Aberration Analyst

A small fun game but it could use some refinement and expansion. Currently there isn't really that much difference between the professions besides the specialists (who cost a lot more). I'd say if the developer wants to expand the concept they should focus on the hunt (gathering info and more importantly different kinds of info, trying to keep your employees safe from varied smaller encounters that test your team's defensive capabilities) and the actual final confrontation with the target (which could be expanded into an actual battle or at least something where you have to manage collateral). As it is right now the hunt is 90% of the game and it's mostly reading random reports and the final confrontation is just a bring specialist guessing game to instantly win.

This is a really unique and fun game. It's games like these that I look forward to over AAA titles. It's creativity like this that makes games fun, and aberration analyst provides variety in the video game world and is truly a work of art!

This is a good game, but it's very unrepentently opaque. Personally, that doesn't bother me, but this game is on the extreme side of not holding your hand. I can understand where the developer is likely coming from with their vision for this, as you slowly figure out how to even perform to a mediocre degree at your job as a supernatural threat analyst, but I would have found the game much more engaging and immersive if you [i]started[/i] with all the "lore" that you need to uncover over the course of several runs that actually provides you with semi-concrete information and hints for how to use the other information available to you to figure things out. Even once you have all that information, though, this game provides relatively few certainties. This, to me, feels extremely immersive and appropriate. You're taking your best guess, but you're not always going to be right. Sometimes you might predict the wrong type of aberration, sometimes you might miss clues that are there or read too much into ordinary occurrences. The game gives you decent room for error, but only once you already know what you're doing. More than likely, you're going to spend your first several runs flounder…

While I generally appreciate games of this type, I have decided to refund this one, because it's quite crude and underbaked. First of all, the esthetics of old monochrome monitors was bright green or amber letters on mostly black screen - that is easy to read. However, small black letters on bright green screen is pure pain. The gameplay is mostly guesswork - you get randomized tabloids, you get chaotic police reports, and then you have to decide. If you do it wrong, you have no chance to remedy the situation. There is very little iteration and deduction, and quite a lot of guesswork against dice throws. The uncovered lore is mostly useless. It's not explained how profession contribute to an investigation. When is "photoprapher" more useful then say "shaman"? Then there are various strange inconsistencies - across runs, new people are generated, but some slots stay marked as "deceased" with not explained reasons. The manual contains incorrect information - the configuration file is called "options.cfg", not "config.cfg", and you have to find it yourself - it's not in the installation directory. Contrary to the manual, there is no way to restart a game, you can only "Resume" and…

I was hoping for something like Daily Chthonicle, and it kinda is. I love the "creepy green pixelated" look the game has. Schmidt Workshops used it in their Cthulhuian dungeon crawler, and it works here as well. I find there's too much random chance in sending agents into potential areas, and it's too much of a guessing game to see if they'll die or—as is most often the case—there's nothing there to begin with and you've just wasted resources. For some reason, after a few days most of my agents died except for 3, and I couldn't send any more in. It also feels a bit buggy, or maybe I didn't get how to play it properly. I'm also not quite sure what era it's set in: the computer suggests the '90s, but based on the images of the people and newspaper, it could be placed anywhere from 1880 to 1960. Not sure if that's intentional. This game has potential, but there need to be more tools for the player to investigate areas. I really want to like it, but in its current state it's not very fun.

Fun little indie puzzle game. It's not a 'jumpscare' kind of game, but it is steeped in a kind of lofi quiet horror that can be easily gleaned from the screenshots. I thought it was really great for the purchase price.