The writing is actually pretty good. Mousing over things has wonderful embellished descriptive flavor texts, that is fairly short but rather eloquent. I enjoyed mousing over and reading everything.. IF you got this far in my review i would say stop reading and just pick it up. it's a free game and it's like 5-6 hours for most. I felt like I had to write about the game to review later, especially if it becomes a trilogy. and it it's full of nasty spoilers :) dont say i did not warn you... This is quite nice with animated backgrounds that are lush vibrant destructive beauty breathing forth apocalyptic fire, oozing out drippy gore our sputtering out electrical sparks... It's a gritty freakish beauty. This is truly good and excellent stuff reminiscent of the golden age of isometric games, and it's amped up with tech in the same capacity. Very much on point and shoudl please anyone who picks the game up. Also, I thought it looks nicer than stasis.

These puzzles? Well I thought they were OK at best, but sometimes just silly. Even Macguyver would raise his eyebrows at some of the solutions to problems with your items. much less about thinking and more just random clicking until it works. As a game its fine cause there isnt many interactables, items or areas and there are tool tips like icons inidcating its a 'useable' But the mechanic fails to really engange much for the sake of decent puzzles. And it feels a little cheap. It puzzles worse than stasis.

Fortunatley there are no actual game mechanic problems That impede with the game pretty much anywhere. I dont think you can get stuck or even die in this game. (I think you could get stuck in stasis, i know you could die) I found the fact i wasnt dying quite scary even, and constantly feared it and felt like death was constantly right around the corner for the first half of the game. This is fine I do wish they did something where you can 'fail' your pregnancy and have some fatal misscarriage/complications resulting in your death. It would have been unique and fit really well within this game.

The last puzzle towards the end requires a lot of walking around and review of every PDA. I get the idea but this is awful punishement and there should have beena better way. At least a page where it records all your data! Not only does it radically shift gears but It's a needlessly anal puzzle, previous puzzles could be solved through random clicking and reduction, but this was a real butthole to solve. The final Room has an event that acts as a climax before the ending, and this climax, well it was really a real real letdown. Your take and interpretation on the ending is really what makes or breaks this game, like the ending hate the climax? Ok game. Hate the climax hate the ending? It's a double whammy of badness. Like that climax? Well you should probably just work for Cayne cause you gotta be as crazy as these characters! XD

Logs. I like it. Rather offensive, disturbing, many of these logs leave me with a 'how does someone even get an idea like this?' reaction.. other logs gave me 'not sure what this means and i dont think i want to know' This is some freaky winking emoticon action, trust me.. I dont jimmy rustle that easy but If it were a long game i might not be able to stomach the whole thing but I managed to finsih it in one playthrough as it isn't long, its the perfect kinda game to go in a single playthrough, too... I can appreciate the style the Bishoff Bros have now haveing played this and Stasis.

Their third game should probably be a shockfactor focused game. They could make a killer game that just goes for a sick and disturbing kind of murder mystery with log collecting evidence of these messed up suspects (CAYNE has a kind of page turner effect) they might as well play this card cause they do it fairly well and it's a unique signature

Now the bad news... These characters seem very far fetched. They are just unusually weird as you try to make sense of things. (I hadn't played the whole thing but it reminded me of planescape torment a bit)The first person you meet is really something else. Samantha is another plot device/character i Wish they just got rid of completely. Dr. Adams has a really cool log, but in person he is a different character. He might as well not be in the game. The other characters behave in some really unreasonable and strange ways. I also cant stand any aspect of this protagonist as her mood swings are off the hook. Your sidekick narrator chimes in and it's often equally inappropriate. Yeah hadley is pregnant and narrator voice in your head is building up some backstory, i get it but whats bad is this really breaks immersion and compared with Stasis, and is just not conducive to the gameplay in CAYNE. In statsis we had a really chilling game with repitive droney industrial background noises and didnt know what was in the next room or what would kill us next. Here we have silly idle commentary jokes at times and strange random reactions of a pregnant woman that seem out of place within the context of this game. Stasis didnt have a lot of characters, was isolationist, and what it had worked well with each other. This is probably the worst thing about CAYNE. the characters dont really mesh right and they just seem so strange in general. I'm not nitpicking this, i think the characters and what was done would work fine in another game, but for this one it didnt seem appropriate.

Ending, some observations and my interpretation: (Major spoilers!) ...and speaking of strange, This game had one of the STRANGEST endings i've yet to see. Apparently everyone is left scratching their heads. Ulatimately this story is a bit vague and requires some thinking to put it all together. Not bad, I like whats going on (if i got it right, i think i did) but the player should get some more breadcrumbs. I spent about half the amount of time pondering the ending as playing it. So what is the ending or what is the game about? (more major spoilers:) We see a shot of the ship from the first game. We see facilities with shafts of light. It's some kind of research center or different facilities nestled around this big ship some kind of makeshift satellite facility type setup..

We see logs with lots of good info about whats going on in the world Doc Adams wants to combine himself with someone else. Person to person merging. theres other logs on the side effects this had and it seems to be a major focus of this facility. (note the artificial womb room and that PDA in it)

Cayne ancestor is on the facility. The name of this game is called CAYNE. There's a disembodied voice in your head. it has awareness, speaks to you somehow and slowly regains memories but cant feel its body. At first many players assume it is an AI (I wont mention another creepy scifi game but it reminded me of the premise in S***) There is also supporting evident for AI research being done that led me to think this. Plus, we see cayne's body, he's in the facility and 'exists'. So, in a way it almost seems like deliberate red herrings to distract from the truth. Cayne is inside of the player character and when he is reborn he cannbibalizes hadley as the host (doc adams even uses the word) also some really effed up stuff happened on earlier experiments where cells would attack the spinal cells, etc. as mentioned in one of the logs. other keywords are the 'special order' (the doc doing the supposed abortion mentions it as does a log) so while it is not directly shown (for whateveer strange reason) it is implied that cayne cannibalizes the player character. It would have at least been interesting to see how that mystery 'works'. I feel like leaving it as an ambiguous 'unicorn' type ending isnt right here, and almost sleazy, due to the large amount of potential redd herrings combined with various other loose ends. That's way too much hubris for a game like this, lol. It's not done well enough to go that route, but it's still a cool idea. And the more I ponder the more i liked it. At the same time there really is a whole lot of shit that just doesnt make sense in this game the more i ponder. Really, a lot of it is just absurd. The big one was the damn video where the elevator is zooming up into an exposed atmosphere on alien planet no air lock no nothing. It's very notable. I'm not sure how that could be an oversight. How to construct a building (or video) like that without a second thought to the exposure? (Why, not even the engineers over at Hadley's Hope were that bad! lol) So Cayne reborn must be some super lifeform. (This seems implied, or could be presumed) Still there are better ways to maybe present that if this is the idea rahter than a violent deathbirth and exposed alien atmo. Maybe I just have this interpretation because Cayne seems like Weyland being reborn as a Giger-y Xeno and Hadley is of course Shaw. (The strong resemblance to many parallels in Prometheus seems like good grounds enough so i'm just going to go with that) The whole time I knew the pregnancy only existed to be some plot twist or a deus ex, and that gave me the idea that it would probably be some blashphemous demonic body-horrorish result. The whole cult business is really odd, and i just dont get it. Samantha is super odd (and really I think they threw it in just to be some alien type stalker xenomorph it just is LAME). Really Every character is really odd. the cult leader geneticist who whips himself and enjoys the mutant glands of a crippled stroke victim. his daughter who sounds like she came fresh out of jonestown. Brosef who fancies his maggot bitches Grubette and Grublinda. The good doctor who wants to climb inside and burst out of brosef in some fatally violent inner homo brotality... You know its bad when the most normal person in this game is the voice inside your head. After that its the crazy mechanic/janitor who bereates you for no reason like he wants to fight you (he crawls toward you to kill you actually, he reminds me of an angry mudcrab, why isnt he scottish?) as he bleeds to death from getting sliced in half, maybe he's just mad at the world since his bird died. Well no, since he expressed fear of you causing reactor meltdown. WTF. I suppose you'd have to be pretty messed up in the head to work in a place that is like the a mix of doom's phobos base and auschwitz! Unlike both of those examples this game doesnt answer a really relevant question: "Where are these security teams??" There are research areas all over. why is cayne frozen corpse in this one. with a damn cult too. why is the alien on the loose. if cayne is so important (he's the richest man in the galaxy and whoever brings him back will be rewarded... maybe or something) why is there a shit show of security for this very special project. hadley seems like some kind of walk in clinic drifter anyway, so i dont know. there are some real rough spots in the story. and the greater image of it is marred by loose ends and blurred by the ambiguity. Still I can appreciate the game for where it's going and it was free. The only puzzle that really made me think was the ending but boy did it make up for the rest XD.

Amazing job from a small team. And the fact it looks nice the way isometric game like this should look make it tastefully done despite all the absurd and messed up stuff in it. I do hope the third game has some nicely woven story elements and cahracters that fit well within the dynamics of the game. I think we could easily see it next, and must say I look forward to it. Cayne is however a mixed bag for me. but how much can you criticize something that was free (and it wouldnt have to be) and had quite a bit of thought to it?

3+1 Stars (for being free, and making me think so hard about the ending)