Aaaand it’s gonna be a pass for me. The puzzles are uninspired, there’s somehow a huge lack of clarity in what you’re supposed to be doing even though the game has been so linear, the combat sucks ass. There’s ‘climbing’ sections that are challenging to neither your reflex skills or your puzzle skills, they’re just really, really fucking slow. There are set piece moments that cheap shot kill you for not correctly guessing whether the level designer wanted you to charge forwards or back away.

The upgrade fridge thing is annoying. It’s not an exaggeration that it’s rapey. The first time you encounter the upgrade system is a huge info dump of skills and weapons upgrades for you to go through and the game is screeching - literally screeching - annoying edgelord lols at you while you’re trying to process it (or you can wait for it to stop… how much time you got for gaming these days?).

It feels like it’s written by the kind of teens who think they’re breaking taboos nobody’s ever broken before when they doodle dicks in their school books. The rest of the dialogue isn’t much better. The English voice actors sound like they have no idea of the context of what they’re talking about, and while it does sound better in Russian the subtitles don’t seem to offer any accessibility options and expect you to read them at 240wpm while in combat.

The straw on the camel’s back for me though is that the facility I’ve been in for nearly an hour has an obnoxiously loud background droning noise that… I think it’s supposed to make the ambience feel oppressive? It’s just exhausting and annoying.

I haven’t been so disinterested in seeing what happens next in a game for years.

edit: second thoughts. Maybe I’ll finish it when I have more patience for it. But I don’t recommend it.