The game’s theme of long-forgotten warfare defines       the setting, evidenced by sea mines littering the ocean, military bases, and rooms filled with heavy artillery, where exploration is split between navigating a foggy ocean by motorboat, following a distant lights through the mist, and traversing land where the protagonists are dwarfed by the scale of their surroundings. As you move through this hellish island, you are hunted by strange entities, most notably the Sniffer, a towering human-like creature that breathes asthmatically and wears a skin suit far too large for its frame.

The Sniffer possesses the disturbing ability to teleport through holes carved into the stomachs of human corpses and is seen obsessively collecting bodies in his suitcases or hanging skin suits from trees throughout the forest. His behavior suggests a grotesque ritualistic fixation on preservation and control. In a quietly menacing display, he is even observed offering ice cream to the captured Hood before locking her in a cage within a functional, neon-lit movie theater. The world is filled with hidden secrets and a cryptic environmental storytelling that hints at a rabbit cult.

You can see that the symbols of rabbits are everywhere, masks, statues, and a recurring sigil of five rabbits running in a circle, serving as harbingers of doom.         Not just that, players can also discover the five wooden coffins that, when opened, they trigger premonitions of the children’s deaths, such as Hood being shot or the boy being hanged. Some cut scenes in the game show a small dead lamb at the bottom of the well that keeps painfully reanimating, and as it grows, its bones keep cracking into a monstrous sheep, which is seen as a manifestation of the girl’s internal rage. 

The relationship between the Boy and the Girl can be seen in their silence and an underlying sense of guilt   that makes you curious. This emotional weight is shown at the beginning, when the Boy, who is wearing a burlap sack cinched with a noose, tries to rescue the Girl from the water. She wakes up panicking and tries to choke him, even before she knows who he is. The dialogue between them both is rare and it often triggers the Girl’s internal trauma; like, when the Boy answers her questions about their location, the screen shows red flicks, hinting a flare up of the rage and passionate malevolence growing inside her. While they are teenagers, they are still anonymous, and their bond is anchored by a dark secret that haunts them throughout their journey. The synergy takes a literal turn through the Girl’s transformation. Her internal rage is pictured as a dead lamb in a well that painfully reanimates and eventually erupts from her as                   a half-human, half-sheep demon. 

Mechanically, the game is a whole new level of cinematic, and large-scale action, moving away from mini puzzles to huge set pieces. You’re driving the boat like in Resident Evil 4, using harpoons to stab someone in the face or blow up sea mines. The second half suddenly shifts into full World of Tanks, letting you commandeer a tank to plow through buildings and brutally destroy the government   in the city hall. However, it feels like a step back because there is no platforming at all and you see that there are too much of “press Y to open the door” or “press Y to hoist up the ledge”. Instead of dragging stools to reach handles, the gameplay is often just the act of going from point A to point B, which feels underwhelming given       the studio’s history.