Surface: Reel Life Collector's Edition

After the other 3 of the Surface series I've played, this came as a bit of a disappointment. It's still a fairly good HoG, and I'm still recommending it as such, but there's an undefinable lack of... something... in this one compared to the others. Here's a quick brain-dump of some of my thoughts: - Compared to the others in the series, it seems very linear. Although you sometimes have quite a few items in your inventory, it's usually the case that only one ever does anything at any given time. The other games somehow seem to mask things so that there [i]always[/i] seems to be plenty to do. In GoG, I frequently (i.e. almost the whole time) was road blocked because a single specific task had to be done to proceed. - Seemed like less variation in the activities you do. In Pantheon there was always something new and different turning up. Here it's the same 'Use item A on location B to do C' or generic HoP D. There were one or two nice moments, but overall the whole thing felt decidedly cookie-cutter. - Far less plausible. The premise is no less realistic than the other games. Yet somehow those seemed to obey a general principle of logical cause and effect. Here you can, for insta…