No feedback from anyone else? :(
Well, here's what I can say after giving this a go last evening:
- Wow, this game is slow! And I don't mean that it runs slowly: that's just how the pacing is. Not a criticism, just that I wish I had the time to play such games, and this game is indeed probably not for me :D
- I didn't really understand why I need to grow plants. It seemed like an optional milestone which required a lot of setup; I never made it that far.
- I think I saw this minimalistic, overly manual inventory system plus kinetic minigames in another game, Casualties Unknown? Not sure if it took some inspiration from there or both are inspired by something else.
- I didn't really understand food. I slept a few times without eating anything and concluded that eating is optional... but after eating a can I noticed that not eating seems to affect your walk speed (and thus exploration distance I guess). However, that condition crept up so slowly that I didn't even notice my glacial walking speed was not normal until I tried eating something for the first time.
- It wasn't clear when I needed to eat and when I needed to stop eating. It seems that you can eat as many cans as you want one after the other, but I didn't understand benefits and drawbacks. There seem to be a lot of food cans lying around all over the place.
- Having to turn off your flashlight before sleeping to get a good rest was an interesting discovery. That said, I wasn't even sure what a good rest meant, since the UI doesn't seem to quantify this in any way besides the text message.
- A bug I noticed: there was an X corridor junction where, while the PC was in the square that joins the four corridors, sound effects went through a strong reverb filter. (Playing in Firefox)
- I found a cable and a flat battery and then went around trying to find something to plug it in. The light fixtures (illumination, not growing) seemed to have a protruding metal bit that I tried to tap into to no avail. Couldn't find a way to charge batteries so I guess energy is a finite resource?
In all, I guess my description so far would be "slow and confusing but not in a bad way", maybe I would need to give this some more time to understand all of the mysterious mechanics :)