I’ve played the game for a month and a half. I’m unemployed and have the time to make an analysis of my overall experience.
I’m making this post separate from the main thread because I want to talk about several aspects together, and I don’t think a single message would be enough.
The Tango sinkhole:
There’s a huge hole near the Tango satellite lake that is supposed to be a trap to get ATVs stuck. While it was planned as something fun, it ended up being negative for the early game experience. Let me explain:
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Without the ATV, the process of repairing satellites and fixing generators becomes much slower, which makes exploration harder.
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There’s greater difficulty in accessing unique story events since there’s no way to escape in case of an emergency, so you end up preferring to stay home.
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It makes the focus of your initial money (which is scarce) go towards buying a mask and an oxygen tank that costs almost 800 baocoins.
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If you try to rescue the ATV using a hook, for a beginner it’s very hard, and more than once I ended up losing credits on hooks that got stuck at the bottom of the hole.
Incomplete tutorial:
The tutorial, while trying to mix teaching and leaving secrets to explore, fails at the teaching part, and that makes it a huge flaw because:
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The player doesn’t learn how to write reports, their format, or how to place them in the box.
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There’s no interaction with a satellite.
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There’s no interaction with the delivery drone.
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There’s no interaction with a repairable antenna.
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There’s no introduction to item crafting.
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There’s no introduction to the proper use of the radar or how to move or zoom it.
Many of these elements I only discovered much later in the game. For example, I didn’t realize until day 49 that I could interact with the radar using WASD and QE.
Also, within the tutorial itself, I took way too long to understand basic concepts like signal calibration. I feel there should be an easier way to explain the system toggles.
PROPOSAL: The tutorial would be much better if it took place in a more open space, like a small training micro-map, with an antenna, a satellite, and an ATV in between. Also, giving the player real tasks would force them to interact 100% with the basic aspects of the game. I know that would break a lot of the tutorial’s secrets, but it’s necessary in order to actually learn how to play, since the game is quite hard to understand.
Satellite calibration:
When I first started, I forgot that I had to calibrate the satellites. This led me to spend most of my money upgrading the download speed of the console. That created several problems:
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Besides losing whole days walking to make reports from Tango to Xray, the console downloaded signals extremely slowly, so I often didn’t reach the daily goal, since a single signal could take 1–2 in-game days to download.
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By failing daily goals, I earned even less money, which went into food, boxes, console upgrades, and saving for the oxygen tank to rescue my ATV.
PROPOSALS:
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Add a more accessible menu in the small computer (the white one in the office) that shows how calibrated the satellites are.
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Add some sort of “meter” in satellite cabins so the player can see the satellite is becoming uncalibrated.
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Make the satellite squeak when it’s uncalibrated, with the noise increasing the worse its condition is.
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Receive Bao emails suggesting that poor results may be because you’re not calibrating satellites at the big computer.
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Put a poster in Alpha or Echo that says “A well-calibrated satellite is a happy satellite.”
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ALL OF THIS TOGETHER.
Events that don’t let you sleep:
I understand the terror of not being able to pause the game when an event is happening, but in many cases it was just annoying:
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When the yellow obelisk dropped to warn me about the wisps, I didn’t go out of fear, but I stayed doing other stuff at the base while waiting for the event to end, and it was already 1 AM in real life and I honestly wanted to go to bed.
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When the Rozital placed magenta lights in the hole I went to check (WITHOUT my ATV) and got attacked, but even then the event didn’t end. I had already been playing 5 hours, but I knew that to end the event I would need to go deeper and kill the aliens, which meant saving up to recover my ATV, buying beers for molotovs, and going there, all while having to go to the bathroom every minute to avoid falling asleep and fainting constantly. In the end I died and lost about a whole in-game day because my last save was an hour before the event started.
PROPOSAL:
Please let us go to sleep. If an event lasts more than 5 minutes, it doesn’t need to keep extending.
Boar Wars:
I’ve had 4 boar wars in total and I’m sick of collecting meat bags and pink crystals. It’s one of the worst events because:
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The whole map gets filled with useless fossils.
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Secrets that require digging get overshadowed by the pink crystals.
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Unrelated events that have presence of meat and blood get overshadowed when the entire map is full of meat.
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It lasts too long.
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It overshadows other spawns on the map edges, since you can’t tell if it’s a genuine duende or just another boar.
PROPOSAL:
Fewer Boar Wars.
The spoiler problem:
I love the game because it works under a creepypasta logic where you need to search online how to access certain rituals and secret elements. However, I think this actually hurts the game itself, since YouTube recommends spoilers and monsters that should be a surprise, so instead of being scared when you encounter them, you already know they’ll eventually show up, and it kills the slow-burn magic the game is aiming for.
PROPOSAL:
Add more narrative clarity about the rituals and secrets already in the game: just provide instructions to access secret content via graffiti, tables, books, and diegetic explanations of how to interact with the world. I feel they’ve spent more time adding content than explaining how to access it, and that undermines the adventure and mystery experience. That leads to more YouTube tutorials, more spoilers, and less magic.
Conclusion:
The game requires much more work in terms of simplifying its systems, polishing existing aspects, and in general, making access to the information it already has easier.
More than adding new mysteries for veteran players, the game would benefit from improving the early experience for beginners so they don’t drop it.
The fact that tutorials and access to information are outside the game and not inside hurts the horror atmosphere.
THERE SHOULD NOT BE A HOLE IN TANGO THAT RUINS YOUR ENTIRE EARLY GAME EXPERIENCE IN A DOMINO EFFECT.
I love this game, i want it to keep growing, and i hope Mr.Dr.Nose actually reads this feedback. My eternal love to all the developers. Ciao <3
