After a nice but rather uneventful opening stage where you fly a plane through enemy territory, you eventually get shot down. Shooting is possible, but there is little reason to do so. You manage to eject and parachute into the water below, only to somehow end up in a strange form of purgatory. As you walk through it, you see moments from your life, creating the feeling that your life is literally flashing before your eyes.
The first impression will probably push away anyone who is not a fan of AI generated content. The game makes extensive use of it for cinematic cutscenes, flashbacks and various animations that appear while you play. The effect can be quite impressive, and the initial purgatory section is particularly well done. The soundtrack also deserves praise. It has a heavy metal undertone, and some stages have their own unique songs with lyrics that fit the scenes.
However, the extensive use of AI also casts doubt over other parts of the game. The most obvious example is the voice acting. There is no indication that the voices are AI generated, but they sound strange and artificial, with very little emotion. Cutscenes are also everywhere and make up a significant portion of the experience. The formula quickly becomes repetitive. You walk around for a while, trigger a cutscene, walk around some more, trigger another cutscene, and repeat the process.
Although the game initially puts you in first person mode, you soon switch to the main third person camera. This gives you a much better view of your surroundings, which is important because this is not a shooting game. Instead, you have to dodge or outrun enemies until you eventually gain the means to deal with them. Besides running, you can crouch to crawl under obstacles and jump. However, jumping is not freely available and only becomes possible when the game expects you to jump over a hole or vault over an obstacle.
During the first few stages, you are incredibly vulnerable and can die almost instantly. Simply approaching an enemy can result in them grabbing you by the neck and ending your game. There are also plenty of other situations that can kill you, such as falling over an edge or entering an area where the game does not want you to go. In those cases, you simply die without any warning. Running away from something can also be frustrating when you have no idea where you are actually supposed to go.
There is an achievement for completing the entire game without dying, but I somehow managed to get it by quitting to the main menu whenever I was close to death, or by choosing not to take the second chance after dying. This sends you back to the main menu, where you can simply select Continue and carry on.
Eventually, you gain a health bar, although you will have already experienced several deaths by that point. Once you have one, enemies can still grab you, but you can press a button to escape. You cannot do this indefinitely because escaping still costs health, but fortunately part of your health regenerates quite quickly after a few seconds.
Later, you gain the ability to collect souls. These can either be used to heal yourself or to incapacitate enemies by approaching them from behind. Both actions consume a soul, meaning you need to find another one if you want to perform another action. Souls are only available during a handful of levels and cannot be stockpiled. Fortunately, enemies are extremely easy to outrun and rarely pose much of a threat. You can also crouch under obstacles or vault over them to get away, while enemies cannot do either.
The game finally introduces another form of attack towards the end, when you encounter your childhood dog. It follows you around, although it can also wander off randomly, and you can give it commands by pointing at something. You can order it to interact with switches or attack enemies. The dog cannot kill enemies, but it can knock them down for a few seconds. This only works against basic enemies. Besides the standard soldiers, there are only a couple of other enemy types, so there is not much variety.
The game consists of short and linear stages. Your main objectives are to move forward, avoid enemies and interact with objects. This often involves skulls that remove branches blocking the path, although there are also sections where you need to carry objects to specific locations. There are occasionally small open areas, but progression remains very straightforward and it is difficult to miss where you need to go next.
The setting combines a war torn city with hellish elements, with later stages becoming increasingly focused on the latter while still incorporating imagery associated with war. There is sometimes a lack of continuity between stages. You can simply reach the end of an area, encounter a loading screen, and then find yourself somewhere completely different in the next stage.
The art design is easily one of the game's strongest aspects. The environments are incredibly detailed and often look fantastic. Unfortunately, much of this detail feels wasted because you rarely have a reason to stop and appreciate it. Instead, you generally run straight toward the exit. There is no exploration. There are no collectibles or hidden secrets to discover, although there are some missable achievements. There are also no logical puzzles or boss fights. The final chapter does put you back in control of a plane, requiring you to shoot various targets, but this is a brief return to the gameplay from the opening.
The game is also extremely short. You can complete it in around three hours, and there is very little to do afterward apart from replaying individual stages through the stage select option. Unfortunately, this does not help much with missable achievements because the game gives you little indication of where you need to start looking.
Overall, the game is undeniably beautiful and surprisingly functional, but its use of AI generated content raises questions. The game claims that only the cinematics were created this way, yet the voice acting and soundtrack also raise questions about how extensively AI has been used. Perhaps other elements were created with AI as well, although it is difficult to say for certain.
The bigger problem is the price. For such a short indie game from a first time developer, the asking price is extremely high and puts it in direct competition with much larger and more critically acclaimed titles. Combined with the extensive use of AI generated content, the price feels particularly difficult to justify. At half the price, it would be easier to consider, but even then it would probably be a game worth picking up only at a significant discount.
