This sense of “false risk” puts another mark against the game’s immersion. I can see why taking direct control of the protagonist out of the player’s hands means you need to tread a fine line between risk or puzzle-oriented gameplay, but the developers stepped a bit too far in a safe direction. It doesn’t help either that the voice actor they chose for Lea speaks almost in a very monotone manner, making this yet another foreign-developed game that suffers from a poor localization process. The voice acting is still pretty decent all-around, but Lea’s tone rarely matches the situation she’s in.

Conversely, the game is wrapped in quite the beautiful graphics engine. Painstaking effort was apparently taken to present the desperate, aged feel of the environment. Plants, growth, and general signs of decay are seen around every corner, and you’re often asked to interact with machinery that barely looks like it should be working. The game also has a pretty nifty dynamic shadow system that is accurate for the most part, but absolutely murdered the framerates on my 8800GT configuration. Generally the scripting is solid too, though I did encounter a few cases of strange debug errors coming up during normal conversations, as well as bizarre pathfinding issues leading to Lea becoming ‘stuck’ in a piece of environment, walking back and forth in circles. This particular problem was blessedly rare, but is also absolutely unacceptable to come across for a game like this, where the only option is to hope your last save point wasn’t too long ago.

All complaints aside, this game will probably get a lot less attention than it deserves. Given the low $30 street price it’s worth a look for anybody feeling the pure adventure-game genre is dead. I truly hope the developers are encouraged to develop a sequel to the title with some added refinements. The game deserves it.