Muzman on 3/1/2014 at 08:43

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I powered through this over my time off and it took most of it!
It's pretty cool once you get the hang of it. It feels like it's a real job getting around, even towards the end when you're relatively buff again, which I actually liked. That'd probably frustrate a lot of people.
I don't think I quite figured out the story for all that (I thought for a moment it was going to pull a "It was you!" twist, but it didn't luckily). I must have missed a couple of key pages as finding the last plant I needed was a real chore (and it's bloody hard to find even if you look those pages up on the net!).

I managed to get quite good at dealing with the beast most of the time, but that skill is mostly running the hell away, particularly up steep slopes, and not falling off a cliff.
It's a little bit like Amnesia in that you kinda know bad things are going to show up right at that spot where you need something. But it's kinda random on top of that (afaik it'll turn up in a given region and then roam freely. It's not scripted to corner you or be near you) This is very good for tension, I find. Which is what the game is about more than fear.
The beast itself has come in for a lot of criticism, mostly for the way it looks. I don't know if that's entirely fair. Sure it's a little weird. But I think the problem is mainly it's just a big cat really. We don't find them particularly scary anymore. More awesome. The thing is, if you were stuck in the jungle with one hunting you - you a tasty morsel rendered terribly slow by disease - you would be pissing your pants. You should be running away anyway, not looking. You haven't got time to look. And the sound of it crashing through the bush after you is memorable enough.

So, cool game. I always wonder if you could make it even more hardcore and still manageable though. If you had to have food and warmth, if camp sites weren't essentially safe at night. I guess kinda Don't Starve made in Cryengine. These guys didn't go there probably because they didn't want to overwhelm themselves with mechanics that could go wrong. But I do wonder at the potential.