Y'know, until the very end, this was nearly a mild thumbs-up.
Let me go through the entire game with you. I won't spoil solutions, just the nature of the puzzles.
First, you find a number code. This is one of arguably only two actual puzzles here, the only bit that fits the escape room idea, where you're finding clues in the environment and putting them together in a way that makes sense. It also has the poor decision of having one red herring number, and also having two of the digits be 6s or 9s, presented to you in such a way that you can't know which way up they are.
This gets you a QR code, which directs to a picture that can no longer exists from certain countries. I don't know why they didn't just include the picture in the game in the place they put the QR code, but whatever. That gives the solution to a very basic flick-the-right-switches-on puzzle.
That gives you a morse code puzzle, with a morse code answer sheet right there. That's convenient, but does somewhat trivialise it.
You put in the code... the second time you have a free-type text box to input a fixed-length numeric code, and the second time that you get absolutely no feedback if you get it right and may not realise you need to "use" the puzzle again to actually have an effect... And can access a new area.
There's a locked gate. There's a device to unlock the gate. There's a single object to pick up, and a single place of interest to use it on. That let's you use the device, and that let's you open a gate. There is no puzzle in this part other than noticing the things to interact with... and trying not to be distracting by the massive hole in the ceiling where you can see through to the earlier part of the level.
You go through the gate, and down a tunnel there are some letters, but the horrible lighting means you may not be able to see them. (Bit of advice here; this isn't as bad on lower graphical settings. A brightness control would be useful, but the game doesn't have one.) The is one slightly-odd bit of scenery in a place that looks like you're not meant to go, but if you do, you can interact with it to open a new route [i]just far enough away[/i] that you probably won't see it open, and in a location, within a new environment, that you may not even notice it.
In there is a code panel. You put in the unscrambled letter code. You get told something like "You've opened a passage."
And this is where I get annoyed. Up until this point, this has been a fairly straightforward, fairly short set of basic puzzles, with all the difficulty coming from the poor lighting and lack of decent signposting. But this moment... Oof.
You've opened a new passage. Great. You go look for this new passage, and you know you need to check every nook and cranny because the last one opened up in a dark corner with map geometry [i]just[/i] blocking line of sight. Maybe it's in this room; you can jump to a little area just above where you put in the code, after all? No. Maybe the massive door in the room before has opened? No, that's no it, and nothings else here looks different, no other little passages in dark corners. It's not in the tunnel you walked along to get here. It's not in the none-puzzle gate room with the missing ceiling. It's not on the route to all this. It's not in the room you started in.
Where is this blasted new passage you opened?!?
And so you look up a video, and find out, and you get very annoyed.
And then you walk back down, through the passage, past the gate, along the tunnel, and to a single none-description stone slab in a room full of far-more-interesting stone slabs at varying heights, a stone slab in the floor, a stone slab that you have by this point walked over several times, [b]it's just some random bit of the floor[/b], and you put your cursor over it, and it says [i]Press E to use[/i] ore something, and you press it, and the slab [i][b]moves[/b][/i]. You [i]hadn't[/i] opened the passage, you'd just unlocked it, and it was placed just [i]somewhere[/i].
You (and by you I mean the devs now, not [i]you[/i], dear reader) could have had one of those checkboard slabs be the wrong colour, and hidden it there, y'know? That would've been something. Have a pattern, break that pattern, the player's eyes are drawn. That feels fair. Or, heck, you could've actually had the passage open when you told the player the passage had opened, not bother with this whole business. But, no; a random broken slab at the end of a tunnel of debris.
If it ended like this but the rest of the game had been satisfying, I'd recommend this. If the ending wasn't this moment of time-wasted frustration, I could forgive the blandness of everything leading up to it. But a boring leadup to an aggressively-annoying finish? Sorry, that combo is a no-no.
