This is a complete playlist of every time kuoushi played Pyramis, but available in a playlist format. Enjoy just letting the whole series run without having to click anything! Hours of kuoushi, direct to your brain.
I’ve given this game a recommend because I had fun playing it. That might not be the case for you, so keep reading if you’d like to know more.
First, the general setting and inspiration of the game is sold as being based on H.R. Giger. Not going to dispute this, but I will say that despite this inspiration, the game largely takes place inside sci-fi hallways and bunkers and only really goes full on (biomass kind of all over the place aside) at the very end. I’m not saying that this is necessarily a bad thing, but for the most part the Giger elements appear to be very limited or over-used to the point of just being a thing you walk beyond rather than stop to admire. It’s present, but it kind of feels like it’s taking the backseat a lot of the time.
Speaking of stopping to admire things, you better hope that it’s in a well-lit area because otherwise you’re wasting the absolutely limited supply of your flashlight’s battery. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to people who are well-versed in survival horror, but you will have to manage your resources extremely closely otherwise you’re going to be stuck just running through halls and trying to get to the next thing with bad things chasing you, rather than being able to use your resources to kill said bad things. The flashlight battery was a personal pet-peeve of mine because the game is DARK by default. Turn up your gamma in-game. You’ll thank me later. Also, your flashlight is basically useless when the walls are black and it has a very short range.
Speaking of limited resources, let’s talk about the save system and how it works just so you go into the game fully aware of what’s going to happen when you die. Throughout the game you’ll find alien eggs that can be used to save the game in a specific place. That’s cool and all, but whenever you enter new zones or do new things you trigger an automatic save which overwrites your manual save at the eggs. It kind of renders them useless to a degree. (Apparently this is not the case. According to the dev, if you click Continue on the main screen then click NO when asked if you want to continue, it’ll show you other saves that you can load from.)
Also, when you die, anything you used from the last save point to the point that you died is gone. Walk into a room and get an autosave (it doesn’t tell you when it autosaves), then kill two bad guys with a lot of ammo, only to die to a third? That ammo is gone in the void now. You won’t get it back when your save reloads. You won’t get it back when you exit the game and restart it/reload it. It’s gone now. So you can get into some extremely tricky situations where you have absolutely no ammo because you tried to kill things but ended up dying anyway, so now you have no ammo, no batteries, and no health when you respawn and those things that you killed previously are back. Unsure if this is intended or not, but it is something you should be aware of while you play. Guns are also not exactly consistent in damage or feel, so it’s not a good idea to rely on them to kill things anyway.
Bad guy AI is what it is, so generally if you jump up on something high and are away from the edge, they can’t really touch you and might even just walk away. This helps in the above situations where you don’t have any ammo to spare. Movement isn’t always the smoothest, so you’ll kind of need to get the hang of it before really running past enemies all the time.
The game’s puzzles are mostly just walk forward, find X, use X on Y. Not that this is very surprising for the kind of game we’ve got here, but there are a few that you may get stuck on for a bit. If that’s the case, remember to hit T and try to turn on the little waypoints that tell you what to do in the points of interest menu.
One thing I did actually enjoy was the general sound design and music. Sometimes it was just there, but other times it was pretty nice. Not something you’ll always notice, but it does its job, so that’s nice.
I won’t say much about the story because it might end up being spoilers, but there is a story, let’s say. You have to read a lot of the collected notes and scraps and things you find in the game (and there’s a lot), but if you end up liking what’s written, you won’t find yourself lacking in things to read.
The game has issues, and honestly one of the issues is just that it might not live up to how cool the trailer and screenshots make it look. Like I said at the beginning, I had fun, but if any of the above sounds like a turn off to you, then it might not be the game for you.
