This was one of the first games that started killing my faith in Kickstarter. It seemed like every blogger and podcaster was promoting it and I bought a ticket for the hype train without knowing what I was really getting myself into.
The studio seemed more interested in the idea of making a game than actually making it. All they wanted to talk about was how great their Kickstarter was going and all the apparently important people that had backed it and all the voice talent they'd recruited.
The whole experience of this game was as shallow as a shower.
Like many here, I backed the Kickstarter - mainly riding the wave of goodwill and the PR push the game had to get across the finish line. When the first episode finally came out for PC I had lost all interest, mainly due to the total lack of indifference the game had been getting to that point. I wasn't outright upset that I had spent $15, but it was definitely one of the projects that has lead me to very very rarely back a crowd funded project.
So, imagine my surprise when my fiance got me the game for PS4 as a gift a couple of weeks ago. She'd somehow heard about it, looked into it and saw the Metal Gear connection and picked it up for me knowing I loved that series. Feeling I owed her the effort of giving the game I go, I sat down to start playing it earlier this week and just finished Episode 5 a half hour ago.
From reading this thread, I feel like it definitely does flow a bit better having each episode played back to back. For instance, in Episode 4
it's extremely obvious that you are playing a more simplistic clone of Hope, as the on screen indicator only lists '390' for the character's location instead of the standard 390-H, and the 'passport' info for the character is entirely blank, ect. There are lots of clues that this is a 'base' model of Hope, and not the same character. Totally see how that could be missed if there were several months between playing Ep 3 and Ep 4.
But that can't hide the fact that so much of the story is told in collectibles and audio recordings.
And it's amazing how POORLY those audio recordings were implemented. I started to listen to just ONE of the Zager tapes, quickly realized I had to sit still to listen to it and exited out. I then realized that if I wanted to listen to those tapes at all I had to be in a certain room in the first place. So not only do you need to find the hidden collectibles in the first place, but then you have to be in a certain space to even listen to what you've found. In the end, I never listened to a single tape, audio log, or whatever all the way through.
Meaning, I had a pretty loose handled on just what was going on. Which wouldn't have been the end of the world if the game itself was enjoyable to play. Here though, is an issue I imagine only comes about because of the PS4 version giving you direct control of the character. Basically, the stealth is stupidly simple when you have control of the character. Which made getting through the environments to the next story beat feel super tedious, not tense. Instead of feeling like I was outsmarting guards, it was just a matter of patience. By the end of Episode 3 I almost gave up as the game seemed to just be artificially extending the game by putting each objective on opposite ends of the map.
The only real high point was Episode 4 - as the change from multiple enemies into the one larger enemy, and making the story beats part of the scanning functionality, along with a engaging episode contained story of the doctors, and I was thinking maybe the team had finally gotten a handle on things and that Episode 5 was going to be amazing.
And the answer to that is no. Episode 5 is a bunch of backtracking through previously visited environments with most of the paths blocked, with minimal interaction leading to a series of sequences that make zero sense (seriously that 'space' section? What. The. Fuck.) and ending with a non-choice that just defeats any of the character development that happens.
I don't consider the experience a complete waste, Episode 4 was really fun, and Episode 1 at least had some neat ideas going on... it's just that nothing every really gelled. I can't even imagine how disjointed the game must have seemed with years in between episodes.
