This is a very interesting game. I really liked the overall atmosphere, and the concept of controlling both characters felt very unique. I think it has a lot of potential.
However, the game felt really slow and sometimes somewhat confusing. The character movement seemed very slow, almost sluggish. The dialogues also seemed drawn-out and often felt like they were there mainly to slow down the gameplay rather than introduce anything substantial. It didn’t help that I didn’t really feel attached to the characters until very late in the game, when they finally started to become more interesting and I began to care about what they were actually saying. The lighthouse was where the story really started to become intriguing, and I’d really like to see some continuation of it in the future.
Like I said earlier, the concept of controlling two characters has a lot of potential, but unfortunately it isn’t used to its fullest here. Instead of being a defining gameplay feature, it mostly became another thing that slowed the game down. Gameplay-wise, it often just meant slowly going to every object with one character and then doing the same with the other, especially because there was no clear indication of which objects each character could interact with.
At first, I also didn’t really understand what was going on. When the alarm rang, I thought we were supposed to run away. I didn’t realize the characters were actually trapped in this place, so I was confused about why they wanted to find the source of the sound. For a large part of the beginning, I felt lost. I know that sometimes, for example in horror-themed games, the feeling of being lost can be intentional, but I don’t think that was entirely the case here. I often felt more lost than the characters themselves. They would say things like “Oh, let’s do that” or “Let’s go there”, but I didn’t know why they wanted to do it, and I just blindly followed what they said. This got better later in the game, once I started to understand what was actually happening.
There were also moments where the characters would say things like “There’s no reason to stop here, there’s nothing interesting here”, only for me to pick up some item elsewhere and then return to the exact same place, and now I could suddenly stop there normally. Also, sometimes I didn’t know if they said that there’s nothing interesting because I wasn’t supposed to stop there or because I was supposed to stop there but hadn’t hit the trigger that would allow me to get out of the car. This made me repeatedly try to stop in spots where I wasn’t supposed to. Maybe adding different dialogue lines when you’re trying to get out in the middle of nowhere and different dialogue lines when you’re trying to get out around a landmark that’s only there for navigation would help.
I also ran into several technical issues and bugs. The area with the long pipe, guitar, and trumpet seemed especially problematic. I had to restart the game a few times there. The first time, I picked up the trumpet and played it, walked around a bit, and played it again - but then Binko got stuck playing it forever and I couldn’t go anywhere. The second time, Binko didn’t bug out, but when I played the trumpet and made Kumira rest, Kumira got stuck in the rest animation and I couldn’t move.
Once, in the area with the painting, I interacted with things (maybe too quickly), and the “[F] Drive” popup stopped appearing near the car, so I couldn’t enter it anymore.
Dialogue speed was also hard for me to adjust properly. Lower settings made the animation extremely slow and dragged everything out. Higher settings made the dialogue animation faster, but caused the text to disappear too quickly once all the letters were shown. After testing it a bit, it seemed like the dialogue speed might be framerate-dependent, which would explain why it felt so slow for me.
I think that some work could also be put into the car controller because it feels a bit off, and maybe touch up some of the interaction areas as well because some of them feel too small requiring you to stand in a very specific spot.
I was also stuck for about 10 minutes in the lighthouse, not knowing what to do. I thought I had searched every corner and ended up loading a save because I thought something broke. After searching again more carefully, I finally found the bag. I think it should be more visible or better highlighted.
On a more positive note, I really liked the idea of the notebook map. It’s also placed in a very good spot. In many games, the map is in a corner, which makes you focus more on the map than the game itself. Here, it’s almost in the center, right below the main view, so I could always see both where I was driving and what was shown on the map.
The world feels interesting to explore and all the spots have nice bits of environmental storytelling, I only think that it would be nice if there was more terrain variation, some hills, some rocks, etc.
Because I was wondering whether I had missed anything or if there were other endings, I did a second playthrough where I explored everything more thoroughly and tried to interact with everything. One place I hadn’t found before was the area with the TVs, water, and the table with animal toys. I really liked all the interactions and dialogue in this place. That was also where Binko asked Kumira whether they played any instruments. I really liked the scene this unlocked later, in the area with the music box and the piano, where Kumira played the piece properly after Binko tried to do it.
I also really liked some of the small touches, like the fact how seamless it feels to go from the main menu to the gameplay and how fast everything loads. It’s also nice how some dialogue lines change depending on what you interact with first.
Overall, the game feels very complete, with a big and interesting world to explore. Given some minor improvements, I would gladly play a continuation of this story.