Subtitles would improve the game somewhat. It demands you listen to the narrator as she drones on and on and on in ways that are neither interesting nor engaging, and then punishes you if you don't wait for her to finish. Stand in place and jump 50 times because I didn't wait for the same cut scene to play out for a third time, are you for real?
The lighting is extremely poor. Even with the brightness turned all the way up I could barely see anything. I don't mind dark and atmospheric, but this is just primarily a black screen. This really came to a head when I lost all my lives (after the game glitched out and the aforementioned required narration didn't play, so I had no choice but to head down the stairs unaided). Once lives are spent, you are made to play as a rat in the sewers trying to find a an essence of soul or whatever so you can return, but was downright impossible to see any of the turns in the maze. The camera wasn't locked behind the rat and adjusting it was slippery, so merely trying to turn ended up being the most disorientating part of the maze.
The "scary demon voices" when you enter the hole at the start of the game really smacks of Rattman's rant, so much so that for a second I thought the audio had been ripped straight out of Portal 2... It wants so badly to invoke Portal, for that matter, with the derisive omnipresent voice - or perhaps The Stanley Parable, where obeying the narration will make or break your success. But it completely misunderstands what makes that kind of narration work.
I didn't have particularly high hopes going in. It's just some little game I bought years ago while trying to scratch that first person puzzle itch and it has merely collected dust in my library since. But nonetheless it failed to impress even a little.
