Rusty's Day Off: Episode One - Janitor on Duty

Haven't finished it yet but enjoying this game a lot! Super atmospheric, interesting and challenging puzzles, quality bar overall is super impressive. Highly recommend! 10/10 so far from me!

this is a pretty solid fps, all things considered. the movement is the highlight, which takes all the best aspects of source engine games and turns them up to 11. (the map actually encourages you to bunnyhop across it at mach 5 the moment you learn how to do so.) the combat is also great, condensing multiple weapon playstyles into a single gun, and it's balanced so that fights feel buttery-smooth as long as you manage your resources well. you honestly wouldn't be able to tell this was designed with VR in mind. it's so much fun to explore and find synergy between all the mechanics, and i really enjoyed being able to just screw around and find out which approaches worked best for me. the game also looks great, with a unique artstyle and environments that are (mostly) well-marked. the animations are also super clean, and the presentation in general punches well above its weight in the genre. unfortunately, i do have some complaints, starting with the AI voices. i know this probably didn't have the biggest development budget (i believe it was crowdfunded?) but even if you ignore the inherent unethicality of generative AI, it just sounds really, really cheap and awful, especially here. if you can't afford to hire professional voice actors, either try to do it yourself or just don't have voiced characters at all. i don't even mean that in a derogatory way; you can make your narrative work without spoken dialogue as long as you compensate for it with other methods of storytelling. which brings me to my next issue: the pacing and narrative. i can get a vague idea of rusty's role in all of this, but there were plenty of moments where the game clearly expected me to have some prior context as to what was happening, despite not giving any. (i explored every nook and cranny, so i highly doubt i missed any important logs.) the tone also varies pretty wildly throughout, with it starting relatively light (the maintenance guy leaves for a day and the robots immediately start killing everyone) and then abruptly taking a huge detour to have the main character confront his apparent guilt via a boss battle. i think it's going for half-life vibes, but the reason half-life works is because the silent protagonist's backstory is irrelevant to how the player experiences the narrative. my last complaint is that the map has a lot of empty space, and can often be very confusing to navigate if you're looking for a specific objective. this is a self-described passion project, and in most aspects, it's super impressive. but the above issues mean i probably won't be replaying this for the harder difficulties. still, i hope this game ends up being a large enough success for the dev to produce the next episode. (though, if possible, i would really appreciate an eventual patch to replace the AI dialogue in this one.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7gIpuIVE3k

Good Game

Скука смертная,

Review for VR: Very good game. Feels a bit like Half-Life in VR. The movement is great. I really like the pogo-jump. Highly recommended!

~ I have this game, so far it is as exciting as watching paint dry. I had to find a walkthrough on the screwtube to find out where the action is, I'm still waiting. I believed the hype and the preview videos, my bad. Don't waste your money.

Прошёл игру чуть больше чем за 3 часа. В целом — средненькая. Можно взять на скидке, но по полной цене не стоит — лучше пропустить.