[h1] Yet another Firewatch-like game, but in Space [/h1]
Let start with the most obvious upside – the game looks absolutely amazing. The views of the station both inside and outside are breathtaking, they have that early sci-fi aesthetic like 2001: A Space Odyssey, so taking screenshots is a genuine pleasure here. Furthermore, the game features an RTX technology which was all the rage back when game came out, though it makes the graphics look a little bit odd, since every surface ends up like it's coated in oil. Whelp.
As the title of the review suggests, Titan Station is literally yet another walking-talking simulator where you go from point A to point B while chatting on the radio, which means this is a story-driven game and the gameplay is extremely primitive: you can walk and run, interact with objects (just click on them), read notes (logs) and occasionally deal with some incredibly tedious cubic hacking.
And since we're on the subject of gameplay, its one and the only component is somewhat... repetitive. Firstly, there's a ton of backtracking. While the station itself is small, it has almost no points of interest, but is full of long corridors. Early on, there are plenty of different logs and notes, some of them containing passwords, which I thought would become a key mechanic, but no, there's never a moment where you have to figure out which password you're supposed to use. It's always one door and one password, and from the midpoint of the game onward you just walk up to a locked airlock and someone tells you the code with the radio, so much exploration! Secondly, the hacking mini-game shows up in the last half, and it's like a fever dream someone would have after hard intercourse between SS1 cyberspace and Minecraft. The hacking is utterly boring, I would even call it tedious, if they had gone with something like Fallout 3's mechanic instead, it would have been way more engaging. Really.
There's not much else to say about gameplay, and there's no real reason to, because the main thing here is the story, and I have to say, for such a short game (it takes about 3 hours to finish), the story is decent, and the voice acting is decent too, though David and Jack clearly overact. However, personally, I felt like the author couldn't maintain the right pacing. The first half of the game is very even, calm and clear. The second one, though, is constantly rushing you. Questions pile up, answers either don't come or aren't satisfying, the game tries to build suspense and tension, but it doesn't quite land. The author throws in so many plot twists that you barely have time to register one before another one stacks on top of it. And the ending, of course, is somewhat dissapointing, but it's hard to say why exactly. Maybe the story itself is just completely bland or maybe the acting leaves you so indifferent to it at all.
I spent some time trying to decide what kind of review to leave for this game, but in the end, I'll leave a positive one, because there's nothing critically bad. It would be deeply unfair to call this game bad, it'll definitelly give someone pleasant emotions if they enjoy this kind of games, and besides, it really looks beautiful and costs very little.
