Conceptually this game is awesome, specifically the narrative that drip feeds Michael's crimes while he progresses through purgatory or his fractured mind or wherever it is that the game takes place, as well as some of the photo-realistic imagery.
However, I suffured three massive pain points that made me go from thoroughly enjoying it to basically being bummed out by the end and walking away with what feels like a negative impression. I hope ACID can mitigate these because in contrast to my frustrations, the plus points — such as innovative menu and language choices and graphics etc. — are all brilliant for a one-person game.
1) The door opening, especially in the dark, is infuriating. The early doors highlight the lock and handles, which serves as a turorial. From then on, every door — and by that I mean the hundred sliding doors which literally make up the entire game — don't, and getting them to open can be so frustrating. I still don't know if the doors don't open until the next area has loaded, or if I am just aiming wrong. This is compounded once you are playing in the dark because you cannot see a thing between carridges, so it is impossible to tell if the game is trying to load up the next area, or if you are simply not pointing at the trigger location.
2) It is possible to be carrying a body part, miss the torso, and head into the final area when the lights go out. This happened on my first run, and after about ten minutes trying to navigate in the dark via glowing orange message boards, I had to alt-tab to shut down the game because even your PDA is inaccessible at this point. It's just clunky and having to restart because of that isn't a cool learning curve, it just leaves a bad taste.
3) The final boss chased me down... cool. But when trying to run past it, I just got stuck on his arm and got spammed until I died. No mercy. I also thought I needed to shoot it in the chest because Emily was shot in the chest, but that seems to have no relevance that I can tell, which is a shame for a game that revolves around the little details. After that, other than seeing the interrogation glass from the other side, the implication is you're basically just expected to try again. For all the slow-burning progress, it was a very unfair conclusion. I know it's a demo, but I was just left staring at the screen for a bit feeling rather miserable. And there is no way after all of that I wanted to do the run again, having just done it one and a half times for very little payoff.
Anyway — ACID — this is a very cool game for a single person and I'm sure you'll have fans lining up once you polish it up. But please do take those points into consideration before a full release or whatever you are going for because if this wasn't a demo, I'd be gutted beyond words. That's just me a I guess. Graphically, it's gorgeous, and the narrative is really unnerving, and I look forward to see where you go with it.