[h1]Honestly, this isn't my genre at all, but this time I decided to give it a try.[/h1]
The game explores some very unusual, interesting, and surprisingly deep ideas that can stay in your mind long after you finish it. The slow-paced gameplay actually works in its favor and gives you plenty of time to think about them.
[i]The scale of the spaceship and the disaster that happened on this godforsaken planet is genuinely impressive. [/i]
The retro-futuristic aesthetic is also beautifully executed, and the soundtrack deserves special mention. It sounds exactly the way you would expect from the setting you're exploring.
While walking across this long-abandoned, half-dead planet and trying to understand what actually happened here, all kinds of thoughts keep appearing. Why does everything look the way it does? What did this place look like when it was full of life? It even made me think about whether our own planet could one day end up looking the same, maybe a billion years from now, when the Sun becomes more active, Earth's atmosphere is no longer able to support life, but the oceans still remain for a while before disappearing completely.
I haven't read the original novel, but after finishing the game, I definitely want to.
[h3]The optimization.[/h3]
At first, it actually seemed surprisingly good. I was pleasantly surprised, especially considering this is a game made on everyone's "favorite" Unreal Engine 5. [b]Unfortunately, that first impression turned out to be misleading.[/b]
The first, relatively small locations run perfectly fine, but once the game opens up into larger areas, it starts consuming a ridiculous amount of resources. I saw VRAM usage reaching almost 10 GB despite only having 8 GB available, along with 12-15 GB of system RAM. Considering how the game actually looks, that's a very serious optimization issue. It simply shouldn't happen.
It's obvious that most of this memory is being used for textures, but I honestly can't say they're anything exceptional or even particularly high resolution. If anything, they look fairly average while somehow consuming an enormous amount of memory. Lowering the graphics settings or reducing the resolution doesn't really help either.
Another issue is the collision detection between the main character and the environment. It could have been implemented much better. I constantly found myself getting stuck on invisible walls and small pieces of terrain.
