INFRA is an easy recommend to anyone who enjoys adventure games; it's not without its flaws, but overall it is one of the more enjoyable adventure game experiences I've had. It's a winner. First and foremost, it's absolutely effing huge. I was expecting a short, atmospheric piece like Firewatch, and about eight hours in I started to realize I was in for a much longer haul and a much different experience. I'm writing this review just after completing two of the (apparently) three endings, with 36 out of 74 achievements, at 36 hours spent. And no matter what anyone else says: sweet fancy Moses, INFRA is not a walking simulator. A game is not a walking simulator simply because it has no combat. There is so much to do here that is not walking. INFRA reminds me a lot of Dishonored or Stray in that these are also UrbEx games featuring an extrahuman protagonist, but here your superpowers are an engineering degree and the right to open doors marked "Authorized Personnel Only." That will sound boring to some people, perhaps, but if it sounds as exciting to you as it does to me, do not sleep on INFRA. Snap it up. The game really succeeds at immersing the player in its world; Stalburg has a healthy dose of Terry Gilliam absurdism, but it feels real in a way that a lot of more interactive and populated environments don't. I think this has a lot to do with how the player is expected to engage with the city. You do a lot of touching and installing and inspecting, and at the end of the day you develop a feeling of responsibility for this place that I'm not sure a game has ever given me before. There are no enemies or monsters to distract you; it is just you and the environment, even when the action gets frantic. The environments are mostly linear, at least through the first two acts, but many of them offer multiple options for progression. I know there are areas in some of the chapters that I never found a way into or that I never came to understand the purpose of. There is a lot of replayability here. The protagonist, Mark, is now a fast favorite of mine. The first time you hear his voice acting, you will cringe, but it grows on you. He's got this laconic delivery reminiscent of Peter Stormare and a dry wit that just perfectly captures the character's unflappable competence. There are no one-liners and no banter here, just a remarkably capable dude left to himself in some lonely places, who is perhaps rightly impressed with himself. I wish that the photos you take and the papers you document over the course of the game were accessible to the player in some way after taking them, so that there was a log of the player's journey. That would have been nice, but there is also something to be said for the game's minimalist interface; there are no menus of any kind to take you out of the world. A studio being able to achieve that is something special. On occasion you may find yourself wishing for an inventory, but the game never really suffers for the absence of one. If I have any complaints, they are these: - Reading hand- and typewritten notes in varying degrees of darkness and gloom is perhaps not the most engaging game mechanic I've ever experienced. I found a lot of documents I could not actually understand. - Ugh, early Source engine ladder climbing. There are a lot of ladders in this game, St. Benedict preserve us. - Many sequences overstay their welcomes. There's a piece of graffiti you'll see a few times throughout the game that says "Hallway Simulator 2016," which would feel like self-deprecating humor if it were not so on the nose. Long tunnels devoid of content are expected in a game like this, but INFRA still manages to have what feels like too many. If i'm being fair, I think this is a side effect of how "real" some of the levels are. This is not a game that toys with perception, perspective, and hidden teleportation -- you get the distinct impression that this level design is excruciatingly honest. - When the game ratchets up the action, many of these scenarios seem like they would be impossible to resolve on a first attempt without a healthy dose of luck. A ceiling will collapse in a particular way over time, for example, requiring the player to move at intervals to remain safe, but with no way to know the safe zones other than trial and error. I wouldn't go so far as to call these rage-game mechanics, but they belong to the same family. Fortunately the action-man stuff is pretty limited, although the game does end with a big example. - Sadly, the game does lose a lot of polish in Act III, when the environments switch from almost exclusively linear to a more open-world design. Some really tight puzzle concepts in the early game give way to a lot of frustrating searching for small hidden objects, repetitive movement, and conflicting feelings that you are both missing a lot of content and desperate to move on to the next area. There's a lot of exasperating confusion over what the game wants you to do next. It rarely stumped me for long, but I don't have a lot of patience for puzzles that are difficult to execute after the solution has been found, and Act III has a bunch of these. Still, the feeling of accomplishment and responsibility that the game gave me through Act II was enough to carry me through Act III pretty quickly, and I don't think an indie game of INFRA's high caliber should suffer for a bit of a rush to the close.
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