You're a regular person. You need work done on your brain. You wake up afterwards, and you don't know where. When. How. Or what. But there's definitely something wrong. You will find out why you woke up in the situation you did. And you might end up wishing you hadn't. You're at PATHOS-II, a research station. Medical. Labs. Maintenance. It's located at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. And its cramped, worn mechanical innards bare only passing resemblance the grand Art Deco of Rapture.
You're Simon Jarrett(Zeus, sometimes nice, or a jerk, and occasionally dense). You live in Toronto. Work at a bookstore. You're in a car accident, and need work on your brain. You go in for an experimental scan. And the moment it's over, you find yourself displaced. It seems abandoned, and you'll find yourself wanting it to be. Everyone around is hostile. Well, almost... thankfully. Most prominent is Catherine Chung(Mooney, optimistic), who you spend a lot of time with. The extensive conversations between the two were unexpected, and they're a gamble that pays off. You'd think silence and solitude were necessary, or at the very least superior, when making someone scared, when shocking them to their core using themes of consciousness, body, identity, and other elements of transhumanism. And you'd be wrong.
She'll keep you focused, keep you from sulking, get you to snap out of your funk. Pointing out that you are lucky, both of you. Because where this could so easily be completely bleak, there is hope. A glimmer. A ray. You're not merely trying to escape(I'm looking at you, BioShock Infinite), the methods of doing so all failing for some reason or another. Big mistake. Obnoxious, repetitive, boring. You have a real goal. One that matters. Heck, the only one that does, that ever could again! I don't care how detached you might think you are, there's no way it won't inspire you. I won't reveal it here.
Anytime you face someone who you can converse with, you click to lead to a few more lines, or you don't, and move on. No dialog trees. Seriously, those would kill the tremendous immersion of this. And you aren't made to sit still and listen: you'll *want* to. This is also when you'll be faced with a difficult moral decision. Each time, there's some distinct aspect to it. You're not Harvesting/Saving adorable, huge-eyed 8-year-old girls ad nauseum. There's something to their situation. Their personality. History. Maybe they even ask you to... and maybe they don't. Perhaps they can't. At times they'll be tied to an enigma. Regardless of your choice, you'll have to live with it. And I'm not talking about your avatar anymore.
This has more different, in design and behavior, enemies than all previous Frictional's Games combined. Distinct, memorable. Some teleport, are blind, or leave you alone if you don't bother them. Noise will attract them, which is about the biggest use this makes of your ability to pick up, rotate, throw, just about everything that isn't nailed down. And sometimes, you'll be forced to do something loud. Maybe something breaks when you go near it. Or you have to activate something. Sometimes it'll be a door. Open, close, it'll be heard by anyone nearby. Whether it's you using the pathway... or if it's one of them. That's a lot like the travelling sound of the Thief series, and emulating those is always a plus in my book.
Ultimately, they do end up tedious. A little too often, you're already having trouble figuring out where to go since this has you disoriented so frequently. I wouldn't say I was ever truly lost. That would suggest something like playing Grand Theft Auto III and not having a printed out map. I never found myself having gone extremely far in the wrong direction. There's always a blind path if you keep going. It's just frustrating if you eventually reach that, and then there's someone or something in your way when you try to go back. Actual chases do tend to have you knowing where to go.
They went further in the direction of something like Outlast and Whistleblower. You keep an eye on where they are, you seldom stay completely still, you're always ready to bolt from where you are to where you need to go, which you keep making sure you know from looking. Doing that almost always works. As long as you don't slow down, you can outrun most of them. You don't randomly blunder into any. A lot of this is the journey to the destination. You often can't get very far "just" on foot. And unlike, say, Dead Space 1, it doesn't remain the same means for very long. So you fix, start back up and hitch a ride on, several major vehicles and systems.
You get to walk, and Sprint, across the surface down there. The one big chunk of it should maybe be trimmed by a third. Still, I am baffled by those who call it, well, anything less than stunning. Things float slower, and you have greater freedom of movement. That is one place where you can really enjoy the physics engine. It's gotten another immense upgrade, and it shows. Why it isn't used more for puzzles, I do not know. In general, those are made much easier, and, largely, simpler, albeit not to the extent as in A Machine For Pigs. They wanted exploration and storytelling to be more prominent. It leaves a hole in its place. You have no Inventory. You can carry one or two small things. Yes. They'll automatically be taken out or put away when appropriate.
I recommend this to any fan of cyberpunk, the survival horror game subgenre and this bunch of creative Swedes. And make sure you stay through the end credits, for the culmination of what took me 9 and a half hours to do, and will take decades upon decades to forget. 8/10
