TR-49

I recommend this game, though somewhat reluctantly. The dialogue and voice acting almost completely ruined the whole thing for me. I don't mind the esoteric vague plot that some people are complaining about, I think it works fine, it is more or less coherent. But the constant whiny inflection in the voice acting was grating to me. There's too much of it and yes there's storytelling and that's all well and good, but it's all told in the same annoying way. Would it have killed them to crack a joke or two? The reveals just didn't have much impact either. The deduction puzzles are decent, it was fun to piece together all the connections between the different characters, I enjoyed my time with it.

Someone described this as "Wikipedia rabbit hole as a game" and yeah, that fits the bill. Cool idea! Wish we had more games like this. The start of the game is slightly chaotic -- while you're trying to learn what's going on and how to even play the game, the story wants to proceed at a relentless pace through the audio interjections. It creates this air of pressure, which is *not* indicative of what the rest of the game feels like, thank goodness. The story is rather captivating. I think I pieced together some of the parts a little too early for my own good, but I enjoyed it regardless. I played with the "Reduce hints" option on, which was apparently added after release. I don't know how it affected the gameplay, but I wasn't stuck very long in any part. It's not a very long game: slightly more than 5 hours for completion. Well worth the price, especially for fans of the genre.

Short but interesting deduction game in the style of Her Story or Immortality. Navigating this book catalogue and discovering all the books and commands and passwords was surprisingly challenging, especially towards the end. It wasn't that hard to figure out what I was supposed to do and what are the "rules" but at some point you do feel like you are out of leads. At least I did. I really enjoyed reading everything and understanding the events that lead to where we were and what my end goal is, even if I did stumble on a few key moments or information by chance.