As you might have noticed, we have been recently flooded with product reviews, and it has been a while since we have done a video game review. If there is one thing that takes up a lot of time, it is playing an in-depth video game. I’ll talk about that more when I discuss The Legend of Zelda: Meth of the Wild. (I didn’t misspell that in the title). Okay, enough of that tangent, let’s discuss The Station.
The Station is one of those games that doesn’t take long to play, and it is very in-depth. I’ll cut to the chase an give you the premise. The game begins when this one corporation discovers a planet that has a civilization, but this civilization is engaged in a huge, planet-wide civil war. This corporation, AXIOM, sends a space station to investigate the newfound planet, and it goes out of contact with AXIOM. AXIOM suspects the worst, because this titular station was supposed to be stealthy, so you play the astronaut who investigates it.
If you know anything about first-person puzzle-solving games, you can see where this is going. This is one of those games where you never see precisely who you are, as if you are invisible. It is also one of those games that you can interact with objects in the world, and they will float in front of you. In most games like this, you get objects, and then these objects help you solve puzzles later. In the case of The Station, there are only a few objects to get to solve the main puzzle of the game.
So the set-up itself may not be unique, but the way it is done really works. The game has a very dark atmosphere, and at first I thought their might have been something wrong with my television. I think that when the game started, my TV shifted into some HDR mode or something, but it didn’t seem to affect anything else that I wanted to do on the TV later. The game is all about exploring the hallways of this station, and I will give kudos to the graphics designer for making the darks really black. After all, space is a very dark place, and it makes sense that you wouldn’t see everything unless you had a lot of illumination.
This dark feeling gives the game a very scary atmosphere. I also believe that the lack of music helps, something that was a deliberate choice and not due to the game’s lack of budget. It looks like there has been a lot of time and love put in what was once a Kickstarter project, and I will have to say that it more than works. In fact, I had a difficult time playing this game at night alone, because it was rather unnerving.
Again, this unnerving feeling works to the game’s advantage. This is one of those games where you have to look all around you and find out what happened, and the main mission is to seek out the three people on the station. There are a lot of audio logs to help you out, and much of the game is just figuring out how to open the doors that will get you into the rooms to crack the mystery.
I was able to solve the game within a few hours, and I will say that is not time I regret using. In fact, the ending of the game has an incredible twist that I so want to spoil, but I think it is better that I don’t talk about.
You can play The Station for yourself on the PS4, Xbox One, and Steam. You can find out more information about it here.
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