This game is great, it is definetly in my Top 10 of free Steam games! Insane quality and very nice puzzles (except for one, I was stuck for almost an hour lmao)

Inspired by im-sims, but more of an exploration game with very light puzzles and combat. Runs flawlessly on Linux. I enjoyed the first half, but once I had the mechanics figured out, I found the latter half disappointing. Worth the time spent (especially for free) but definitely needs more time in the oven.

For a small scale indie project, it's pretty well polished. HE:C looks good and plays well. Movement and interaction's nice, controls are mostly intuitive, environments are readable and consistent, generally feels pretty good to play. I liked having objectives as both implicit tutorials and optional challenges; needing to exit with high HP led me to find a way to heal, and going undetected forced me to use stealth and look for alternative paths around enemies. Interface is good at getting the essential information across, including the stealth meter. I also really enjoyed the command line interactions - as someone who spends a lot of time messing with my own system in bash, I felt targeted. Opening the terminal, typing "help" on a guess, getting a list of commands to try out and tooling around in this pseudo-bash was a lot of fun. I like the way "kill everything" is an alternative to "go undetected" so you can still recover and get 100% on the level even after failing the latter objective; limited ammo and concurrent objectives for avoiding damage ensure this route is still a challenge.

That said, the novelty doesn't last. The art direction and enemies are generic and not that interesting. It's too linear and there's too much signposting to be much of an exploration or a puzzle game. Go to the one place you can reach, loot everything, try every function on the computer, and the game solves itself 90% of the time. Arrows tell you where to go, tutorial books are scattered around every level, sticky notes and graffiti tell you every password, lock code, and command to use - I don't know why this pops up so often in puzzle games, but reading a note is not a puzzle. Especially when you stick the note literally on top of the thing I need to use it on, all you're doing is wasting my time. Using a security camera to read a note you'd otherwise be unable to see is a puzzle *maybe* once. and HE:C uses it way more than that. The same thing applies to the computer: Try every floppy, search every file, try every network connection - there's no logical leap required, no compiling scraps of info, it's just busywork. If these folders and emails are going to be useless every time, why even include them? Why include useless clutter in containers if they serve no purpose? At least in System Shock 2 every magazine, snack, and piece of junk gave you little bits of lore when you examined them in your inventory. The notes/graffiti/files here exist only to have passwords written on them - there's really no lore explanation for them and they reveal nothing about the world. These could have been a great place to add some foreshadowing or explanation for the bizarre surprise endings. Some explicit tutorials, like bots being targeted by security, could have easily been shown organically, for example by having a bot get gunned down by a turret where the player can observe.

Some minor technical issues: In Level 10, holding the crate and walking into it made it vanish from the level. The friendly fire objective in Level 11 doesn't count killing bots with sentries, which is what I assumed it meant - does it only count bot-bot or sentry-sentry kills? Throwing 1 grenade works as expected, throw a 2nd and it immediately plummets to the floor well below the aim point. Their bouncing and damage are also very unpredictable - inconsistent and undesirable for such a rare item. Codes are the same every time, so if you find it once and reset the level you can use the code without returning to that point - avoids repeating already solved puzzles, but might be unintended behavior. Spam clicking to move security cams is kinda annoying. Sometimes E exits the interface, sometimes Esc - personally I'd rather it be consistent every time. I think more limited ammo and more fragile enemies would help the combat - it's not interesting enough to stand on its own as a stealth/puzzle alternative, so better to focus on resource management vs the current version only testing my ability to shoot the same braindead enemy 15 times.

HE:C is more like Portal than Deus Ex, but lacks what makes either of those games great. Still it's good enough for a few hours of free fun, and there's a solid core ready for improvement with real puzzles.

When I installed the game, I was pleasantly surprised by the high quality of the product. The graphics were impressive, and the atmosphere was unrealistically magnificent. It felt as if the developers had taken inspiration from classic games such as "Prey" and "Portal".

This game stands out from other free offerings in the market. Few games manage to achieve the same level of quality and uniqueness as this one.