PAMELA

I bought this game in 2017 when it first launched in Early Access. I remember watching the very first trailer, EA as all hell could possibly imagine. And I loved every second of it. P.A.M.E.L.A. (from here on out, Pamela), is what introduced me to the modern day Cyberpunk.
I put a good ~60 hours into development from 2017 through the beginning of 2019. I will admit, at this point I wasn't "burnt out," but, I was ready to experience the game in it's finest, v1.0. 2017 through today. 2 new pc upgrades, and 1 brand new rebuild from scratch, and I refused to delete it.
Once release occurred, there I was. My wife knew how happy I was. Pamela was FINALLY out! I couldn't believe it. I told her about the terrible animations. I told her about the clunky gameplay. Most importantly, she reminded me that my own mental health issue (Epilepsy) had me forgetting pretty much everything I had experienced prior. Then. Then came 1.0.
1.0. I waited, what felt like FOREVER, but as a kid who waited for DNF from it's announcement in 1997, it wasn't so bad. Is 1.0 perfect? Nope. Far from it. Can it improve over time? Absolutely. The developers put their hearts into this game in the 3 years until it arrived.
When you beat it and see the end you will likely expect more. When you see the credit list for yourself, you'll appreciate this tiny ass team a whole lot more.
Thank you NVYVE, for giving me my first truly favorite game since Duke 3d in '96.
Come find me!
Don't give up NVYVE. You hooked us.
**November 7th Update**
Short, simple, and unfortunately, not sweet at all. It looks like the last update on July 21st was the final scoop of dirt over the grave of Pamela. I hope I am sorely mistaken, but it appears as though we have received everything there is from the devs. A real shame, as this game had an absolute limitless amount of possibilities.
Hope we get something more in the future NVYVE. As an active member of the community at launch, and an avid supporter to the end; We and Pamela deserve more!

Now that the game is out i belive its time to Leave a Review.
So how's the game? Its good, but its certainly not the best as my playtime might suggest. Its a fairly good passtime, especialy if you know how to play it (Having owned this game since Early - Early Access) though it can be quite Hard at times. The Hardness comes from a mixture of Loot Generation Behavior and Enemy Generation Behavior, whereas the game gets naturaly harder as your "Level" increases (Though loot gets better too (Much better infact)).
For new players i absolutely recomend turning the Hunger & Thirst Rate down to 0.8 due to mentioned Generation Behavior.
The Story is pretty much what i expected, nothing world moving but it gives some goals (Motivation needs to come from oneself though), but is more like a Side Objective from the main part that is Survival and Repair of Eden's Subsystems. (How i wont tell you, though its realy easy)
Gameplay wise its clear to be still lacking in some polish, but it works and its usualy very fun. I hope the devs continue to work on that a bit, especialy the Animation and Ranged Aim as it can be a bit, confusing at times.
Graphics are nice but do push what the Unity Engine is capable of doing, doesnt change the fact that the game looks pretty pleasing at times, though equaly so it can be quite hard to see thing even in perfect lighting conditions at times.
I'd give the game a 7/10 wich is pretty solid if you ask me but still open for Improvement and Polish. I also want to add i am fully open for more/additional Regions. I'd even be willing to pay a small DLC Price for them, though then then also have to add (IMO) some additional Gameplay functions or general additions.

Don't usually write reviews, but here's the score:
There are a lot of good things about this game, but also some glaring issues. First, the good. Atmosphere, graphics, balance. Play intelligently and you will have a good time. The weapons are neat and the menu design is simply beautiful. This game is a work of art with incredible visuals and immersion.
The bad: This game handles like a work of art. As in trying to get a 6 foot painting through a narrow hallway. Poorly is what I'm getting at. Basic combat is done by punching and a charged punch will send you forwards into the enemy, or through the enemy if you are too close. You dash without unit collision through the person you are trying to punch and get punched. All the animations are clearly animations and not natural movements. They are unrefined and clunky. Most importantly in the current patch (and probably forevermore) they added the story into the game which is entirely conveyed by Pamela, the titular AI. This was fine with the logs before. They were short snippets, which was fine because they were short, giving a brief bit of backstory every time you found a log point. However, the story components now are long, take up a 3rd of your screen with an image of Pamela that looks like it's being displayed at the wrong resolution, with her grating voice in your ears for up to a couple of minutes at a time. The voice acting also got worse instead of better. She's either supposed to be an emotionless AI or an emotional simulacrum of humanity, but she switches between the two, making her inconsistent and irritating.
All in all, it needs work that it probably won't get. They should honestly re-record the entire story, touch up all the animations, and fix the charged punch. I don't recommend it to everyone, but people into science fiction worlds, survival games, and minor base building should be willing to check it out. And mute Pamela.

Let's get something out of the way right up front: P.A.M.E.L.A is not a high-polish AAA tile. It's a small Indy release with a lot of jank and inconsistent behavior. Screwy AI, badly placed objects, glitched items... Not to mention the new voice actress for P.A.M.E.L.A herself, who sounds like she's on Valium while delivering all her lines in a half-bored monotone.
So you should skip it, right?
Well, maybe, maybe not. Let me list the games P.A.M.E.L.A. reminds me of: Prey (2017), Ultima Underworld 1+2, System Shock 1+2, Dishonored 1+2+DLCs, Deus Ex, Cybermage... Heck, even Realms of the Haunting.
In other words, P.A.M.E.L.A. is in the lofty company of that rarest of genres: The Immersive Sim.
Is it screwy and a little unfinished? Sure. Is it better than any of the other games I listed above? Nope. But if you're looking for another crumbled society to sneak through, another action game that's not really about action, another game that rewards exploration and punishes combat? Well you've found it.
P.A.M.E.L.A. is screwy to the point that you could call it unfinished, but Eden 53 is a real place to me now. I'll remember it's brightly-lit horror for a very long time.

After some setbacks, this game is back on track and better than ever!
For the part of the review for those that don't know the game yet, just follow the *) down at the bottom.
I got this game in a very early stage of developement (June 2017) and was simply astonished by the amazing world and its creepy yet fascinating atmosphere, even though I died fairly often due to a certain lack of directions by the game (which was no real flaw as it was still in a very alphaish state).
Every now and then new updates came and brought new improvements, new stuff to discover, major changes and yes, sometimes new bugs, but that's just how alpha games work.
When it comes down to performance/optimization, the game had some pretty wild times:
In the early stages I actually had to play it with an open case as it would either fry my cpu or simply shut down the PC due to temperature exceeds (Although that might also have been boosted by my FX8350, those things get fairly hot, even with a ton of cooling measures).
Nonetheless, the game worked, sometimes really smooth, sometimes a bit laggy, but all in all perfectly playable (as long as the PC didn't overheat and shut down). A few months ago sadly that changed after an update as the game suffered heavy loading times (usually ~10min, now ~20-30min), poor performance and some major gamebreaking bugs like the inability to recycle stuff or the instant curruption of savefiles, making the game literally unplayable.
So since that didn't change after several months (to be fair, fixing stuff like this is no easy task, especially since there was the big problem with unity engine) I thought "Well, it was good while it lasted", but still kept it on my newspage in case a new update would come and fix the problems. And boy it did! Just started to play again out of curiosity and it loads faster than ever (<2min), the game runs smooth as Kerrygold butter, no overheating, it looks even better than before, so far no bugs, but instead an overhaul of introductions, mechanics and more, long story short: I love it!
So after seeing how much work the developers put into this, I just want to say: Thank you! Thank you for making this amazing game and not letting us down, you guys are amazing! = )
*)
So what is this game about:
You wake up from a stasis pod with no idea who you are, where you are and what happend. To find out more, you have sneak, fight and run through a giantic city with various districts filled with NPCs, some of which may help you if you act accordingly, and some (most) of which will attack you. They all have certain behaviors that you can try to exploit as you make your way through the city and reveal more and more about the incidents that made Eden what it is now. And with a bit of luck, you will be able to bring Eden back to its former glory (a.k.a. turn on the lights in all districts for more than a couple of minutes)
Some of the features:
-Crafting system
-Base building
-Hunger/Thirst/Fatigue system
-Farming system
-Day/Night cycle
-Various flashlights (Never sure if they actually make it creepier or less creepy)
-Futuristic gear including weapons, shields, protective gear and utilites
-Different difficulties with changeable parameters like effects of injuries, enemy strength, etc
-Various types of enemies
-Shopping stations
-Upgrade systems
-Amazing atmosphere
-Open roaming
-Interesting story without fixed storyline
So if you're into creepy games, that give you the good old "I am totally NOT going that way!"-feeling, and like stories that unfold bit by bit, this game is perfect for you. So grab it, turn off the lights and enjoy your heartattack as the first Dark Seeker appears right behind you

Story portion ends kind of suddenly. Other than that and the performance issues, this is a great game and worth the price!

Extraordinarily cool game that plays like a survival version of System Shock 2, but it's buggy as hell. Stuff like: a memory leak that causes microstutters after an hour of play, AI walking into walls forever, AI getting trapped behind stuff, AI not seeing me when I sneak six feet in front of it with my flashlight on, AI sometimes spawning right on me from the most ridiculous places (like dead ends that I just cleared), first-person animation bugs (which go from the occasional action state getting stuck until I do something or another to unstick it, to the persistent why-can-I-never-look-at-my-map-while-crouching?), and the inventory interface sometimes getting unbelievably messed up. Nothing game breaking so far, and nothing that can't be fixed by restarting the game, but still inconvenient. Also Nirvana (one of the late game areas) seems unfinished? It's an absolutely huge space that is sparsely decorated and doesn't have much going on aside from extremely intense neon area lighting that washes everything out. It's also supposed to be a difficult area, but I didn't have any problems at all. Pretty much everywhere else was more difficult. It seemed like they'd somehow shipped an old build of it or something.
Which is a lot of bad stuff, but I still find the core game extremely compelling in the same way that Subnautica is. A lot of careful exploration, looting, building, and slowly piecing together what is going on while trying to not die. Aside from Nirvana, all of the other areas are really gorgeous, detailed, and fun to explore, and the way quests are structured forced me to explore everywhere to find what I was looking for & the crafting items that I needed. The enemies have pretty high HP and deal a lot of damage, so combat is tough and usually feels like a desperate brawl.
The sound design is great. A lot of ambient details going on mixed with the sound of distant footsteps and grunts. Also while the AI is not great, it responds to sound really well. If one barks then it'll cause all of the others in earshot to go into an investigation state and start walking towards the position at a brisk pace. Given the drawn-out nature of fights, this means that they'll often be coming up on your position by the time you finish, cutting off a lot of your escape routes. Once one of them goes from investigation to definitely seeing and chasing you, it can be extremely hard to get enough distance to break line of sight and disengage. If three or four are on you, man... better hope you can find a balcony to jump off of, or a robot to kite them into. I've had some narrow escapes where I hit an elevator button and hid, waiting for it to descend as infected get closer and closer, then making a mad dash inside and smashing every button just to get the hell out of there.
If you do go down, you revive at a cryochamber with nothing but your level upgrades, and can try to make your way back to where you died and recover all the stuff from your dead body. This can get dicey the further into the game you get, as spawn rates of enemy types are effected by your character level, and most of your damage output and reduction is tied to your gear. So you're basically thrown back to a beginning game state while the enemies are in mid or late game. It's a good balance between being forgiving while still maintaining significant amount of tension.
Speaking of which, another thing I loved was that there was never an obviously great place to put a base. Places that get enough sunlight for growing food and solar charging tend to get a lot of traffic, and places that are naturally fortified don't get much light, are out of the way, and still get enough traffic to not be 100% safe hidey holes. I never really felt secure where I set up, and being at base had the same get-in-and-get-out vibe of everywhere else in the game.
Once you get a handle on all of the mechanics, weapons, and base building, the game does get a bit easy. I'll still die if I get unlucky and a bark causes a bunch of witches, reavers, and normal infected to spawn from behind a bunch of corners and chase me down, but there was a point about two-thirds in where my gear and level perks were good enough that I could outright 1v3 pretty much any group. Also, some of the later leveling perks hugely mitigate the danger, or negate some of the game's core loops. E.G. if you level hp regen too far (say, 3hp/second), it hugely reduces how many meds you need to be carrying, which in turn makes taking damage trivial. It's the difference between making hard decisions about your loadout, how you approach enemies, what kinds of risks you're willing to take, and the cumulative effect of taking hits here and there slowly putting you in increasing danger; all that, versus being able to just walk it off.
All of which is to say that I suspect the real game is on a harder difficulty with permadeath on (which lets you revive only once per activated cryochamber, and reviving burns the cryo core. If you don't have any activated cryochambers left, the entire world state is reset and you only keep your unlocked character levels), and extremely minimal character perk spending. It's probably the intended play experience, but the amount of stuff a new player needs to figure out and internalize makes it hard to fully recommend. The game was hard enough on default settings up until the final third.
All that said, I still think it's a fucking awesome game. I blazed through it in four days, and my only regret is that I'm not sure how long I'll have to wait before forgetting enough to have a fresh experience with playing it again. Hopefully they'll have fixed the bugs by the time I'm ready for a replay.