ROUTINE

This game has very fun moment-to-moment gameplay. It's beautifully polished and has some of the best audio design I've heard in a game. If it's on sale, you should buy and play it. The issue is that it's just *fine* for mechanics. There's not much depth to each one. You get a module for your CAT, use it a few times, then stop using it when you get your next shiny new module. I really hoped that I would find myself fumbling with the buttons on the CAT in a moment of stress, but it just never happened because you only use one per area essentially. I was also thrilled by the invisible enemy at first, but then it started to just appear in normal eyesight. I don't know if that was a bug or intended, but being able to see it without the CAT completely destroyed the fear factor for me. There was at least one scare leading away from the drained basin that got a good scream out of me though. If having the entity be visible in normal eyesight was intended, it would have kept things much more tense had those moments only been the very few scripted jump scares like that. Finally the ending - though I kinda expected something like this going in - was basically just a trippy hallucination with no interesting twist or insight. Once you get your first task in the Ward and see the moldy corpse near the bathroom, you essentially know what the ending is already. I was hoping there would be some more clearly defined time travel shenanigans at the end as was teased a bit, but nope. It seems to just be to become the substrate for a psychic mold on the moon. This is one of those games that makes me wish Steam didn't have a YES/NO rating system for reviews. It is a good game while playing, but it left me cold at the end. It has beautiful tension and some really tasteful jump scares, but I got no catharsis from it. If you find an easy opportunity to play it, you should.