Recent reviews by Carnforth

I bought this game on an impulse with no prior knowledge and I'm chuffed that I did. As someone who has been on Scottish oil rigs before in my work life, this game really was fascinating.

Without giving away too much about the story / gameplay, it's an incredibly linear experience. You are defenceless for the entire game in the sense of never receiving a weapon to fight against the enemies with, so it's purely reliant on stealth. If you've ever played games like Amnesia, Alien: Isolation or SCP: Containment Breach then you'll know somewhat what to expect. The plot, Lovecraftian btw, manages to keep realistic enough to not completely blow your suspension of disbelief. I personally didn't like the ending, but that's probably just me. There is a small side-story that adds a bit of background to the protagonist but otherwise it is, as I said, linear. Interactions with the monsters aren't free-roam; you'll interact with / arrive at the thing the plot tells you to, an enemy will appear in a cinematic scripted fashion and you'll sneak/run away, you enter a small "safe" area and get a new update to the plot, rinse and repeat. The game could've done with something of a larger exploration zone / free-roaming possibility of the entire oil rig in-between story beats (à la Ishimura in the Dead Space Remake).

The horror is great right from the get go due to the belivability of an accident on an oil rig, but a lot of the main horror is in-engine. Cutscenes rarely show the monsters up-close, they're mostly only shown properly in gameplay (as such jumpscares are often unintentional) which is an incredibly immersive thing imo. The audio and sound work is genuinely one of the greatest I've seen; the MC often comments/reacts vocally regarding specific things that happen naturally / dynamically right in the heat of gameplay which makes it feel almost like a cinematic experience than anything.

9/10, would jump in the North Sea again