I really don't know how to write this review because I just sucked so bad at this game. I've never played Myst or anything like it, which showed terribly when the 3 pages of scribbled notes in my little notebook did nearly nothing for me in the playthrough.

I think part of this was misplaced expectations. I came into it expecting a horror-filled experience. And it's really not, in my opinion. It's creepy, I'll gladly say that; personally, I found the lighting and the ambient noise to keep me sufficiently stressed for the first half of my playthrough. But once you get past that, there's like 3 "scary" parts in the game, period. The rest of the game plays pretty much what I'd expect Myst to play like (especially if you were to disable the ambiance in the settings, which I didn't because I was frankly afraid of it then being boring.) So really, I feel like me being more afraid that I should have did a service to the game; me always being on my toes kept my interest way more than if I'd have known if the horror element was punctuated timely moments.

So for the first part, I was fairly captivated; I kept thinking things could spring out at me at any moment so I'd better be careful. That was actually kind of nice, freezing every time I heard the house in the game make settling noises. And exploring the different places, trying to find "clues" was pretty engaging for the first part.

It started to go downhill when I hit a wall and walked around, looking at everything for an hour and a half. Turns out, one of the mechanics is being able to combine the clues you've found to create more specific clues, thus helping you in your quest. I apparently missed this being explained, but even after learning it, I never got the hang of it. I was never able to look at my list of clues and see which ones I thought would piece together and what they would form (especially if it was a three-way combination. God help you if you try to brute force it.) On the other hand, a rare few times, I knew something the character didn't but knew that I had to combine clues to get it and progress the story. I still couldn't get it, working backward (and same deal with brute forcing).

Now I really, truly don't know if this is just because I suck at games like this, maybe because I'm impatient. But while early on, there was a small amount of area to comb over, as the game went on, the area that I needed to search every time I got stuck grew larger and larger. So when there was a certain item that I had already seen but had not gleamed a "clue" off of in an area that I thought I was done with, I'd have to comb the entire world for this dumb clue only to find it in the last place I look, then after I find it, probably do the same thing again. Or sometimes, I'd miss that something was clickable, despite trying to move my mouse around every single area to see if there was anything to interact with. At that point, you're royally boned, because you're missing something and you don't even know what.

But again, all of this may just be me not gelling well with this genre, and being shit at it. I admit that, and that's possibly why by the end, I was just pretty much following a guide most of the time because I got sick of going over the same areas again and again or trying to combine dozens of combinations of clues. By the end I didn't feel gipped or robbed, I just felt....meh. I was ready to be done and me and the game parted ways amicably enough.

However, some things I can say confidently that are detriments are these:

The game looks ok, in my opinion, but the characters themselves look god-awful. Just horrible.
The voice acting was ok, but it seems like the actors weren't told the context of their lines; it seems like they were just given words and told to read them off, which made any dialogue between characters in the game feel very forced. (Ok, scratch that, most voice acting was ok. A select few were just....god awful over-actors.)
While the visuals for the game were ok, I faced a enormously annoying issue with the display settings, particularly "shaders". When turned on, it produced a disgusting red-blue effect similar to trying to watch a 3D movie without the glasses. This was most noticeable in the menu, making it literally an eyesore to look at, but was also present around certain items in the game. However, if you turn this feature off, everything gets much, much lighter. Maybe it was just because I only tried to fix the ugly text issue halfway through my playthrough, but I found this worse in the end, as it made everything look not near as gloomy as I was used to, but instead almost sterile. Something I'd expect in Myst, not in a Lovecraftian horror game.

I can't emphasize enough just how horrible that last issue was. Every time I paused or looked at one of the things in the game that had that sickening red-blue blur, I was completely taken out of the game. But every time I turned off the shaders effect, I lost interest in everything looking mundane.

So that's primarily why I have to knock it down in rating. I can't confidently know that whether it was me that was bad or the gameplay, but the poor graphics, voice acting and visual disturbances were enough to twist my stomach into a knot by the end of the game.

I'm not saying nobody will like it. I think if you like Myst and like Lovecraft, this game is perfect for you. It's just not for me. At all.