I’m trying something different again as I wasn’t quite satisfied with the game notes format. I’ll try a more relaxed format now, just writing my thoughts about the game. Just like I used to before the balanced reviews.
Developer: The Chinese Room | Released: 2024 | Genre: Adventure, Horror
An adventure game trying to escape an oil rig after a disaster hit it. It was made by the same developer that also made Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine for Pigs, and Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture.
Excellent experience. The lighting, filthy details and the profanic Scottish voice acting from the protagonist and the crew was spot on. Things like a convincing rough sea and water drops sailing down windows made it clear this was a game the developer really cared about. The game was also very dynamic in a way that reminded me of Half-Life. The ceiling crashing down, water rushing in, something grabbing you, etc.
The gameplay was not groundbreaking. Jumping, crawling, answering wall phones, using (a lot of) ladders, running jumps, a few QTE – that sort of stuff. Later there were also stealth sequences, sneaking between cover and throwing objects to lure a monster away.
But even if the gameplay itself wasn’t original, the atmosphere and the oil rig itself more than made up for it. The abundance of details everywhere and the foreboding ventures down the innards of the oil rig itself were truly fascinating. If anything could sour the experience, it was the linear nature of the levels.
But I didn’t mind that at all. It’s been a while since I’ve played a linear game.
There was a little bit too much “Caz! Get over here now!” in the beginning of the game. It zapped the joy out of just exploring everything before the catastrophe. I’m not sure why I let myself be goaded by this false sense of hurry. After having completed more than 600 games, I should know better.
Some mechanical interactions required surprisingly little fiddling on my part. Take gratings into ventilation shafts, for example. The protagonist did the unscrewing himself. All I had to do was to hold down a key to tear it open afterwards. Even padlocks could be forced open with a screwdriver and a hotkey.
Weird that I had to climb ladders by holding down right mouse button. I also had to use the right mouse button to grab ledges and shimmy along. When I first found a flashlight, it had a separate battery pack. It never had to be recharged. It was a lifesaver – most of the interior of the oil rig was dark.
The disaster was some enormous alien thing hitting the oil rig. A lot of the interior was broken up by long strings of muscle tissue. Later, monster entrails in door openings reminded me of a certain movie by John Carpenter. In fact, you could call this game Deepwater Horizon meets The Thing.
I wonder if the developers used this expression themselves.
Some levels were set up with small crawling spaces for hiding and objects to throw. Then a monster arrived with tentacles flying all over the place. I had to sneak from cover to cover, sometimes throwing an object to lure the monster away. Often I reached a cover just as it spotted me. Watching it trying to reach me through the grating with a full burst of anger was always unsettling.
There were also lockers to hide in, but I didn’t use those much. Too hard to see in them.
I liked how the oil rig boss was convincingly cruel. The protagonist was called up to his office and fired on the spot for pissing him off. If only with the lip sync in this game had been better.
Lots of cliches in this game. I could see a mile away that the lifeboats wouldn’t work. And that the helicopter would fly away before my eyes, then crash back into the oil rig.
In the later levels dealing with the pontoons, I had to swim underwater. And of course, there just had to be a sequence where I almost drowned. Towards the end, rooms were also flooded with water.
Speaking of reaching the end of the game – lots of sad moments to be found there. Roy died – and I even found his insulin. Brodie accepted his fate. Finlay tried to run ahead with a lighter, but was crushed below debris. So I had to take over the lighter and drop it inside the rig myself.
All this saving myself from dying a thousands deaths and it had to end like that anyway.
I wish the developers had shown us the oil rig from a distance, exploding in a massive fireball. Maybe they also wished they had the time and money to show us that too.