So, I've played through the demo, and here's some of my thoughts.
First of all, the elephant in the room: switch to Unreal Engine. I never really played a game on UE5 before, but now I did I absolutely despise the existence of this engine.
It set my graphical settings to the lowest possible ones, and the game was a vaseline smear because of the default settings, while pushing my 1060 to the max and maintaining stable 75FPS in the beginning. I changed the upscaler to something nicer and it immediately improved the visual quality while still maintaining the 75FPS needed for a smooth gameplay.
That is until I've progressed enough to be faced with morre complex geometry, then the performance dwindled hard. First, after going around the corridors, there was already a significant FPS drop. Then, when exiting to the outside, it immediately dropped to 25FPS.
And the thing is, the game doesn't look that much better than the first one that was running on Serious Engine, but Serious Engine wasn't pushing my GPU to the max and it maintained stable FPS. I refuse to believe that "Unreal is more demanding", it's just badly optimized. If this other engine can look just as good and take less resources, then your engine sucks dick. I fucking hope Epic goes bankrupt and Tim Swiney ends up on the street.
But that's my bitching about Unreal, now to the game itself.
Obviously this has spoilers to the first game so if you didn't play it, don't read it.
You first start seemingly in the same simulation that you were in through the entirety of the first game, with EL0HIM talking to you, and you solving some basic puzzles. Jammers, lasers, Tetris blocks to open doors, and then by the end of that you step into the transport platform and you wake up in a robot body in the real world.
A quick interjection: the dream sequence has also shown a certain limitation of Unreal compared to Serious Engine. In the first game, when you had the Tetris door locks, it would pull a nicely animated UI line pointing to them, but here it instantly pops up and seems rather limited. In the same way, the text decoding UI effect is completely gone. You walk up to something like a QR code and it just pops up the decoded message when in the original game it was a very nicely animated effect. It's a small detail but it shows another inferiority of Unreal compared to Croteam's in-house engine.
Now, when you wake up, you are greeted by a robot with a number 33 that gives you a quick rundown of what happened in the first game and fills you in on the gap between the first and second game. Turns out that the AI you played as in the first game took on the moniker of Athena, and it's a "her". Kinda gay that suddenly it's a she, but Greek mythology and all that. And this AI has built additional AI's to rebuild the "human race" as they call themselves, with you being the thousandth one built. But at some point Athena has disappeared after establishing the beginnings of the new humanity, and also she essentially became the robot's God.
As it turns out, centuries have passed since that initial awakening of Athena, and the "new humans" as we might call the robots, have built a city of New Jerusalem. And very much like humans, new humans have ended up getting a shitty politician to run the show, in a way being an EL0HIM 2.0. The mayor of New Jerusalem is a coward much like EL0HIM, and whilst Athena wanted to expand the new humanity as much as she could, the mayor instead stopped on a thousand new humans, with you being the final one in the plan.
And at the speech where you walk out outside and your FPS tanks, a digital sprite of Prometheus appears, talking about The Island. It's quite likely that The Island, Prometheus' apparition and all of that is Athena's doing. Now, an older robot wanted to do an expedition to that island for a long time, but the mayor was too afraid to do so, until now that it became a pressing matter. He finally approves it and you end up on the island, which will be the main play area where you'll solve more puzzles with new puzzle elements, and also discover new messages and remains of humanity as you try to understand what they were.
There are also additional world building elements with different outcomes. For example, robots created their own network with social media and all that jazz you can access and discuss topics with other citizens of New Jerusalem. This system also allows for voice communication, either public or private. So it will be another element of story telling in the game, where you'll be interacting with all the other AI's and further questioning the philosophical elements presented by the game.
We also discover that New Jerusalem has many problems of it's own. They're facing an issue with power generation, lack of resources, and it's all connected with the mayor being afraid of letting people out of that safe haven and out in the wild to explore and gather. For one, this can be the outcome of the mayor being afraid to repeat the mistakes of humanity, but at the same time it shows that civilization comes at a sacrifice.
So that's the gist of the story. Now some nitpicks.
For example Yaqut. That character is very clearly a fag robot. A grating flamboyant voice, Yaqut meaning "ruby", and also the little portrait of him in the HUD has him having a cat. This is a red flag that they might add an even worse character, like a troon robot, but I fucking hope they won't. In a way you can excuse a fag robot because ancient Greece, but nothing can excuse a troon AI in a post-human world.
One of the texts that I've found, since the two islands in the demo are massive and I didn't bothered to 100% them, have one of the robots bitching about how humanity has led to so many species going extinct and destroying so much, and that the robots shouldn't repeat that. I really hope that the writing won't go into the one sided preachy way, but instead will maintain the ambiguity from the first game to make the player think for themselves of all the views presented because that was a really nice way of writing a story like that.
And speaking of writing, I'm afraid that the millennial writing brainrot has also touched the writing of this game, as there are quips and all the stupid quirky humor, which wasn't present in the first game, which made it much more impactful. I'm huffing copium at this point but I really hope they won't fuck it up too much with shit like this.
Gameplay elements: you're introduced to a few new tools on the island.
One is sort of like the laser connector, but it requires at least two laser sources, as it will "mix" them into either red, green, blue or white. The calculation is pretty simple, as it's a negation. If you pick blue and green, the only other color left is red. If you pick all three, you get white. It also poses a new challenge, as now you'll have more laser routes that need to stay uninterrupted to complete the puzzle.
Another one you get introduced to is capable of creating a small hole in specific walls, so that you can move items through it or even connect lasers through it, but obviously you cannot take it through the hole it made, so you need to find some other way to do so if necessary. One of the puzzles requires you to do so in order to finish it.
And the last one is the teleporter. This one is interesting, as you can place it anywhere, and as long as there isn't a solid wall hiding it, you can point at it and press E and you will teleport right to it, including with whatever you're holding.
I've actually managed to screw up the first puzzle on the second level, as I didn't understood how the teleporter worked. The puzzle expected you to move towards the fence on the left of the unopenable barrier and teleport, however I didn't get it at first so I came up with the idea of climbing to the hill over the puzzle and jumping down to it. This left the teleporter inactive and I couldn't figure out the puzzle. Only after going to some other puzzle I understood what it does, then came back to it and solved it the right way.
So that's my thoughts on that. The game seems to be going in an interesting way story-wise, but I'm also wary of modern day poz seeping into it and ruining it. The gameplay creates new unique challenges with the inclusion of the new tools, and it's all completely ruined by the rotten foundation that is Unreal Engine.
