Helium

[h1] Very confusing exploration game with a little bit of shooting. Bland with poorly made levels - just skip it. [/h1]

This might be one of the most boring things I've ever installed on a computer. It is so bad, I don't think the dev ever played it themselves. I'd just speedrun it but sprinting only gives something like 20% speed boost and you can only sprint for 2 seconds, and the levels are too boring to just stand it until you find a gun

Got this in a Fanatical (Bundlestars) bundle years ago and finally redeemed it. The first part of the game is a slow-moving walking sim which isn't reflected in the game's tags. After the initial customary tutorial showing you WASD, jump, run prompts, you're thrown into a large alien world where you just walk. And walk. And walk. You're forced to drop down where fall damage hurts you but are not given any healing. Dying sends you back to the last checkpoint which can be a lengthy walk from where you died. If the developers are trying to evoke a stark desolate world, they could have done so without such a needlessly drawn out opening. Whatever story they're trying to tell, that seems loosely inspired by Stanisław Lem's Solaris, is seemingly wasted because of just bad pacing. There is a difference between boring your players and creating a suspenseful sense of desolation. I want the last 15 minutes of my life back.

In 30 years of games I would say this is the wierdest. It's almost feels like a straight A dev in college had to cram an all nighter to make a game for his finals and he forgot to do it. I say that because the concept is fun, the gameplay is smooth and the terrain is ok. If it has a story, then its hidden as hell. I had no idea who I was, why I was there, and what I was doing...It feels like its a good base for a game, but never was "finished". You have JUST enough ammo, enemies are kinda cool, and the feel of the gun is decent. Lots of walking, but enough to look at. Has a HL1 feel...yeah thats its, its a HL1 DLC if that was ever to exist. MAYBE its worth $0.99. I say that because you WILL get 1 dollar worth of entertainment over it...but theres NO WAY this is on ANYONES wishlist...

I love indie games. I can put up with a little jank. Jank CAN be charming. Not here. This game felt like a school project and not an actual well thought out game. Items you need to progress sometime just wont load. You won't know that there's supposed to be an item there, because the game gives you so little in the way of directions, or functional quality of life stuff. So you'll have to exit the game, and reload, you'll then see the items fall from the sky onto the ground, as well as all of your scenery. This game is wholly unpolished, poorly thought out, badly executed. It truly had no redeeming quality's.

Controller support is a lie - yes almost everything works, but you can't fire your gun! That single example pretty much tells the whole story - for the (probably) hundreds of hours the dev put into this, it's all wasted because they didn't spend a single hour genuinely playtesting with naïve players. There's so much more that's broken about this game, but even if those small issues were fixed the gunplay is really boring, basically walk backwards and hold down fire. So maybe all those broken bits don't matter that much in the end. BUT, I suspect a few more hours of tweaks and it could have been fun, or at least playable. As is, 99 cents is overpriced.