Directive 8020

This review is not negative because of the lack of shared story. It is not negative because I thought the story was bad, in fact, I thought it was pretty good and made better by having played all of the other games in the series. It isn't even negative because because they went more experimental with this one. It's negative because this game has the same copy/paste stealth gameplay that you will do for the 6 out of 9 hours it will take you to beat this game. It doesn't iterate, it irritates. The game, sadly, just isn't fun.

[h1] The "pretend this isn't a part of The Dark Pictures Anthology" game! [/h1] Honestly, I have given Supermassive Game a monumental amount of crap over the years for their absolute lack of ability to produce any sort of meaningful game since their inception. And honestly, this game is mostly a return-to-form for them after the atrocity they released - Little Nightmares 3. [h2]How to tell it's a Supermassive Games title?[/h2] 1) Spend most of the budget casting a bunch of b-list actors to poorly deliver the most emotionless performances you have ever seen. 2) Write said characters to be the most uninteresting, annoying, and unrelatable people in existence. 3) Make the timeline in game as confusing as possible by jumping from present day, to 4 years prior, back to present day, FOWARD in time by 24 hours, back to present day again, forward 17 hours, back to present day. (this is actually how the game is structured I'm not even kidding) 4) Create the illusion of choice for the player so only about 3 choices in the entire game actually matter. 5) Make the gameplay 2 hours of wandering around reading meaningless lore about the characters, broken up by 15mins of "press this button to hide" stealth sections. 6) Don't show an actual monster in game until at least 4 hours in. 7) Charge $70 CAD for it. I will give credit where credit is due and say there are aspects of the game that I do appreciate and was impressed to see in this, mainly being Twitch Integration (cause why wasn't this a thing before?) and the settings being very very "Alien" and "The Thing" inspired. But overall, I just can't recommend anything from this dev. It's the same bout of "arguing in circles" over and over again: For example, a character will deliberately defy an order from a superior to prove that someone is evil, will actually PROVE THAT THEY ARE EVIL, go back to said superior to say "hey look what I found" and you will be presented with a choice to make: 1) Say "wow that's crazy we should stop them" or 2) punish them for not obeying your order even though they found the bad guy! You, as the player will ask yourself, "who would ever even pick the second option?", and pick the first, only for THE GAME TO COMPLETELY IGNORE YOUR CHOICE AND STILL WRAP BACK AROUND TO YELLING AT THE CHARACTER FOR NOT OBEYING THE SUPERIOR! It's the same boring delivery time after time for the same insane pricetag.