Review

This game was very middling to me. I went in basically totally blind. I got gifted it like a year or two ago. And it's been in the queue to get to since.

On the gameplay front, I found the point-and-click adventure gaming to be a bit frustrating. Adventure games can be...fraught. I find it hard to really call myself an adventure game fan, even though I continue to play them. So... I think my frustration with this one largely boiled down to items frequently being used in odd ways. If you're in an adventure game and you have, say: a wrench, a hammer, and a key. You pretty well understand to be on the lookout for a pipe, a nail, and a lock respectively. But we got a lot of sci-fi...stuff in this one. I found myself looking at my inventory (spread across three people...) and just having no real idea what I'm expected to do with the items. Or having an object that I could conceive of being used in a scenario in front of me. But it is in fact reserved for something else. There ended up being a good amount of rubbing everything on everything else. The hallmark of when things have gone wrong in adventure games, in my opinion. Where we have to play the game of "What am I thinking?" with the devs.

Tis also a bit frustrating just navigating. The game is dark. Multiple times I just fully did not see completely open doors or huge passages and such and got stuck because it was just so damn dark. Or didn't realize that something on the screen was clickable (and pick up-able). There's the funny little show interactables button in the lower left. Which is absolutely welcome. I have no interest in a Bone Totem without that. But also, you don't really wanna just be clicking that thing all the live long day. Otherwise, we may as well just be highlighting everything and remove the middle man.

Let's talk about atmosphere. What you're experiencing while flopping about between stuff. I didn't personally find it to be scary at all. Not sure if others did? Partially that's because there's not like any stakes. But unfortunately the bigger problem was this froot looks familiar. There's a line between loving allusion and just cribbing off your biggers and betters. I never really got the feeling that I was seeing anything original in this game. There was a lot of Alien here. A lot of Lovecraft. A lot of just general sci-fi tropes that were super well-worn. Everything I saw felt like it was some iteration of another story. So as I'm making my way through these tech hallways, I'm constantly being reminded of much cooler things I've read and seen. I get wanting to cite your sources. But when we're just directly inserting chestbursters and facehuggers, you're inevitably making me wonder "Why aren't I just playing Alien: Isolation?" I found myself speed-reading through a lot of apocalyptic logs "Yeah, yeah. Memories aren't my own. I'm going crazy. Let us all become one. Let us ascend. Uh, huh whatever." The things I'm reading are ostensibly interesting. But I've also read exactly the same thing literally dozens of other times. It didn't feel like we were approaching these tropes from any particularly interesting angle.

And another thing! What was with the PDAs? There was multiple times where I was reading the logs and like the scene after we would see something from it and the characters would respond to it with shock. Umm...were you not reading along with me? The log directly talked about the thing you seem to be seeing for the first time. I can understand feeling the need to show, rather than just telling. But if my characters don't give a shit about the logs, why should I? I mean, they're all pretty samey in tone. So I did get pretty bored reading them. But again, why are they even there if the characters I'm playing are not going to acknowledge them in any way? We may as well not have them. If anything, reading the logs is spoiling things you'll just end up seeing in person. I would also say that I think each of the logs are too long. They fuck with the pacing. Each time I was done reading one, I had to stop and think for a second. Where the hell was I? What was I doing? I'm not an exceptionally slow reader, to be clear. They are just that long in comparison to anything else you're doing that they feel like a bit of a flabby mess. God forbid when there was two in a room.

I would also say that a lot of the actual storytelling is not very neat. There's like 5 different characters who could be assigned the mad doctor/corporate stooge fucking with things they ought not fuck with role. To the point where it started becoming genuinely comedic when I got to the next log and someone yammers on about how they're poisoning their colleagues and themselves with alien juice. Yeah, you and everyone else, dipshit. You people are goddamn stupid. When we have one Burke, sure. When we have half a dozen of them running around, this world just becomes absurd. I find it hard to relate or remain interested. Every scientist was those two morons from Prometheus. The ones that end up wandering the tunnels and befriending the bloodthirsty alien worm. (Another plot point that gets directly copied in this game, actually...)

I wasn't impressed. It wasn't miserable. But I ended up having a walkthrough open next to me so I could fly through the millisecond I started hitting a speed bump. The game definitely improves a lot once we hit the underground area. There's more incidence going on. The game makes bigger swings. The last session I was playing was the best, and also the one where I looked up info the least. So I do think that's all connected. Bone Totem's biggest problem is just how damn thick the world is with bullshit. There are too many puzzles. You can't walk two feet before hitting a door that has three puzzles in it. Just gets genuinely tiring. Every time I got done streaming the game for the night, I felt exhausted. Not really the feeling you want to come away with, I don't think.