A mix of different genres
The game begins with your attempt to escape from a jail cell. You'd be forgiven for switching the game off immediately once you're confronted with a lame puzzle scenario, that merely involves clicking on a couple of items to make your escape, and after witnessing the control system for the first time, which could have been so much better. In the adventuring segments of the game there are a number items around the room which you can interact with (reading notices, picking-up or using items in your inventory in order to solve puzzles), but the developers have moved away from using the standard point and click style for interaction and instead uses a direct control scheme, which often leads to frustrating camera angles. The frustration also lies in the fact that you need to walk around the room and stand in front of an object in order for it to highlight before you can interact, using WASD to rotate and move the character and then the left mouse button to interact with object. The result is a rather clunky and unnatural control system that often seems to work against you in the game.Puzzles range from simply moving around the room searching for specific items to the downright confusing, such as a bizarre safe cracking puzzle extremely early on which had me scouring the internet for any sign of a walkthrough. The frustration comes down to the fact that you'll sometimes need to set of trigger items to progress. I clicked on everything in the room searching for clues, scouring a notice board, searching the waste paper bin, looking in drawers and still found nothing. Then, after clicking on the door you'll discover that you're supposed to look for a key, but where could it possibly be? I’ve already clicked on everything. The difference this time is that when I go back and search the area, I can now view things that I haven't done before (rummage through the drawer for example), so now I systematically have to search through everything again. In a game that does little to hold your attention for any sustained period, using trigger objects such as this is annoying and frustrating.
Furthermore, you then discover that you need a combination to open the safe, which you discover is the safe holder's date of birth. There are various clues to his date of birth hidden around the location, but they are so unfathomably ambiguous that you'll be shaking your head with the absurdity of it all. It comes as no surprise that after a certain number of attempts at cracking the safe, a voice from nowhere puts you out of your misery and offers you the answer for free