I can’t express in words what I experienced while playing through this indie masterpiece; after it I am left with a sea of positive impressions, but I also feel some kind of sediment in my soul, melancholy, sadness maybe.
It would seem that the game does not have a clear plot, there are no well-written and memorable characters... We are simply shown the story of a nameless little boy in the vile world of dystopia
(or maybe even post-apocalypse), who will have to endure a lot of hardships his journey, in which he witnesses human cruelty, where there is a very strict division of the classes of “slaves and masters”, terrible experiments on people with suppression and deprivation of will, mind control, and so on.
In general, if you look closely, Playdead likes to put children in the center, and as a result of the passage it turns out that someone’s fate, life, freedom definitely depends on them.
The plot here is very conditional, we know nothing about what is happening, we do not know the identity of the boy and his background, we know absolutely nothing.
What is happening in the world of the game throughout its entire duration is not explained at all; the player himself builds a picture, putting it together like a puzzle: piece by piece, based on small details of the visual component of the environment, building his own theories of everything that is happening.
But from the first minutes it immediately becomes clear that something is wrong in the world, everything around is wrong. The environment is very dark and depressing, it is aggressive, hostile and cruel. From the very beginning, the feeling of doom, loneliness, hopelessness does not leave... These feelings dig deep into the soul and do not let go until the very end.
I think, after the above, it is not difficult to understand how powerful the atmosphere and immersion in it is here, which is facilitated by the excellent location design, magnificent sound design, and the divine soundtrack from Martin Stieg Andersen. Depressive or melodic ambient fits so perfectly into the atmosphere, and in some places your heart literally freezes for a moment along with time, you seem to be drowning, or in weightlessness, your soul is floating.
To sufficiently understand the world of the game, one passage will not be enough. After all, for the first time, attention is focused mostly on puzzles, and on studying the environment to a lesser extent. And in order to complete your picture of the vision of everything that is happening, you come back here again, plunge into this darkness even more, study even more details, find secrets that also contain pieces of the history puzzle, and also discover a secret ending that turns everything upside down on the head and gives rise to quite a few questions.
My verdict: this project is ideal for those who like dystopia, who love and know how to immerse themselves in the world of the game and want to study it. This game is made with soul. You won't be disappointed