I tried so hard to like this one.

The gameplay is all right, a bit of a generic third person shooter, and it was a bit too hard for me, as someone who isn’t used to the genre (and also was playing on a controller), so i ended up turning on a bunch of the assist features to make it slightly easier.

The lore started as a bunch of SCP knockoffs, but didn’t seem to get the spirit of why SCP worked at first. Eventually it started to hone in on the vibe, like with the Ashtray, Safe, X-Ray Lightbox, etc…

My main gripe with the game is that it doesn’t feel like I’m actually using the paranormal objects I collect. It felt like I was absorbing them and playing a generic psychic superhero with a gun. It was fun, it just didn’t fit the vibe the lore was going for. Given the premise, I was sort of expecting to be messing with forces far beyond my understanding.

Of course. None of that matters. Not a single opinion I have about the quality of the game matters. There was an annoying and consistant texture bug where text and logos on objects wouldn’t display correctly, appearing as a blurred, muddled mess. This got bad enough that one of the puzzles that required a clue from several whiteboards, I just couldn’t do. I found a temporary solution, but I looked it up later and the only real solution is to mod the game.

And then there’s the crashing. Oh my god. This game lag spiked and crashed so much even on the lowest graphics settings.

I’m told the console version is good. But this game is five years old, and for it to be this unplayable on modern hardware and Remedy Entertainment hasn’t pushed a patch or update that fixes it. To me, that’s unacceptable.