tl;dr
Game's alright. Worth the time it takes to beat
Go play it.
As for the game?
(minus some QOL problems with the camera, though those seem to be engine issues)
It's a pretty good representation of the era, I think.
I've been working actively with the source engine for the past decade and I get the impression the developer is at the very least reasonably familiar with it as well, or did some proper research into it. Respectable either way.
The game itself is not really something to start writing video essays about, but I get the impression its more of a love letter to the era and the technology than an artistic statement anyway.
It really was fun to see all these nowadays simple things from the old perspective again and remember the era where every aspect of these game world simulations was doing major leaps almost every month. Not to discredit modern developers and the technology they're pushing forward but the big leaps have definitely slowed down.
The format in which the story is delivered though? I've never seen it done this way before. To the point where it actually took me a second to realize this was fiction lmao. It's genuinely excellent and a wonderful twist on the genre of narrator games (or whatever you would call things like The Stanley Parable).
The pacing is also pretty good, the game ends before you even get the opportunity to get tired of the walking from node to node cycle and the information within is interesting enough to keep most people hooked. (I of course am incredibly biased in this as I will find any kind of technical rambling about these kinds of things incredibly interesting.)
I'm personally wondering if there's more things that could be done with this, though I fear the novelty would wear off quickly.