Recent reviews by The Sea Does Not Regret

I first played the game close to release, and like many I know I bounced off it after the first mission. This time I intended to finish it, and it took me approximately a month to play around 25 hours.

As a car simulation game it is entirely too shallow, there’s not much need to progress the upgrade tree past the Liberator — which allows you to strip armoured panels off abandoned police cars — everything else is unnecessary. Even if you did, there’s a time grind (e.g. scanning new anomalies, gathering materials, gathering research currency) that makes it unpleasant to engage with. Repairing the car is slow and arduous, and was something I eventually disabled in mercy towards myself.

Similar issue with base upgrades, where you can upgrade a locker to unlimited storage, and then do the same again several more times. Why do I need multiple unlimited storage lockers to begin with?

I do like the Quirk system, where your car will develop random — rarely useful, often harmless — faults, it goes a long way to providing the car with some personality. I wish it were in a game I enjoyed more.

The customisation system is fine, with paints and decals available for the exterior with trinkets & unique steering wheels/shifters available for the interior. But after I had to scrap my customised parts for the third time I stopped bothering.

As an anomaly game it lacks compelling entities, with a chunk of them just being coloured AOEs. But you learn very early on that nothing can hurt you, or that being hurt is irrelevant, and so aside from avoiding the coloured AOEs there’s never a sense of danger. Rather than spooky anxiety it causes irritation when an mostly undodgeable car-breaking entity locks onto you. The second and third areas don’t add any particularly interesting anomalies, but the third does manage to add the most annoying one. I’m hoping the DLC will rectify this, as I’ve heard the entities in it are a bit spookier.

The first section (out of three) is the most compelling, with an abandoned pacific forest vibe with a few creepy things dotted around. The second area loses this aesthetic, replaced by a sort of half-mutated-reality swamp. I basically never engaged with it, and sped through it to the next area. The third & final area is hard to describe, but I didn’t find it particularly compelling either.

The game manages to be tense in moments, but never pays the tension off into anything meaningful. It is at its best when the teleport-home beam is active, and the sky turns dark & the technology used to rip a hole homeward begins to destabilise the whole area, becoming a race against the clock to get to the beam.

After the final mission there was a moment I expect was intended to be epic, where you charge away from the macguffin dodging entities in a desperate bid to get home. Instead I flipped over twice, having to awkwardly get out of my car to flip it over, still in no danger whatsoever.

For a game whose story is primarily about obsession, I found it very difficult to get obsessed with.