buns

Walking simulator, pejoratively.
Even better, a talking to doors simulator.
As a futuristic cyborg detective you solve crimes by talking to doors. You also have cool cyborg powers like a blood detector. Show up to a crime scene. Yup there's blood here! The whole game takes place in an apartment building. In the future architects and video game level designer is the same job, so the whole apartment building is designed like a goofy video game map with random cut-throughs and dead ends.

The apartment building Lebel is where you find all the doors you talk to.

For some reason there's a set of trading cards scattered around the apartment building only instead of baseball players they have hospital patients. For some reason there's a whole ventilation shaft in the apartment building whose sole purpose is to house a stray baseball card.

There's a great mechanic where you have to spam a "take pill" button or the game becomes hard to look at. That's it. There's no gameplay impact, it just makes the game hurt your eyes to play. I guess the story explanation is that it's so hard to have a built-in blood detector that it makes the detective's brain go all scrambley. So that's cool.

There's another cool mechanic where you can open cupboards. Some cupboards, some times. There's never anything in them but by golly you can open the everloving butt out of them. So that's cool.

Besides his blood detection powers, the character detective can also take a trip into people's memories. Then the setting switches from a convoluted haphazardly designed apartment building to an even more silly on-rails jaunt down some rando's memory lane.

Occasionally you solve brain twisting puzzles like "click the thing that isn't moving and not the thing that is" or "update a computer driver".

I guess there's a werewolf or some sh*t I couldn't have cared less by that point. I was really looking forward to this because the reviews are generally positive and praise the setting and writing. But it's a talking-to-doors simulator with a bunch of half-baked game mechanics that don't amount to anything, so I was very sad instead.

Oooh, look, there's blood at this crime scene!

The most surreal experience in gaming.

This is a walking sim with light puzzle elements and random stealth sections. The puzzles were easy and the stealth was even easier. I'm not sure why there was stealth at all, to be honest. Regardless, it's a fantastic narrative game with an amazing aesthetic. This truly captures the grimy and depressing themes of cyberpunk.

I was reminded of Soma throughout the entirety of this game. Though, this game is not really a horror game.