Having seen that "Overwhelmingly Positive" score, I had my hopes high up. And while the game turned out to be really good, I can't help but feel a little disappointed.
Gameplay-wise, it's Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Aesthetically, it's a mix of Bioshock 1/2 and Alien: Isolation. We start a normal day as Simon, a brain-damaged man going to get an experimental brain scan. After the procedure, he wakes up in an unknown location with no idea how he got there. It turns out to be a derelict underwater facility with a cancer-like composite of machine and flesh corrupting everything. The atmosphere is great - dark and unsettling. Simon finds an omnitool and goes on trying to uncover what is going on.
Unfortunately, this is the moment where my first disappointment appeared. I kind of expected a more exploration-based gameplay where I upgrade the omnitool, open previously blocked paths and so on. This quickly turns out to not be the case. Simon hops from area to area and doesn't return to where he came from. This makes sense story-wise and is the same as in the aforementioned Amnesia: The Dark Descent, so I'm not gonna complain about it too much. Still, it feels like a missed opportunity. Exploration is also a little lackluster, rewarding the player with only the occasional document like a diary or with absolutely nothing most of the time.
Then, there's the monsters. They look decent and there's a few different ones, so it's not the same spooky fella stalking the hallways all the same. There's a similar mechanic to Amnesia's sanity system. When close, the monsters make our vision glitch due to electomagnetism. There's some unskippable chases but most of the time you can sneak your way past any weird creature you encounter. Pursuers never appear in packs and their AI isn't much different from the ones in Amnesia, so they're not much of a problem. And if you really struggle with the monsters, the game has a safe mode in which you cannot die from their attacks.
The game asks some difficult questions about what makes us human and other existential stuff. But this doesn't at all translate to the gameplay or story. Simon is moving "on rails" from action to action. He clearly has his own ideas and ideals and the player's opinions are completely disregarded. There are no real consequences for the decisions the player makes. Only a handfull of choices are significant. They carry some moral weight, which is nice, but their influence on the story is non-existent. Simon doesn't get to choose whether he wants to do the truly important stuff. There's two main objectives and he does them both because he agrees with the ideas behind them. So why would the player be given all these existential questions when the big choices were made from the start?
Also, Simon isn't exactly the brightest. He witnesses a thing happen and then is surprised when the same action yields the same consequences in the game's ending. His crash-out where he yells at the only companion he has may be realistic but it seriously ruins the melancholic mood the game was building up to. It would've been better if Simon was a silent protagonist whose shoes the player gets to fill fully, not just partially.
Aside from the aforementioned issues with philosophy and Simon, the story is decent, though not exactly creative. It's best described by one of the documents we find along the way which is basically the "average Elder Scrolls journal" meme.
[spoiler]
>(date) We introduced the AI. It works great.
>(date) The Ai started to act weird. I hope it wont go rogue. Still works great, though.
>(date) The AI went rogue. I hope we can contain it.
>(date) We couldn't contain it. We are doomed.
[/spoiler]
Obviously, the actual diary was worded differently but that's what it felt like to read it. I straight up laughed at that moment.
The ending is okay. Personally, I see no sense in[spoiler]creating an artificial world with scans of maybe 50 people's brains and have it fly around in space.[/spoiler] If I had a choice, I wouldn't participate. But I was stuck playing as Simon who decided he wanted that.
To sum up, the atmosphere is great. The dread and isolation feel real. The monsters are okay. The philosophical aspect is solid but wasted on an "on rails" story with few meaningful choices, none of which impact the ending. Simon is part himself, part player but in all important moments he's himself. The ending wasn't bad but it really should've been a choice, not something forced onto the player.
7/10, Amnesia: The Dark Descent was better.
