So, I played the game for... close to half an hour? Not a lot of time. But I had a pretty distinct experience. I'm going to open up with the positives.
I LOVE the aesthetic. The pitch-dark city, skittering noises, and general dingy atmosphere contrasting with the bright glow of your cellphone, the nice girl in the konbini that asks for a favor and promises to lock the door behind you if something's chasing you, the glowing phone booths and bus stops that you know you can use... The vibe is immaculate. These sparse little safe areas REALLY amplify the scary moments.
There was a goat in an alley. It bleated. It soothed me.
Plus, the mechanical side intrigues me--using the phone to interact with your inventory, finding prayers and pulses, the signal bar telling you when you're close to a demon...
However, I also want to discuss the negatives.
Firstly... there's no guidance. Moira gave me a mission to find hints in posters to use to assemble a code for a particular entrance to the sewers, simple enough. I actually found the entrance, but as you can guess, I had absolutely no idea what the code was. I hadn't found even a *single* of the aforementioned posters. The only ones I'd found were posters about medical supplies, and missing persons posters (the person depicted looks oddly like Moira. I'm intrigued.), so I made no headway after a long time to wandering. So I guess it's less "no guidance" and more "oh god help is this even doable".
You're meant to use landmarks to navigate, but that is currently *very* difficult due to the very large amount of empty space. Not even just, the huge parking lots and alleys to nowhere, though they don't help; there is just very few things that do stuff. I found some tentpole demons, lizardboys in a garbage dump or a parking lot that weren't an issue to stroll away from, an aggressive white van, and besides that and some garbage dumpsters-and-cans to get procedural loot from, there wasn't much to latch on to besides the façade of a large glowing casino, uh... which I can't interact with.
I feel like the game experience is hurt by it being a roguelike, or at least procedurally-generated. Maybe this isn't the norm, and I just got bad worldgen; either way, I ended up replete with healing items with no enemies around, and in love with the story quest presented to me but with no way to interact to it. No guarantee that the posters had even spawned, either. I felt frustrated and bored; things that, IMO, are the worst thing a horror game can do. It doesn't need to be constant high-octane scares--if anything, that would hurt it even more--but it'd be helpful if things happened more often.
Tighter environments, more rigorous spawning of quest objectives, more present threats... maybe some environmental effects, like fog rolling in to constrict your vision, or a thunderstorm in the distance periodically lighting up the environment and making your phone malfunction, maybe even a monster that, instead of attacking, follows and distracts you and tries to avoid your line of sight... I'm backseat deving at this point, but I love horror games, so unfortunately I can't help myself; I feel like intermittent events like that whenever the game can tell nothing is happening would help the horror atmosphere, and may allow for more items to be added, and bring variety to the item pool... uh, if they stay procedural.
(What's the deal with the rabbit dolls? I can't equip them.)
Incidentally, how does running work? When I hold shift, I hear a flap but my speed doesn't change; when I let go, I slow down momentarily and go back to walking. It's weird.
I see a lot of potential. A lot of cool things, a game I wanna play the heck out of when it's finished. I'm critical because I want it to be the best it can be when it comes out. But I feel like the procgen is the thing holding it back the most at the moment, and I can't tell whether it's clumsy procgen, or procgen at all. (At least, I *think* it's procgenned--the city doesn't feel handcrafted in my brief run.)
Uh, also, thank you. Like, genuinely. Thank you for thinking of a weird horror game, and then making that weird horror game. It's my favourite thing, when people do that.