Breathedge
Breathedge is a confusing mess of mechanics that could have been brilliant, but ends up being frustrating and tedious. It has the potential to be 5/5 but ends up more like 2/5 the further you get. The atmosphere is ruined by the suit AI, delivering voice lines at the speed of a "terms and conditions apply" small text in an American radio advert. Tool durability is so low you spent most of your time gathering resources to make more tools. Oxygen is always running out. After 15 hours I decided I'd wasted enough time trying to enjoy it and just gave up. If you do decide to give it a go, I'd recommend turning off the voice entirely, and finding some kind of cheat system to remove durability.
Pros
- The background music is really nice, until you realise it's only 20 seconds long and plays on a loop for the entire game
- Really pretty. You just never get enough time to look at it because the oxygen's always running out
- The progression is good, or at least it would be if it wasn't one step forwards two steps back all the time because the tool durability is so low
Cons
- Looks like they didn't pay attention to all the feedback saying the suit AI narration was too fast. I cannot state this enough - the speed that the suit AI talks at completely ruins the game. I can't understand what it's saying because it talks so fast. It sounds like one of those American 'terms and conditions apply' at the end of a radio advert, and it's used for literally everything in the game, from interesting information to important quests. Maybe it's meant to be funny but it's just irritating and makes it hard to understand what's going on
- Seems like it would be pretty easy to run out of non-renewable resources and have to restart the game after a dozen hours
- The oxygen tanks are too small, even fully upgraded
- The attempts at humour mostly fall flat and are just immersion breaking. One of the early quests is called "Build some crap imposed by the developers" and they make multiple references to being an indie dev team artificually extending gameplay
- It took me 2 hours to discover there was storage on the shuttle and I didn't just have to dump everything on the floor
- Oxygen depletes while the menu is open
- Resources aren't renewable
- Not enough storage space
- Tool durability is so low that you have to remake them after every 5 uses. And it takes 3 uses to gather enough materials to make a new tool. Carrying two at a time sometimes helps, but then you have no inventory space left
- Ultrawidescreen doesn't work properly, it's just zoomed in
- There are only 4 action hotkeys, and a dozen tools to use. I'm not playing on console, give me more buttons
- It's possible to miss several achivements and not be able to get them later
- I can't tell whether the bad translation is actually bad, or deliberately bad because it's meant to be funny
- There are so many map icons that it's sometimes hard to see where you're going - and you can't even place your own markers
- You can't lookup recipes for crafting when you're not at the station
- It took 7 hours before the story started at all