Recent reviews by MC Farquaad

Well, I'm not sure how, but this game somehow has me programming in assembly language for fun. I'm still a little surprised it managed to make it as fun as it is, if a little frustrating.

To emphasize this point: few weeks ago I revisited it and decided I wanted to try to beat out my friend's score in one of the puzzles, and I spent the next hour or two implementing a manual right-shifting algorithm. At 2 AM. All in the name of saving some cycles on a fictional computer.

Bought this game a couple years back because it was on sale for quite cheap and I had a bit of extra money in my Steam wallet. Let me break down what it does right and what it messes up.

The intro scene is extremely promising. You wake up alone on a stalled/crashed subway car in a dark tunnel. It's ominous and had me intrigued straight away because I tend to like dark/cryptic games like the one that was being painted by this scene.

Unfortunately, that's just about all that it does right. The rest of the game can be summarized more or less by aimless wandering. The level design is lacking, to put it gently. There's virtually no indicators in the world of where you're supposed to be headed. Even escaping the train car is a challenge, with the actual exit cleverly disguised towards the end of it. Once you get out, you're in a nearly pitch-black tunnel surrounded by fog. It's difficult to even tell which direction is up or whether you're still moving, and the tunnel is pointlessly long. When you do encounter the door you're meant to enter, you literally hit an invisible wall, which is a bit jarring to say the least.

Now, you're out of the tunnel and into a room with a couple of glowing items: a flashlight, and a couple of notes. I enjoyed this particular room, as it reminded me a bit of Amnesia and gave a small amount of insight into the story in a very enigmatic fashion. However, most of the rooms that follow are bone dry. At some point you need to enter some duct work, and then spend several minutes crawling through and hoping you're not about to hit a dead end. I stopped playing personally after spending more than five minutes wandering around the same small area with absolutely no notion of where to go next.

With that elephant out of the way, let's talk about minor issues:

- Batteries as a limited resource in a game where the level design virtually requires them
- Incomplete localization - the "batteries" indicator on the HUD is written in Russian despite the locale being set to English
- Failure to lock the mouse to the game window in full-screen mode
- I can excuse most technical goofs given the indie nature of this game, but this is just bad

It's possible I'm missing a good part of the experience given how little I played, but I feel somewhat confident in my overall judgement, as there was no indication that these problems would get any better as the game progressed.

My friend bought me this for $1, presumably as a joke. I played it for about 5 minutes before becoming somewhat bored. I tried to switch to fullscreen and it crashed and broke my sound, and when I tried to restart the device my computer bluescreened. I feel like I lost out here even though I got it for free.

Seriously though, do not buy this game for $10. For $1, maybe. Definitely not for $10.