21. August 2025 15:05   (Last edited: vor 1 Monat, 1 Woche)

A fantastic first mission. First, let me say that I know who the author is, so with that cleared off the table on to the mission itself.

The opening area sets the bar high in all of details, overall level of visual and sound ambience and in how well-ripened the whole locale feels, easily equalling some of the best "visually modern" city missions like Behind Closed Doors or Being T(2). With that, the mission soon shows also its biggest shortcoming - the objectives screen is fairly empty and doesn't sound too ambitious or challenging.

Then we have the mission's watershed moment but the problem I have with that is that we don't get any signalling or communication by the author as to do all there is to do in the whole opening area first because afterwards we don't get a chance to return to it anymore (on my first playthrough I discovered and entered the warehouse relatively early before exploring all and had to restart after finishing the mission just to see all there is in the opening part) - in my opinion a loopback option to the opening area (maybe including a shift in how it presents itself to the player) (and/or better feel of all the areas being interconnected) would greatly help the mission's immersion and overall feel of coherence.

The author apparently worked with some areas in mind that they wanted to include so then we get besides the open city portion a sprinkling of its sewers and entrails (to me also heavily reminiscent of Behind Closed Doors or the Odd one, in a good way) but towards the end the feeling and progression gets more and more linear, and the final area doesn't feel as detailed or visually refined as the earlier ones.

But back to what in my opinion is the biggest weakness of the mission - the lack of an interesting or coherent storyline or scenario that drives the mission and how it translates into a package of goals that are fun and interesting and reasonably challenging to fulfil. A story is present very sketchily in that we get the mention of an altercation with the "wizard" in the (nicely made) briefing who then makes a presence (is it him? - we can't even be sure about that) but that's it - there's no follow-up on that, and neither on our saviour (and another sketch of a story in the museum, but that's merely on what I would call a secondary or filler level just witnessed by the player but unrelated to their agency (it would and could be if you could somehow actually interfere, with palpable in-mission results)). Goals are basically just waypoints needed to progress further without any actual input on the player's part, or feel like ad hoc afterthoughts the player would do or try to anyway. The mission doesn't know if it wants to be a city romp, a mystic adventure, an escape thriller or a zombie infestation-investigation horror - it's a bit of everything but nothing fully and wholeheartedly. Don't get me wrong - it looks and plays splendidly, but the overall impression is of an arthouse cinema flick that doesn't know what it wants to do.

Another small niggle I would add is why the mission (among its many other interesting and playful details and small ideas) does an interesting arrow innovation thing but then decides to make a fuss about the single most important arrow type and makes it as difficult to get as possible (I had to backtrack half the mission to a location after finally getting the *single* rope arrow I found to get into) - feels unnecessarily forced and making things more onerous than they should be instead of real inspired tasks or challenge (the only other one is also easily overlooked). There were also a few inaccessible places that should be at least in how they offered themselves to explore.

Overall a top quality effort but I would like the author to focus more on the story and objectives and interconnectedness aspects of a mission to make their (hopefully) future works more involving and wholesome.



PS Vee love teeny tiny texts cluttering our whole objectiffs screens, and no proper mission is wholesome vitout dem