I do understand that making games is difficult and I have played many different indie games made by small teams, but this still seemed to me like it could use more time in the oven.
The game story is fine, if not a little too exact of a copy of the cult horror classic "The Thing." And I mean, it is a very close copy, the setting, the basic premise, and even a very specific name drop in the ending of the game. And this isn't a bad thing out of the box, but the rest of the game I think struggles to make an identity for itself.
The gameplay is mostly moving from objective to objective, often highlighted with glowing yellow circles. Some objectives are telegraphed to you with internal monologues captions that appear at the bottom of the screen, and some are given to you verbally by characters, but a lot of times in the game I found myself lost and confused about where to go. Sometimes you'd get no direction about what to do next and would have to wander around to try and find some objective or story event that triggers when you enter a certain room or approach a certain character.
Mechanically, the game really has nothing going on. You can hold objects by clicking on them if they are interactive or once they become interactive, and you can see them in your characters hands, but you don't [i]use[/i] anything really. If you need to do a task like unlock a door, or shovel snow, or open a crate, the screen fades to black and plays the sounds of your character performing whatever actions it is. This I will admit is a clever way to achieve more complex things with less animations and resources, but the sparseness of the rest of the game just kind of makes it more apparent how lifeless the game can feel sometimes. I am reminded of Void Crawler, a game I played just before this one, which is also minimalist and heavily borrows from other known horror properties, but this one at least had some nice animations that were immersive; while plugging in a power cable to charge the mole was a fade-to-black like this game has, adding oil or coolant had nice animations of you opening the bottles and pouring the contents in, and I really just with this game made an effort with at least a couple things without constantly needing to just turn the screen off.
There were also other weird design choices, like most times that a jump scare triggers, the game just shuts your flashlight off. And while I guess it could work in a few instances to build tension, a lot of the times I would either not have seen or only just barely seen whatever thing was happening and it left me feeling confused about what was going on more than scared. I would not really rate this as being terribly scary, but this is really subjective and I'm sure there are at least some people that would find this to be a scary experience.
The game ran OK on my machine, it still seemed to chug at certain parts, and it has a very spartan set of options in the menu as you would expect from an indie game. No brightness adjustment, but at least in this game the flashlight was actually adequate to see with as opposed to some other recent games I've played.
Another pain point was the lack of a save feature. I am sure a game save is a tricky thing to program, and this game has a menu that allows you to select any one of the game's three chapters to play as a workaround for this. But at the same time, the game never [i]tells you[/i] which chapter you're on with any kind of in-game title or splash screen. You can kind of guess, but when you launch the game, you only have New Game or Select Chapter available and it never tells you which chapter you were on. There's no continue option to restart whichever chapter you last played if it can't save your progress in earnest, and I really with the game would gradually unlock the chapters in the chapter select menu as you play instead of just giving all of them to you at once.
Overall though, I just wish there was more. The game is cheap and short, so it's kind of a decision you'll have to make, and I didn't run into any serious bugs that kept me from completing the game, but what's here is very, very bare and just failed to really resonate with me. It's not terribly interactive and I think weighing this with all of the other criticism I had, that was really what just pushed me towards not recommending it.
