It's almost like old im-sims like Deus Ex and VtM Bloodlines had small tightly packed levels for a reason...

It seems like many people lost their mind with calling every single indie game a "hidden gem" and apparently lost any taste and common sense. Most positive comments are simply that: "hidden gem". When you come to negative ones, you start to see the actual review of experience that this game will give you: very poorly made game with accent on atmosphere but with tons of absolutely strange (not in a good way) and not needed choices.

There are many games that do not guide you by the hand nowadays, and there are many good ones among them. some have clunky gameplay but when you get used to it, you get the charm of it, some have tons of walking, but when you actually do it, you start to feel the atmosphere and mood that developers wanted you to feel. In this game you will fight with inventory system and it will not feel as good as it did in deus ex or stalker because instead of feeling joy of fitting some extra good stuff in your inventory, you will feel frustration barely being able to fit essentials unless you actually fight with this system, on top of it, grid could be made bigger like 2 times and make the tetris more enjoyable. You will fight with absolutely gigantic maps that have so much unused space, that walking, instead of being atmospheric and mood-setting becomes a boring irritating chore after first hour of it in each separate level, while each single level has much more than just a single hour of it. You will get irritated by combat music that is tied to place instead of actual combat, so when you will backtrack thru location for 5th time in fear of missing out a bit of content in the giant map, everytime you will just hear combat music seemingly out of nowhere in the same places, which is actually wild and has no meaning other than to show that it just a poorly made system (one of many in this game). You will fight with terrain, getting stuck in some corners or falling through walls/floors that just had no collision added to them. Quests are mess, some are good, insteresting, but many are just chore to go through, some will give you so few lore for such a high effort or for so many time spent, that you will just feel robbed in the end, not even talking about thing that is just constant through the every aspect of the game including quests and all the rest of stuff i spoke in review or didn't: feeling that it's made by people who really-REALLY lack an experience in making games or just programming in general.
Getting already incredibly famous for their mood breakcore tracks feels like a very cheap move in all this mess of a game but that's pretty much just a minor personal issue with it as a huge fan of the music genre on a very personal level, so i digress.

All in all, i spent 13 hours on this game, 10 of which are equally spent between content, walking while it would feel atmospheric to me, some backtracking and reloads to try out other variations of walkthrough. 3 hours were spent in noclip at insane speeds moving just straight to next sprinkles of content, so i abused noclip pretty much every time when walking would lose any atmosphere and become a chore instead (+- and hour of legit walking on each stage so you can only guess how much walking i skipped, my guess is very roughly 15-20 hours since i was pretty thorough in my walkthrough)

This game is not a "hidden gem": it's a hidden huge slab of stone that needs many many work on it to actually chisel off those giant chunks of ugliness and clunkiness to actually reach this so-called GEM. And this review is not to hate on the game, but out of frustration because this game could actually be so good and so atmospheric and i really really wish it was that good as it actually could with just so few extra effort spent into chiseling off those useless chunks and then maybe even polishing the "gem" afterwards, yet so many factors just blatantly ruin it and make it so unenjoyable in the end.
Read other negative reviews, there many of those where people could put their thoughts together much better than i did here, and some caught points that i missed or just purposefully left out since this is already a wall of text that able to compete in size with useless space of game's levels. bb

i want to die in a gigastructure for a pointless conflict and sink into the concrete