Developer: Remedy Games
Publisher: 505 Entertainment
Genre: New Weird, Third Person Shooter, Adventure, Puzzle
Gameplay Stats: 54 hours, 100% achievements
I'm not even sure where to start for an intro to this game. I picked it up because I'd heard good things and because it was part of a new genre called "new weird". New weird mixes the paranormal with the mundane. I've heard that shows like Twin Peaks and X-files are good examples of this genre, but I haven't watched enough of either to say for sure. They are on the list though!
Visuals: At first this game starts out looking very normal, not stylized. Then the more and more you explore the game, the more stylish and weird it becomes. It all fits together pretty well, it's quite nice. I don't have a high-end PC by any means, but the game looks pretty good on medium settings. I have it on good authority that the game is beautiful running on a new NVIDIA 3090 graphics card. The enemies telegraph their abilities by their design and the icons used in the game are similarly easy to parse. When the game gets going and there are supernatural things happening, all of that looks good too. The distorted/mangled environments look really great.
Audio: The game doesn't have too much going for it in the way of ambient noise, and I think that's probably my only complaint. To be fair though, the majority of the game takes place in an office building where it would be weird for there to be a lot of music playing. If memory serves, all of the lobby areas have some music as well as the elevators. You can stumble upon some radios that all play some nice music that you can hear pretty well from far away, so I think the designers were aware the game could be a little quiet. The music that is here is nice. It all fits thematically and does actually bring something to the experience. The janitor's theme is a genuinely beautiful Finnish Tango that I'm sure I will listen to several times in the future. The sound effects are all fine. The voice acting is actually really strong! I think Courtney Hope, who plays the main character, won the Performance of the Year award at last year's Game Awards and I really think it was warranted. She does a fantastic job as does the man who plays Dr. Darling. It's a small quibble, but I think it would have been cool to be able to play some of the music/recordings while playing the game, whenever/wherever you want. You have to be paused or find them in the environment unfortunately.
Plot: This was the first game I have played in a bit where I genuinely cared about the plot. The mixture of the mundane and extraordinary is truly fascinating and captivating. The main story is very largely voice acted with documents and voice logs scattered through the main path to give some extra light to what has happened/is happening. I genuinely read and listened to all of the extras that I found in my playthrough and found them very largely to be interesting. The side quests are largely centered around investigating a supernatural object or something strange in the environment and they are generally explained through text and voice recording. They are all interesting though. I legitimately read around 200 of these memos and listened to probably 100 more. I fully explored all of the dialogue, not out of obligation, but out of genuine curiosity. Full marks!
Gameplay: There isn't a whole lot here that is revolutionary, but it's all done well. The game plays like a third person shooter, similar to an Uncharted game. But with some super powers that you acquire through the story. I think a couple of them are optional as well! I found myself getting bored when playing Uncharted, but for some reason tearing a chunk out of the wall and hurling at an enemy across the room only to make them explode into little blue bits never got old. It is fairly repetitive, but I think that kind of fits thematically here. The combat is a weird take on a fairly mundane combat system which is what the whole game is in a nut shell.
I really can't gush about this game enough. It's a breath of fresh air compared with what I've been playing more recently. It's the first time in ages that I have actually cared about the plot in a game! Maybe since God of War? I'll have to check my nifty game review blog. (Edit: Since Chrono Trigger!) Would I recommend this game? Absolutely. Will I go out of my way to explore more in this genre of new weird? Absolutely. [9.5/10]
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