Let me put it to you this way,if you like holding down the W key,than this "game" is right up your alley
It's genre is "Adventure,indie,casual" which is misleading.
What this basically is,is an art project,it's not a game,it has none of the defining characteristics of a game.
One might say that this is an interactive story,but the interactivity is basically an illusion,there's no interactivity whatsoever.Complete lack of immersion,waste of time,sadly.
I don't even have to explain,this is my personal opinion,indeed why would it not be,what else would it be in fact,one has to ask.
It's overall a very pretentious experience whereby you walk through an island and you are shown things,and there are things in the environment you interact with and have,one would imagine some kind of hidden or clouded or subtle meaning which I honestly did not pick up on,is it's simply because I'm dumb that is a possibility,maybe I'm simply unreceptive to this kind of stuff as I don't find art gallery's particularly interesting either unless there's an obvious an amount of talent in there.
The funny thing is that in this game there is an obvious amount of talent here,it's got really great visuals (source engine at it's finest),great audio,and good narrator.
Who does it in a deliberately dry manner,there's not a huge amount of emotion in there,there are at certain points,but most of it is pretty flat,that's deliberate though,it's done so with purpose and the environments looks fantastic,shouldn't be too difficult to do admittedly when it's completely non-interactive.
It's the same reason why "Mist" and "Riven" looked really good back in the day because there's barely anything you could do.
And also there's not really a lot of places to go,you have to perceive down a linear path,there are some dead ends,which are really frustrating,and it busts the story experience because those dead ends don't give you anything.
You might go down there and expect "Oooh is there a bit of dialogue here that might explain something else what's going on?" but there is not,there's nothing there so you have to walk back to the area that you were in previously which is painfully slow.You cannot sprint,you cannot move faster,you just walk at a very laisurely pace through the island,which of course artificially extends the length of this title,that is deliberate.
When you go into a dark area,a flashlight comes on,but it doesn't really help because there's nothing you really need to see,at first I went around exploring to see if there's any clues,but you'll never find one,you'll see some writing on the wall but it doesn't explain it at any point.If you're looking for a payoff,for the game to suddenly explain what's going on but that doesn't happen, again if we can even call it a game,which it isn't . It doesn't tell you anything whatsoever aside from these bits of narration that come in.
Supposedly these bits are semi-randomized,now that doesn't mean that they're randomly generated it just means that sometimes it plays a different one if you want to go through twice for whatever reason which I have no desire of doing because the last hour of my life I feel was wasted in a frustrating stupor in which I've learned nothing and experienced very little. It's rather unfortunate I have to say,the idea of telling a story via an interactive medium is something that a lot of people have been wrestling with for the longest time and of course people within the industry continue to wrestle with it and often don't to it very well.
In this case they've made a story that could have probably been in a cutscene a probably should have been,because it doesn't benefit you at all, in terms of the ability to control your character,assuming you even are a character,there's no evidence that suggests that you even real.
You walk through through this area and you're thinking "Well you know what,they could accelerate this and just keep the dialogue going and tell me a story over the course of 20 minutes" as opposed to dragging it over the course of an hour.
If you wish to try it out,then go there knowing what it is.
It is a slow-paced set of bread crumbs with many gaps in between them,you gobble the bread crumbs up as they lead you to a destination hoping against hope that you will find something a little bit more substantial as you go on,maybe the rest the loaf of bread but you never get it at all,and by the end of it you are hungry for something that is worthwhile.
As a gamer you are conditioned to a belief certain things should happen in your medium,I certainly am and perhaps I cannot appreciate this .I have to wonder if someone to who doesn't play games at all could appreciate this.It's difficult to say.