A point and click sci-fi/noir mystery, rendered in loving low-color style. Tries some neat stuff with your “mind map” of ideas being your whole inventory, putting investigative and research puzzles front and center.
Played through with Alleson and we found it pretty unsatisfying. Some complaints:
The game is short - kind of a “play in one long afternoon” length - but tonally it's pretty one-note. There's a single narrator, the voice of the protagonist who also reads the dialogue of other characters like a noir detective telling their story. It's all in that dry, flat noir style, clearly a stylistic choice, but it gets old a few hours in. That goes for the other aesthetic choices too - there's something “deadpan” about the whole thing.
There's some conflict between the way the terrain opens up and the way puzzles open up. The story is linear, and pulls you along from one locale to another. These locales get larger over the course of the game, opening up in good adventure game style. But the mind-map and associated puzzle complexity seems to peak a little earlier than the physical terrain does, and so the second half of the game puts you in a very large space with a lot of tiresome backtracking for a puzzle that somehow feels more aggressively linear than early parts of the game.
The mental inventory is cool, but one way it falls down is when we (as the player) make a mental leap with available information ahead of the character, and then struggle to get the character to make that same leap so we can move forward. This happened to us several times, often in a “You just haven't looked up that idea in that book _again_ now that the flag is set” way. These moments pushed us to a walkthrough.
We got tired in the last act and ran through the rest on the walkthrough to see the ending. I think we would have bounced off the last puzzle hard if we weren't following instructions. There's a Lynchian handwavy abstractness to much of the writing, and that last puzzle asks you to engage it directly and guess what the dev means through a lot of dreamlike images. I'm still not quite sure what story it was trying to tell.