Interregnum Chronicles: Signal

First advice: Read the game description closely :)

This plays like a "walking" simulator inside a satellite called "Harmony" that accommodates one person, so you're floating in microgravity with ways to grab onto things and push yourself around. The core of the game is to tweak signal processing using human interfacing terminals, and that mysterious signal of unknown origin and requires decoding to find out what it is/says/does. At first the system doesn't have the capacity to process the entire signal so an Operator (you) needs to approve lots of AI upgrades. See where this is going?

The progress is in the terminals and what goes on is a bit like an idler with the goal to farm signal data efficiently. There is a dominating story plot that unravels through messages and intercepted transmissions from Earth and it does a good job at giving the idler gameplay a narrative/meaning. There's an addictive aspect to floating through the different modules of the lonesome space station and getting that big amount of signal data analyzed, compressed and stored.

So on to the major thing I like about this: the station itself, its interiors, the visual design, the sounds and the small details that makes it all worthwhile. I sunk over 20 hours into this and it might sound like a grind but really this game lets you stretch the playtime so if you're bored IRL you can stick around and process more data even though you could have progressed through AI upgrades and story bits hours ago.

So yeah, Spacewalkers (devs), make more Interregnum Chronicles games please.

You charge batteries in a neat looking space ship. I charged 4 batteries and opened 372 doors. I threw a toolbox and read a 30 something page book. The computer AI talks about stuff the entire time, I don't know what she's saying.

I don't know how to play and am too motion sick to continue. Majority of the time is spent opening doors. They take forever to open. It's a good door opening game for people that like charging batteries while stuff beeps at you. The overall appearance is the best attribute. It might be one of the top 20 walking simulators that don't allow walking.

So I have played this game a fair bit and tried to "get into it" but honestly, it's pretty awful. I'm writing this review with steam saying that I have had 11 hours playtime, but really it's more like 5 or 6 because I would leave the game on to "idle" in order to farm the necessary resources to progress the story.

And that is pretty much the game in a nutshell. Leaving it running to obtain an ever increasing targeted number of resources that are basically just numbers on one of several terminal screen's. There are Networking, Data Processing and Memory "resources" that you need to increase in order to upgrade the stations AI and each resource is tied to the others with glass ceilings that you need to break by obtaining more of one of the other resources. There are ways to expedite the process such as using up to 4 batteries on a terminal but honestly, that just gets annoying. The batteries will explode if you overcharge them (or at least damage the stations electrics) and when you do use them they don't last long at all. I haven't timed them but I would be shocked if they actually last more than a minute or two at most. When you do have to recharge them as well, you can only carry one at a time and so you have to take each one from where you need it back to the garden where the charging ports are. Obviously you can't plug one in and leave it charging whilst you fetch another as it will likely overcharge and short out the electrics so you end up floating along carrying one for a 2nd, dropping it to pick up another, dropping it to pick up a 3rd and so on until you get them where you need to go. Obviously you are in space with no gravity and so they drift.... a lot. Yeah, lets just say that gets old. Fast.

The resource mining appears to be the "game" aspect of the game, but rather than including interesting puzzles or at least something a little bit puzzling, you basically just have to click icons when they are ready and balance out how fast they light up by clicking other icons. Now I could explain exactly what to do, but since this is the only aspect of actual game play involved in the game I figure it best to leave it as basic as possible on the off chance that someone reads this and still wants to play it, so they can experience the wonders of clicking boxing for themselves. And with both of those points being made, you can probably see now why I ended up just leaving the resources to gain by themselves on the slowest settings whilst I went off and washed the dishes or watched a movie, because riveting this game is not.

On a positive note though, the station is nice to look at. The graphics are decent enough and at first the station does feel almost "real". That feeling doesn't really last though as it is deceptively small, though confusing to navigate due to the 4 dimensional nature of having no gravity. On that note, the fact that they have not included any sort of map is a little bit bizarre because at first it does just frustrate you not knowing where you need to go. At one point the power went out and I needed to find "electrical", but there are no sign posts for "electrical" at all and so I was just frustratingly floating around looking for a door I might have missed that did not exist. It turns out "electrical" is in one of the other rooms and so is not signposted anywhere except for inside that room. This is extra frustrating as all of the other rooms use the garden as a sort of "hub" and are clearly signposted in there. I can't work out if this is a developer oversight, a meanspirited way to frustrate players or just plain stupidity but it is definitely enough of an annoyance to be noted here.

So i've mentioned the bad puzzles (If they can be called that), the maddening lack of a map, and the nice enough graphics and now I am really struggling to really think of anything else that this game has going for it either positive or negative.... honestly there really isn't anything either way. It has a story, sure, but the story is pretty bland and delivered in the laziest way possible - via e-mails. After a while you find yourself skimming over some of them too, because it's not even that good of a story. No spoilers, but it's just a generic "AI in space" story that doesn't really break any boundaries and seems lazily put together. You get e-mails from Earth which key you in to events as they are happening in relation to what you are doing, but again it is bland, uninspired and pretty forgettable. You can only read so many lines of text before it just starts to be read but not processed and this "game" really struggles there. What baffles me is that they have a number of screens around the station, including one that appears to be a 24/7 news type channel that only ever says "Please stand by" with yet more text on a ticker at the bottom. They could have added so much flavour to the story by having the events on Earth told to you via that News channel, but instead you just get e-mails. And even then, bland e-mails. No attachments. No pictures. Nothing.

So yeah, honestly i can't recommend this to anyone. I can't even recommend this as a game in all honestly, because it feels more like a tech demo or some sort of crypto-mining sim where you are the GPU, just endlessly crunching numbers by checking boxes. It's not even the fact that this is a walking sim either. I like walking sims. I have played nothing but walking sims lately, all space themed, and I enjoy that style of storytelling. This just isn't enjoyable though. I didn't buy my pc to leave it running whilst I do other things, but this game just doesn't have any actual content to make you want to do anything other than walk away and do something else. Most walking sims that I play are indy-developed games too, and they are head and shoulders over this one. It genuinely feels to me like this developer had an interesting idea, made a level, got bored and then just threw the rest together so they can charge money for it. It just feels soul-less.

So yeah, i finished it so I could shut up that nagging voice at the back of the mind telling me "you should really give it a chance". I gave it a chance. It doesn't really deserve it. Apparently there is a 2nd "good" ending (I got the bad one lol) but this game doesn't inspire me to replay it at all.

If you got through this review and are still on the fence about whether to buy it or not, I urge you to choose not. Buy Observation, ADR1FT, Tacoma, Event[0}, The Station, or one of the many other walking/floating sims in this genre. They are all games that are fun to play with good stories that are worth the money. This just isn't and it doesn't even come close.