25.3 hours played
Written 1 month and 1 day ago
Great game, I did a presentation on it for my intro to the creative arts class. Fantastic creature designs, solid puzzles, level design and atmosphere was on point. And as an autistic guy whose special interest is the first world war, I can appreciate the symbolism and references. I bought this on sale for like $3 but I also bought the art book because I love the visual design and all the intricate detail and symbolism behind it, and wanted to support the devs.
My ONLY major gripe with this game is the soundtrack. The music itself is fine, good even, but it absolutely does not fit the tone of the game at any point. However I just played it with the music off and it was fine. Music in survival horror games is tricky to pull off because it can very easily break immersion if the sound is not diegetic (plausibly occurring in-universe and audible by the characters), so in my opinion survival horror soundtracks should contain mostly ambient sound, and if there are conventional instruments used (piano, orchestral) they should be used sparingly to exemplify certain areas/scenes, such as safe rooms in Resident Evil. A composer who does this fantastically in my opinion is Mikko Tarmia who did the soundtracks for the Amnesia and Penumbra games.
Besides that, this is one of my favourite games about WWI, and I love the characters who symbolise the different types of people who were affected by the war (those who were horrifically disfigured, those who lost children, those who were raised to be nationalist and idealise war and went on to learn the uncomfortable truth, etc). I cannot recommend it enough to people who love artsy puzzle psychological/survival horror games, it will confuse you at first but will leave you thinking for weeks about the implications of it all. GREAT GAME 👍
EDIT: Also!! Go to settings and switch the dub to German. The lip syncing is synced to the German track but it's set to English by default.