After a break, I realized that I was wrong. The puzzles are indeed both creative and a bit complex. The ability to take control of someone else, who then takes control of someone else makes for a very satisfying reaction when you overcome the obstacle.
This game makes me more anxious than the previous one I played since I constantly must keep running away from things and avoid being spotted. However, there are some portions that make me feel at peace. One of these instances is when I take the submarine and plunge deep into the water for the first time. The music here is key. It reminded me of the Donkey Kong Country trilogy and how the music plays an important role in the nostalgia for replaying those games. More specifically, the music during this part of the game reminded me of the aquatic ambiance music from DKC.
I swear this game is catching me off guard sometimes since my deaths are mostly because it tends to hurl obstacles at you and my reactions are a bit late.
As I progressed through the game, I found that I needed to take control of the figures more and more. It seems like it is quite the opposite of Limbo, where you are the one being controlled for some areas of the game.
I continued, but there are two parts that stuck out to me. The first was the seismic wave which blew me apart a few times, and then the mermaid. The mermaid was very interesting because I felt like I was being trained to avoid her since she was aggressively chasing me, however, once she inevitably got ahold of me, I felt that the game was over. I would not have been surprised since I feel like the developers tend to make ambiguous endings like that. Surprisingly though, I was still alive and continued my journey.
I found that once I entered the factory again, the puzzles got a bit harder. Many of them now required me to avoid and time things closely at the same time. It reminded me of the Limbo factory obstacles, although these were on another level. I had more trouble here and I got stuck on certain parts, like the section where I had to stack boxes that would propel me upwards.
I have noticed that the game is both unsettling and calming. It is unsettling since there are a ton of dead or zombie-like people but is also calming since the scenery feels like it would be something straight out of a dream.
I felt like throughout the game everything was working against me, from nature to the people chasing me. I worked through situations where I was against the current, but here it was different. Once I began to break into the facility, everything was different. There were many people there, but I was not faced with any resistance. It was odd to the point that I did not know what to do or where to go. Eventually, I consulted a guide where I found that I had to move things around to get inside the water tank in front of me.
Nothing could prepare me for what I saw once I got in… I did not even know what I was looking at or how to feel about it. I approached it and took off the mind control caps and then I was consumed. I had a feeling that I knew where this was going, and I began to control the thing. It was a mess of bodies stuck together. I felt like I was controlling a wild animal, and then I burst out going on a rampage!
This portion of the game is the most unnerving, the sounds of the groans emanating from the player, the screams from the other people, and the change in movement really took me by surprise. It was the first time in this game that I felt like I had power, specifically, the power to destroy, kill, and make my own fate. Another surprising aspect is that the other normal people, who I thought were against me, began to help me escape which made me a little better.
This leads me to the ending. The ending results in our escape but inevitable death. I see this as a fitting end since our character was clearly in pain and confused. The good nature of the ending is also symbolized by the beam of light shining down on the dead corpses. Of the two endings, I feel like this is the more solidified since we are now dead. Unlike Limbo, we do not have any other reasons to hypothesize what will happen next. The overall story here became clearer since I concluded that I became a part of the experiment and was trying to escape from what were most likely government forces.
Overall, I feel like while this was more stressful than Limbo, it was a great game nonetheless, the scenery and the gameplay made it very interesting to play and hard to put down the controller.
