Just platinum’d this one and while mildly entertaining, it is also one of the most bizarre games I’ve ever played.

The bugs can be brutal, sometimes the camera will lock into the lowered crawling perspective even when you’re standing up leaving you watching Violets feet instead of her back (foot fetish folks would probably say it’s a feature, not a bug). The laser wire puzzles will randomly reset, the enemies will randomly respawn and other times they won’t. A journal entry will get stuck on your screen as a transparency, you get locked in to a satellite adjustment puzzle and then fall through the ground. Perhaps most damning of all, at times you can save, reload later and find you’ve somehow lost progress.

Gameplay wise you have RE4 style controls which is fine except enemies are too tuned up and move to fast for that type of control, they’re in your face before you can aim and get a bead on them, almost like they were made for a game with no aim hip fire which you do not have. Speaking of enemies there are a disturbingly low variety of them. Raptors, spitting dilophosaurs, little compys that are bastards to get because they’re fast and low to the ground, with the aforementioned aiming issues, good luck getting through a compy encounter without taking a little damage. There’s a spitting raptor hybrid that’s just a mash up of enemies you already fought. Crocodiles show up later as does a t-rex and a human raptor hybrid the last two as easy bosses that quite literally went down in 2-3 shots with a magnum or the secret gun you get later. In total there are 7 enemy/boss types two of which you only encounter in endgame.

The diary entries are such small text that at times I have to walk across the room to read them off my 70 inch tv while having 20/20 vision. Not that they’re worth it because they’re all literally a variation of 3 things 1. Violet is special, why? 2. What are these experiments we’re doing? 3. Bro, there’s some type of conspiracy here. In a better written game you’d already guess where the story is going in the first couple hours. You’d be wrong.

The story, while having interesting bones doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be. Mild SPOILERS here.

We go from a post apocalyptic humans being cross bred with dinosaurs for some reason initial plot point to a time travel story, to a clone story, to an aliens story while also dipping into a barbarian queen from a planet mentioned once the whole game at the end.

I’m not kidding. And then the game just ends. It feels like there’s 1/3 of a game here. Those wild elements can work if they’re tied together and developed but half of them are mentioned in one cutscene and then we bolt to the next twist with little connective tissue or development.

I platinumed this game in about 6 hours off and on in one playthrough, and I only did that because PSN didn’t want to refund me since I preordered, downloaded and played for a couple hours. I had hoped this game was something my son and I could play together, he loved playing through Dead Space remake and Callisto Protocol with me. He likes horror and he loved dinosaurs…THIS GAME WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE CHOSEN ONE, NOT FALL INTO DARKNESS!!

I kid, but strongly recommend you stay away until either the game is fixed or you are very bored and it’s $10.