The Good:
The game looks very pretty. You definitly know how to create interesting scenes, interiors and make a coherent environment. Some of the animations and death sequences were pretty elaborate too, I was impressed with them.
I had nearly no technical issues with the game, except one time when the game decided to load a save a few rooms back after my death. And two or three times the animations John does when he was supposed to stumble or something, it played in a weird way, as if John was flying in the air and having epileptic attack. But thats a minor glitch.
The music and sound effects very atmospheric and I enjoyed them, good job on them.
The bad:
The voice acting was uneven. The voice of John was good, and the acting fit his character and scenes. But Te'ah had some sentences that were completly over/under acted. There were moments when she sounded like a robot when you expected her to show some emotions, and the other way around. One sentence I remember, the "I'm a vegetarian" as a response to John talking about skining an animal in the past. The voice for Dr Malan was a generic Evil scientist and at times I felt like he is some crazy Russian doctor from Chukotka. Thankfully he did not have that many lines so it was bearable.
Some of the puzzles very annoying in that they either required finding a specific object (The bone glue in medical, it had no shining indicator and I missed it completly and was running around the rooms trying to do something to those power cells). I hate the moments in adventure games when I know what I have to do, but I just managed to miss an item somewhere and I cant do shit without it. I even managed to develop a certain paranoia about it, and in any adventure game when I cant progress I worry that I again managed to miss a vital item and need to look for it. This particular bone glue was a problem because it was no as easily noticable as other vital items in the game.
The other instance of a problem with progression I had at the Insect Queen. And I was not the only one from what you are saying. The problem here is that when a player try to interact with the Queen and gets eaten, he wont try to interact with her again as he knows the outcome already. And the happy face over her was not enough to convince me, because the face was red, and red is the color of danger so I assumed its something dangerous about her. Even the logs that were speaking about the Queen being calm at times were not enough to give me a clear indication that I should interact with her when she has the happy face over her. Better solution here would be to make it so that the milking process is very tiring for her and she falls into a deep sleep from exhaustion or something. That would give the player a clear signal that she is not as dangerous in this state.
The last example of annoying puzzle bullshit was in the room towards the end, when you have the room where they used gas to kill subjects and the other one, and the barrier that prevents you from going further. I entered the room with the cages, looked around with my mouse cursor and saw no "hand" so no interactive objects, I left the room. And I got stuck for good 15 minutes running around other rooms and trying to maybe break the doors to the gas room or something. And the solution? You had to move close to one of the cages so a script could start that would shake the screen and when you got back to the previous room, the plot would move forward with Dr Mengele capturing you. That goddamn cage should have been an interactive object, then I would walk to it and started the script.
I also did not like the fact that you could not skip conversations and was forced to sit through them again and again if you got killed and had to reload.
The ugly:
The writing was anywhere from sort of ok to terrible. I will be honest, I skip most of the pda's in the second half of the game because they were just such huge "My personal diary of meaningless crap", and the writing in them was not interesting. They sounded like mediocre blog posts at time. It would be far better if instead of so many pds we would get 1/3 of them but more interesting, meaningfull and not written as a literary fodder. Good example here are the pdas of the security guys in the security station. There was like 3 of them, and they tried to present the events from 3 different perspectives, but they were boring, and after reading on of them, the others very just the same shit, in the same order, with slightly different words. Another example was from the crew quarters were there were the 2 girls and 2 guys having some personal drama crap going on. Completly inconsequencial, and the shit about "What she had to do for the alcohol" was cringeworthy, and she repeated it twice at least. Subtlety and some maturity and non of this "Lololol I had to suck dick for this, so awful!"
I dont know about the later pdas but most of the one I've read followed the same order. The guy/girl gets to the ship/no department and is excited at the beginning, then he/she realizes whats going on and that their collegues are shit and starts to complain or run away/get transfered to other place, bla bla bla.
But the ultimate price for the most cringeworthy line of the whole game goes to "The morals of man do not apply to Gods" I was laughing hard after hearing this crap. It sounds like something a rebelious teen could have uttered. And I was subjected to this monstrosity repeatedly as the game killed me a couple of times after hearing it.
Unkillable Cat mentioned it already and I agree with him, none of the characters was in any way memorable. John came the closest to being at least human but he could be summarized as "a desperate father looking for his family" and his constant whining how bad it is on the ship, and all the experiments and corpses and hybrids, it became unbrearable at one point and when I entered a room with some gruesome scene in it, I thought "God Damn, he will cry and whine and be emotional again!" There was to much focus on telling me how awful it is, how terrible and terrifying instead of just showing me and allowing me to process it in my own way. It was as if you went to an exhibition and there was a guy following you commenting on every painting with "Oh look how horrible it is! The dead people, the horror! Let us cry in despair!"
And now for the story. The game was kinda short so not a lot of story could be presented but what was presented did not impress me. It was full of sc-fi cliches that there was nothing surprising about it. If you tried to make an amalgamation of scenes from sc-fi movies and books, then you managed to do it. But its not interesting. The whole story is basicaly "Evil corporation has a ship that they do illegal research on. They also capture innocent people and experiment on them. Someone sabotages the ship and shit hits the fan. The experiments run amok and kill nearly everybody. you wake up from stasis and try to find your family in the mess. Some misterous voice help you. You learn of the Big Bad Evil, mad Doctor Mengele. You defeat Big Bad Evil after a trip through the ship and surprise, surprise! You are betrayed by the misterious voice. And oh God, the reasoning for that betrayal was so so boring. Money and revenge. The revenge being explained in one sentence at the end. There was nothing interesting in the story. Evil corporation did evil things, mad Doctor was mad, and a betrayal at the end. One could say it was a classic sc-fi story but it was like Sc-fi plot for beginners with no will to take it in any interesting direction. Maybe because it was to short to really expand upon the story and give it some unique character. I don't know but what I know is that this story was done to death already and it was a waste of great setting, awesome visuals and good sound and atmosphere.
I know it all may sound like I did not like the game but its not true. I liked it, thats why I finished it despite being completly predictable and uninteresting. If I were to present any closing remarks, I would suggest that you
Pyke restrict yourself to graphical/art direction/technical side of game creation because thats what you do great, with a constant supply of screenshots of your amazing visions for different games. Just leave the story to someone else. Or maybe try doing as crazy and creative with the story as you do with art direction. Because sticking to the cliche, predictable stories with mediocre writting is what drags your awesome visuals down.
I hope it does not sound too harsh, I wish you all the success you can get and a long and fruitful career in game design.
