Warning! Mechanics spoilers / design analysis after the jump...
I really like the quippy bullet point format we adopted at the late ModMatic, so I guess I'm going to dust that off...
- Crank that. This is basically the premise of the "Crank" films, distilled into a frantic puzzle-fest. Cleverly, your constantly dwindling health doesn't really dwindle that fast, and there's plenty of health to go around to give you enough time to brute-force your way through most puzzles...
- All +use'd up. Some props are interactive, some aren't. Several puzzles require digging through stuff. The result? You might just spam +use as you never have before.
- Sky's the limit. One of the most detailed 3D skyboxes I've seen in Source; you can see abandoned cars below and countless buildings bathed in this nasty toxic yellow light. Make sure you have color correction enabled when you play.
- Letters to the editor. This Aspik guy really likes spelling out words with letters. Like, a lot.
- Bathroom stall. Valve really loves wall decals, using them for gameplay / sign posting -- but also for subtle narrative, their main storytelling function being: getting you to wonder who exactly sprayed that Lambda decal or who scrawled "the cake is a lie" in a crawlspace. Aspik makes gratuitous use of wall decals but it's not clear who wrote it, why they would help you, how they would know what they know, etc.
- The Neverending Story. In fact, the whole narrative is really nonsensical in general. I would spoil it for you here, but I really have no idea what happened -- and then at the end Aspik tries to directly tell you what happened and it gets even more confusing. Maybe it reads better in the original Russian.
Don't forget: you are a STAR.
