Breached

There's something both eerily peaceful and frantically nerve-racking about being isolated and alone in this adventure game. It's that conflict of emotions that makes Breached both entertaining and frustrating. Right from the start, you're thrust into the thick of things and clueless about what's happening. Reading the opening journal, you get the gist of the malfunction that put you in the dire situation you're in and given the barest of instructions for how to interact with your environment. It makes for an immersive experience as you share your character's confusion at his current state and how he got here, as well as his anxiety in sorting out what to do next. From a storyline perspective, it makes for an almost surreal and immersive experience. From a gameplay perspective, though, it can be frustrating to the point of pulling your hair out.

The problem with Breached is that it does too good a job of leaving you to your own devices. Short of general tasks, you're not told where to send your probes, what to do with the materials you find, or how to progress. For example, early on in the game you're told to synthesize fuel for your shelter. What you aren't told is how to use the resources to synthesize that fuel. And when you finally figure out that you need to do so in the Lab screen, you're only told that you need to manually figure out a proper ratio of ingredients. It's a lot of unnecessary trial and error. And as for the scavenging part of the game, it can get more than a bit monotonous cruising around a barren landscape trying to find just the right spot where some needed capsule or mineral is. Worse, the map never seems to get right what resources are to be found in a particular area. Once again, it's frustrating to feel as if you've been spinning your wheels and wasting precious time for no good reason. Still, despite itself, Breached still manages to come together in the end to feel like a unique, but short, experience worth checking out.