Compelling gameplay, overall I quite like it, but... frustrating... Specifically, my issues are:
1. The teammate abilities take waaay too long to recharge. The green teammate's ability to open and close doors is crucial for navigating the world, but they can only store two charges at once (busting through two rooms, or unlocking a door to double-check a sealed room's contents and then re-sealing it), and they take something like 30 seconds to recharge one charge at a time. My ability to clear the biomass is limited by my ability to open doors, until all of them are open.
2. On the other hand, the other abilities are sort of lackluster... The biomass scanner is vague. I understand what it does- it updates the "contamination status" of the room you're in, and the (up to) 8 adjacent rooms. Unfortunately, what actually makes a room "contaminated" is frustratingly unclear- it certainly isn't visible biomass presence, nor is it exactly "visible biomass in this room or any adjacent room" i.e. some safety margin. It is hard to tell what it is, which makes it effectively useless! The grenade, although it seems fun, isn't nearly as powerful as it could be, it isn't strong enough to make it usable in comparison to just rushing in and swinging the flamethrower around in a circle (which clears a larger-radius circle than the grenade) and, of course, that long recharge time...
3. Sometimes it appears as if biomass spawns out of nothing in a room I already cleared? You can mostly track the "source" of a wave of biomass if it hasn't already hit a wall, because it spreads outwards in all directions evenly, steadily. Sometimes when sweeping through rooms I haven't touched in a while (because I thoroughly cleaned them) I'll find what I call an "orphan source", which is a small- or medium-sized circular patch of biomass with a pod in the middle. If it were larger I'd be able to accept I'm perhaps sloppy and left a single pixel of biomass behind, but its size implies it's younger than the last time I was even in the room... Hence orphan source, spawned out of nothing.
4. The "escape" room is a real room with real biomass in it, but I can't touch it without ending the level!!! This means I can't actually sweep the entire level and clean out the entirety of the biomass, I can only keep that one room at bay, while emptying the rest of the level.
5. In a similar vein, a sealed door does NOT block biomass-spread, but DOES block my movement, which means, counterintuitively, that a sealed door is less certain to clean than an open doorway, as with an open doorway I can blast both sides with fire in rapid succession to confirm the biomass is dead on both sides, but a sealed door could be harboring biomass on either side, or in a nebulous middle region the camera's zooming between set target points does not allow you to ever permanently see (this is conjecture).
6. The guys! The guys!! They can't follow me!!! They get stuck on walls if I'm not paying enough attention! And then there is no sound alert while they're being hurt so I won't notice until they're dead... meaning I've lost one of my abilities! It's okay if it's the grenadier or the biomass scanner dude, but if door guy dies, the game actually becomes effectively unplayable (you cannot open doors)
7. The rescue operations, I'm confused on how they work. I've found one guy once before, but I couldn't figure out how to interact with him to make him follow me to the exit or something, and with the biomass encroaching on all sides, I didn't have time to thoroughly experiment. I didn't find anyone else (of the three I was supposed to find) so I assume they died to the biomass. I also returned to the room later and the guy I'd found was gone, and the marker at the top still reported 0/3 so I think he died too lol
To be clear, I really like this game. It's just that, when playing it, it FEELS like the feeling isn't mutual, if that makes sense. The game has a certain disdain for me.
If I had control of the game's development, the changes I'd make would be speeding up the recharge rates (maybe removing them entirely? They're limited enough by your ability to move between rooms, and the lives of your teammates), making the characters more cleverly pathfind the player when they're in different rooms (which is to say, move to an open door rather than trying to go directly towards the player i.e. running into a wall until you die), figuring out why biomass occasionally seems to spawn afresh from nowhere, making sealed doors prevent biomass growth between rooms (also preventing flamethrower fire from killing biomass THROUGH a door?), making the biomass scanner naively report binary whether/not there is biomass in the room (making it clearer what it does and more useful to the player), maybe adding new biomass formations that are more actively hostile to the player (something that shoots projectiles perhaps) to make it altogether harder to sweep a room completely clean.
