I've finished it in one sitting last daynight, a 9h30m playthrough (can send smegma samples to any requesting doubters.) I tend to spend a bit more time on games than most I think, so I estimate most people should be able to get 6-10 hours depending on difficulty. Which felt just right for an experience like this.
Never played the classic console horrors like BioEvil and Silent Hazard but I did watch that one let's play about some chick called Jill Sandwich so I knew the basics ie: run away from most dudes, save ammo for boss fights, etc etc.
I thought it was a very good experience. On the Survival difficulty, the resource management felt very well tuned, such that I felt like I was running out of everything about half the time but always had just enough resources to keep going. Felt like a perfect balance of incentivizing you to replay particularly sloppy plays while also giving you enough slack that you can just about squeak by if you roll with most of the punches that you take, man.
The mechanics felt very deliberate and the puzzles were intuitive but reasonably complex idk I just thought it was really solid overall? just like my
Like the 6 item limit got really tight by the end but I really liked that it made me deliberately prepare for each outing. Here is an idea: carry one gun, one tool, one stack of healing items for your "reconnaissance" runs - basically only for self defense and exploration. When you identify a room that you want to clear, come back to it loaded with extra ammo and thermites and whatever else you need.
The plot and aesthetics are certainly stand-out for me. I would say no one element of the game's story felt particularly thought-provoking or fresh - like, whatever you think of when you read the phrase "Do Androids Dream of Silent Hill?" probably encompasses the entirety of the game's narrative. However, I thought that the overall aesthetic, such as the way the music complimented the visuals particularly in the more demented sequences, came together in a brilliant way. I have a particular affectation for art that can produce a feeling of simultaneous awe and horror, beauty and disgust, some sort of transcendence that is indistinguishable from degeneration - and this completely hit the spot. If you like the mixture of psychological, gnostic, and occult horror especially in a sci-fi context, you will probably really enjoy this.
My favorite thing about the game, that sets it apart from most other surreal horror thingies, is that it does not pull its narrative punches. It's not merely just "oh I get it the whole game is an allegory for -insert mental illness-" or "oh I get it the whole dream is just a dream flashback bro nothing's real aha."
No, without spoiling anything, the game embraces the fact that it is a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream, like "here are multiple contradictory versions of events, actually happening simultaneously - and they might as well all be fucking true, and they probably are, and if they weren't you would have no way to know." There is no certainty, no actual wake up call, just a demented megastructure formed by layers of context and meaning stacked on top of each other. And the result is that instead of the game discarding some of its own layers as artifice, hemorrhaging its meaning and context as irrelevant symbolism until only the True Meaning (TM) (R) remains, the game IMO simply grows over with revelation and evil, sick, tragic meaning like some sort of epistemological cancer.
Instead of "nothing meant anything," the game tells you "everything meant everything, even if that is an awful state of things that our minds are barely capable of understanding." And that IMO is one hell of a narrative commitment to make for a small indie horror game about a lesbian robot from east germany shooting silent hill monsters in space.
And I think that's pretty neat