This game was lauded as the spiritual successor to the Dead Space series, and as it was being made, it certainly looked and sounded the part. Some of the people who made Dead Space were even working on it, trying to recapture the lightning in a bottle that was the original series.
For one that loved the Dead Space series so much, it took me until the game was free for Playstation Plus members to play it myself. Maybe it was just balking at the cost of $70 - $100 for the game. Maybe it was because the streamers I watch on Youtube never got past more than two episodes of game play. I don't know why I really kept putting off getting it.
But I'm glad I did.
The next thing I noticed was that there was no system to actually tell you where you were supposed to go. Games that are linear enough can get away with that, but this game has multiple paths at times, and it's very easy to get lost and lose track of where objectives are. In addition to that, the more linear sections tend to lock doors behind you, so if you go down the path, you're very likely to find yourself unable to back track and it's easy to miss things.
Not that you have enough inventory to collect everything you find anyway. Multiple times early in the game, I was forced to choose between ammo, health, or things to sell for credits to buy upgrades. Off one beaten path I found a room with several items, and I ended up having to leave almost all of them behind, opting instead for the health packs and ammo I was already carrying. At 60% of the game finished, I didn't have a single weapon fully upgraded because money was so hard to save up, and a lot of things to sell were left behind until I was too far along to go back for them when I finally found a store.
Yeah, you'll want health and ammo over money.
Finally, there's the bosses. There's the final boss, which is huge, terrifying and worthy of being a final boss. There's also a monster that's just two regular enemies stuck together that you have to fight off four times. That's it. Two bosses. One that you fight four times. The first two times you face him are also so close together that you really don't have a chance to build up your inventory from the first fight before it shows up again. Trust me, I scoured every corner trying to find health and ammo.
That's a lot of issues, but the game is still playable, and a lot of it is still fun in spite of how frustrating parts can be. What it comes down to is the game clearly needed a few more trips through Quality Assurance. Having finally played through it myself, it's actually really easy to see why what should have been one of the best games of the year ended up being so quickly forgotten.
Still, if you're looking for an action-horror game without worrying about the lore and love a good challenge ala Dark Souls, you'll probably love this as it is.