This is extremely mediocre. So much so, that I had to write this out. This is almost a 5-year old game now and I don't know if this will be read by the dev, but I did it anyway.

Graphics

The foliage looks good from the balcony and the facility that you are teleported to at the end has a nice aesthetic. This is the only praise I can give to this thing.

First of all, it looks bad: there is almost no sading, no anti-aliasing, z-fighting occurs in a few places. There is too much bloom - the couch and the carpet in the starting room, for example, are practically glowing. The in-door plants have a very weird misaligned texture with black parts, which I think are supposed to be on the bottom of the leaves to mimic shading. The furniture in the house is very inconsistent: in the same room you can see a solid colored cube, an extremely smooth lamp, couches consisting of beveled cubes (with flat shading!) and the same detailed table which you have have seen in every single other room, just scaled differently this time. The doctor model is much more detailed than any other object in the game, so it looks really out of place. And the pool looks bad.

The Gameplay

This game is advertised as a "3D first person puzzle game". While it is in fact 3D and first person, this can hardly be considered a puzzle, or even a game.

The only things you can do in this game is walk, look around, pick up newspapers and activate objects.

The controls are just unpolished enough to be a little annoying, but not unbearable. The game certainly uses the default Unity Character Controller as walking emits the annoying default step sound, and looking around feels somewhat patchy. Also, when you let go of the movement keys the character will continue moving until the next step sound plays, which i guess is kinda realistic, but it is definitely not good for gamefeel. There is a sprint button, but the speed up is so little and the distances so small that it is entirely unnecessary and should have been disabled in favour of just increasing the movement speed.

Now, for the puzzle part, the only puzzle in this game is to activate 4 objects in the right order, with newspapers as clues. This could be an enjoyable puzzle, but the execution here is so simple that it can not be interesting even in theory. Most time is spent walking around until you find all the interactable objects and realise what you have to do at all.

Launching the game shows the text "2020" on a black screen and puts you into the game immediately. There is no main menu, no pause screen and no settings. While this is not bad by itself, having some sort of an options menu is certainly desirable.

You start in a room with a newspaper in front of you. You walk over to it, trying not to get stuck in the couches and interact with it. The newspapers all show a unique central headline and picture, but everything around it is the same for all of them. All text except for the headlines is just random parts of word strung together, not providing any information about the world at all. You then walk around looking for other newspapers. At one point you may stumble upon an interactable object which is not a newspaper. There are 4 of them: the telescope, the globe, the fusebox and the gramophone. You must interact with them in the order you get from the newspapers (the object in the picture should be activated according to the number in the headline). However, the game does not even let you input the wrong sequence! If you press an object out of order the game will command you to "Activate objects in the right order." in red letters on the bottom of the screen with a buzzing noise. And, pressing 'H' brings out a help menu, which tells just straight up tells you to look in the headlines and that "order matters", which makes the puzzle even more braindead than it is by itself.

Oh, and did I mention that while walking around the same loop of classical piano music plays over and over, becoming overwhelming more grading over time, while adding extreme levels of pretentiousness? Well, luckily, the music stops when once solve the "puzzle".

After finishing the sequence, you go back to the ladder and suddenly a cutscene plays of a realistic surgeon walking on the balcony. You then follow him to a newly opened staircase, which ends in a door that opens when you come close to it, but it does it so slowly that the first time I bumped into it and thought it was a wall, and so I turned around and went for another circle around the house. The door opens into a tiny room, which will teleport you to a weird tech facility, and after walking through two other sets of very slowly opening doors you come into a room separated in half by a transparent black plane. On the other side there are tens of the same surgeon models standing in A-poses, one of whom has red clothes for some reason (maybe he's the boss?). Then suddenly a voice says roughly this:

"Something something experiment. You are probably thinking "What are we doing here?" Don't worry about that. You will not remember this."

Fade to black.

Credits.

The game than asks you if you would like to quit or replay. Like hell would anyone want to play this twice.

"Plot"

I saw people in the comments praising the game as intriguing and for having a shocking ending. The ending really is shocking, because of how there is no story before it! The newspaper headlines that supposedly should have contained clues about the story are not at all connected with each other and do not form a cohesive thing. I think that the doctors are supposed to represent that the 2020 lockdown was a big experiment that was not noticed by the public? While there may be some message here, it only exists in the ending monologue and is not connected with the puzzle and the environment at all, there is no world here.

All in all, this game is so amateurish that I was getting second-hand embarrassment while playing this, I cannot imagine how it got 3rd place in game jam. This game could not taken a whole week to make, especially when you consider just what people do in 2 days for other jams.

Looks cool!