I'll give the game a rating of 5/5 in the actual vote that affects the rating of the game, considering that I think this is a wonderful game and that it deserves such a vote. However, I will voice my opinions and rate the review as how I rate my personal experience playing this game. Please don't let it get to you, I think this is still a fantastic game.
The problem I have with this game is that the creator of this game went too far in not guiding the player. There is a clear line between "making the player choose through action and not choose through guidance" and "confusing the hell out of them to the point that they no longer feel like they're choosing, but trying to understand the programming of the game because they aren't getting enough feedback for their actions" Let me explain more clearly what I mean by this disconnect.
This happened to me particularly after the point where the protagonist reaches the tower. The confusion only begins once I reach the tower. At the very start I had made a point to take all of the weapons/gifts supplied to me, but not use these weapons unless it was absolutely 100% unavoidable, like some sort of trap where the only way to save yourself is to use your weapons. That never came up xD. The confusion started like this:
The left elevator leading up was notably confusing to me and felt like I was missing some kind of key event that would allow my character to resist programming or something, so I tried very hard to get up there without success. Furthermore, I had no idea what happened when I received the 'antichrist' sort of key when I picked it up, and in fact I thought it was going to teleport me to Gomadi. When instead Gomadi commanded me to go down and kill him, I thought suddenly I had done something that he wanted all along and that now the game flagged me as 'Gomadi puppet'. This feeling cemented more as I tried to use the far left and far right doors out of the tower, which did not open.
Once I reached the abyss and mysteriously got the halo, that's where everything sort of fell apart. I had NO idea what the hell this halo thing was, and I thought that I had glitched the game into thinking that I had obeyed every bit of Gomadi's commands or something and that now I was his puppet. After sparing Tanar even though I tried to kill him 'for the hell of it' now that I thought I broke the game ((Later I found out that happened because I waited too long to kill him, I was goofing around with the strange dual wires in the middle of the room)), I was further confused with what happened to Tanar when he just like, sunk into the abyss. While I listened to Tanar explain his reasoning for giving the protagonist sentience, I wanted to try and help him to a better path than to banish him as punishment or outright kill him, but I guess there's only so much you can do.
So, to recap what i've said so far: With no feedback with what the upsidedown cross was and what the red halo was specifically, I was confused as to what path my character had been thrown into. Then, when I appeared back up on the surface with nothing visibly changed, I of course tried to NOT leave the tower and instead travel up a bit to see if something would happen. In particular, I tried to take the left elevator, again, to see if something was now accessible. The left hadn't changed, and the right didn't have the white voice yell at me. Since I didn't kill Tanar (Which I did later to figure out wtf was going on), I didn't actually know whether or not Gamodi was up the tower. I admit, my impatience is what lead me to not go ALL THE WAY up the tower to find out that there is not an elevator leading to Gamodi instead of the recepticle for the antichrist key, but the lack of feedback from the game contributed to this too.
So, thinking there might be more choices to make once I leave the tower, like to find where Gamodi is, I leave. Then, suddenly I was flagged as submitting to Gamodi, when really I was just taking the only choice I thought I had which happened to coincide with Gamodi's command, similarly to 'not killing' which I didn't disobey since it coincided with what I believed.
Great game overall and I give it a solid 5/5 for the purpose of rating it as a game as a whole, but as a review I decreased its rating due to the frustration I had with the game in trying to understand why I went to get that antichrist key, and what the hell that halo was. The funniest part is when I deliberately attacked a spider, but didn't kill it, to get the 'disobey' achievement and went down to Tanar to kill him, only to find that all of the halos turned into guns and that I literally couldn't kill tanar with a gun no matter how hard I tried.
So weird. But, I figured it out by the end. Really I'm just one voice out of many, so my opinion doesn't mean much in the end ^^ Great game regardless. 5/5 rating 3/5 review.
