Go to the game's main page
Review
Unfortunately, I didn’t enjoy this game very much. It doesn’t help that the subject matter is not something that I personally relate to, so any game about it will have to work a lot harder to connect with me, and I don’t think this game succeeded at that.
In my opinion, the mechanics could use some tuning. My main complaint was that you are automatically logged out from each computer after hiding; in theory I don’t mind the mechanic of having to interrupt tasks in order to hide/run from something that’s hunting you, but having to repeat that first action of logging in made it tedious, especially when (by the end) about 2/3rds of the time I was just repeating that one action over and over and waiting for random chance to give me enough time to get any further.
I did play on Hard Mode; it’s possible Easy Mode involved more time between interruptions, which likely would have improved the experience.
I encountered a major bug related to the pushpins that resulted in printing a large block of array errors to the screen whenever I referred them as a group, and various other smaller output errors. In general, the game felt like it could have used some more editing and testing.
I had to rely on hints to solve the screensaver puzzles. I actually think the screensaver puzzles were pretty interesting on their own, but the environment of the game wasn’t conducive to the amount of experimentation I would have needed to figure out the solutions. I also feel they could have used some more prompting as to what kind of a solution was needed, since they felt out-of-place in comparison to the earlier tasks which all involved mechanical interactions with normal office objects, so that’s the kind of puzzle I went in expecting to find. (Conversely, the puzzle with the chips fit right in and was very intuitive to solve.)
I didn’t see the guide until after I finished the game, which is unfortunate, as it was charming (especially the illustrations) and probably would have improved my experience a lot if I had known about it. I wish more of the vibe from the guide made it into my experience of the game.
