Shabriri

Bought this game to play on my stream for roughly thirty-eight dollars after taxes. Dear god, I would have much rather taken thirty-eight dollars and lit it on fire for what I got out of this game. First and foremost: every review I've read of this game claims it has a six-hour runtime. If it takes you six hours to beat this game, I seriously hope it's because you left to get lunch for two hours before finishing the game. It barely takes four. Four miserable hours of nothing interesting happening while you lightly jog from point A to point B. Game has nothing to offer outside of pretty good graphics. And even though the scenery looks good, you can't really appreciate them because the rest of the game is so bad. The acting is really well done, but unfortunately the script is so utterly lackluster that none of the actors get to shine past the opening ten minutes. And by the end of the game, the actors start sounding like they've lost interest in the project too. There is essentially no gameplay. You walk, occasionally press a single button button or hold a trigger. That's the game. There are maybe five scenes that have you running from monsters, except the monsters' AI is so easy to outsmart that the only way you will die in these scenes is if you are standing still. The game itself is painfully linear, which could work to its advantage if there was anything interesting during your time on the oil rig. I do appreciate the option to turn off the bold, yellow markers telling you exactly where to go at all times, but, honestly, the only time you'' struggle with where to go is when you're under water and your flashlight barely works, so you drown before you can find the correct path. The narrative tries to show character development by having the main character grow from "signing up to work an oil rig to avoid jail time" to "facing his problems and all of humanity", except it isn't even fully clear that he's running from his problems until a fourth of the way through the game, or so.(Again, it's a FOUR HOUR game, if you're lucky...) And his growth doesn't feel remotely earned, because you're barely shown any of his "running from his problems" outside of one flashback and a letter at the start of the game. **Spoilers** None of the "emotional moments" of the game have any weight, because you're never given any time to get to know the characters out side of them calling you on a phone once per chapter or them shouting "hey! I need you to go here and do XYZ, because reasons." Your character's "best friend" and "godfather to his children", two facts you only learn through a single flashback, three face-to-face interactions that last about a minute each, and a couple of 30ish second phone calls, dies at the end of the game and you feel nothing because the character has had next to no screen time. Even the MC's voice actor delivers his lines as if he's just blandly reading words on a page. "No. Roy. Don't die." a-la Gene Wilder in Willy Wonka. Another character "dramatically" dies over the phone, but why should you care? He's been on screen for exactly two short conversations. Almost forty dollars for a bad story, lackluster script, half-baked ideas and a disappointing resolution that explained nothing. Four hours of wasted time in a glorified walking simulator. A survival horror game with no survival, no horror, and its only a "game" in the most overly-generous sense.