If I could give this game ten thumbs down, I would. It's really that terrible. This "game" is barely a game at all, and it has A LOT wrong with it.
First off, the controls are horrendous. Imagine looking straight ahead and pressing W. You'll walk forward, right? Now imagine turning your head to the the east then pressing W. In any other game, you'd walk to the east if that's the way you're facing. In this game? If you turn your head to the east then hit W, your head will be looking to the east as your body walks to the north. In short, you can't actually move in your desired direction just by looking at where you want to go. The WASD keys are locked into moving you in a literal single direction, no matter where you turn the camera. You have a player body that's stiff to face one single direction at all times without the ability to pivot, and your head works totally independent of your body, rather than movement acting as one unit, like in most games. It's extremely frustrating to control in this game, and unfortunately, that's only problem one.
The next problem is how the game handles picking things up, which is critical to the content of this game. This game has 100+ USB sticks scattered throughout its environment that need to be brought to a PC in order to unlock cut scenes. There's so many of them that anyone reasonable would assume that they could just pick up these USB sticks as though they were a collectible that simply gets added into an inventory, BUT NOPE! In this game, you have to click and drag each individual USB stick over to the PC ONE-AT-A-TIME. And if that wasn't tedious enough, there's only one PC, yet this game has a big open environment spanning an outdoors area with multiple houses to enter.
ON TOP OF THAT, what should be the simple act of grasping onto these USB sticks instead turns into a stress test, because this game is not at all good at detecting when an item is being interacted with. This makes it so that the only way to be successful at grasping a USB stick is to hover directly over it before holding left click to grab it, HOWEVER, because the game is poorly made, you have to measure your distance to find juuust the right sweet spot in order to successfully interact with the item. If you don't, you simply won't pick up the item at all.
ON TOP OF ALL THAT, the devs placed MANY of these USB sticks underneath furniture, but again, because the game is horribly made, these items are JAMMED. You can't get them out majority of the time no matter how hard you try. Wow! What a mess!
ON-TOP-OF-ALL-THAT... once you do manage to grab hold of a USB stick, you have to keep your mouse PERFECTLY STILL as you drag it around using WASD, because if you move your mouse to adjust your vision EVEN A TINY LITTLE BIT, you'll lose connection with the object and it'll fall to the ground. You're only human. You WILL make a micro movement.
Further, because this game is an ABSOLUTE MESS, when a USB stick escapes your grasp, it has a VERY HIGH CHANCE of clipping through the floor, and ultimately getting lost to the void. If this happens on the second floor, it might land safely on the first floor, but it's never a guarantee. And what's worse is that if something does fall through the floor, even though you're a ghost who can go through the walls, for some odd reason, the devs decided that you can't go through the floor! So instead of being able to go straight down and get the item back directly, you have to take the stairs... as a ghost! WHAT??
OOOONNNN TTTTOOPPPP OOFFF AAALLLL TTHHHHAAATTTT!!!!1 you'll always be looking straight at the floor during the process of moving a USB stick (or any item) due to the game requiring you to first position yourself directly over it. You're always gonna be looking down at the item to target it, so as soon as you hold down left click to drag it, your view has to be locked DIRECTLY TO THE FLOOR, and you better keep your hand straight and know EXACTLY where the PC is if you don't want to drop anything to the void. Have fun doing that over 100 times with horrible controls. Actually, don't even bother, because what's worse is that the devs made the extremely careless mistake of placing a great amount of these USB sticks in rooms that are COMPLETELY SEALED OFF. Since you're a ghost, you have the ability to go into the sealed rooms yourself, however, you can't get the USB sticks out because they're SOLID.
For example; not far from where you first spawn in, there's a bathroom with some USB sticks in it, but the window and door are shut. There's no way to interact with the doors or windows, so how do you get the USB sticks out of the room? You just can't! I'm not kidding! You have to use an exploit! And what I've found is that the only way to free the USB sticks from this particular room is to purposely allow them to fall through the floor, then go hunt them on the previous floor and pray that none of them fell all the way through to the void.
That's the smallest part of this problem though. The biggest part is that a lot of these USB sticks are located OUTSIDE, and all the front doors are LOCKED. There's no PC's outside (there's actually only one for this entire environment), so guess what? You simply can't unlock the movies on those particular sticks! Like at all! There's a ton of these USB sticks located outdoors too. So basically, this game falls under false advertising being that it actually soft locks the player out of actually being able to access the content they paid for, even if that content TECHNICALLY is in the game's files.
This game also contains NPC characters, and the models span from a ranking of "not great" to "plain awful". They literally look like something that came out of someone's first draft of an indie game that was made solely for learning purposes. On top of looking bad in general, they also:
- Pop in and out of existence.
- Slowly spin around when they shouldn't.
- Too often aren't correctly aligned with the environment they should be in.
- And are generally stiff and don't effect the world in any kind of meaningful way whatsoever.
One girl I encountered at a pool was hovering unnaturally above the water while her body was animated to look as though she was being kept afloat. Another time I witnessed a character frozen in what looked to be some kind of dance move, only for her to randomly snap out of it and become animated. Most times when I'm navigating a house, I witness birds inside of the house with me, which are clearly meant to be an outdoor asset. As you can tell, the QC absolutely pours out of this game.
Also worth noting; This game features a ton of recycled AI art used in other games (I'm enough of an enthusiast that I can tell) and it feels EXTREMELY LAZY. I'm even noticing copious amounts of the same images being recycled from this developer's own previous games! I mean, come on! What kind of laziness is that? Using AI is already making the devs life VERY EASY by generating the images FOR THEM, yet they still won't spring for all new content? THEY'RE USING AI!! There's ZERO EXCUSE as to why 100% of this game can't have all new material in it, PERIOD!
There's a lot to say here that's terrible, but is there anything good? NOOO!! This feels like someone's early access project that was WAY too early even for early access. Hell, I bet that I put more effort into this review than what the devs put into this game! There's a lot that needs to be fixed here (A LOT). Unfortunately, I'm past my refund period, so I have to make lemonade out of my lemons, therefore, I'll be having my own unique kind of fun by attempting to get as many USB sticks over to the PC as humanly possible inside of this unoptimized mess, just as a personal challenge to myself, but generally speaking, I ABSOLUTELY DO NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME AT ALL!!!
