It’s a shame these characters couldn’t get voice actors even half as interesting. Lea sounds like nothing so much as a too-chipper corporate phone system (as in “Please listen carefully, as our options have changed”), and will start to annoy from moment one. The few other voices are similarly grating or—at best—boring, with not a single stand-out among them. For someone who can’t find her way around a ship she lived on for years, Lea has an annoying habit of treating you like an idiot. She’ll mention a puzzle that needs solving, and as you’re gleefully thinking, “I remember reading about that in so-and-so’s file,” she’ll almost immediately interrupt your search with, “Maybe you should look in so-and-so’s file.” Then about ten seconds later you get, “Haven’t you figured it out yet?” While the background music isn’t nearly as intrusive, and it conveys a definite sense of eeriness, sometimes it can be way too upbeat. One song sounded so much like “Low Rider” it disturbed me more than any plot twist that came along.

If the music drops the eeriness ball sometimes, the graphics may pick it up again. Everywhere you look onboard the ship are scattered papers, dead bodies, deep shadows, monstrous plants, and creepy pools of liquid, all carefully rendered and detailed. Unfortunately the character models aren’t of the same quality, and seem polygonal and old-fashioned. What’s worse, Lea herself experiences a lot of object clipping. Sometimes you can see her arm pass through a door, or an item she’s holding will drift in and out of her body. The clipping starts in the opening sequence, and is the first chink you’ll see in The Experiment’s shiny armor. The interface may be extremely impressive, but you’ll get the feeling that’s where all the developer’s energy went, as almost every other aspect of the game feels unpolished, at times shockingly so. At one point, a cryptography puzzle must be solved to obtain someone’s password, but regrettably the solution you’ll get doesn’t actually unlock anything, since it’s misspelled and missing the last two letters.

If only that was the most frustrating glitch. Late in the game there are several time-sensitive sequences where some chemicals must be mixed together and then launched. Sometimes the launch button just doesn’t work, and worse, it resets the chemicals you entered so you have to start over. When this leads to you failing the ten-minute long sequence and being sent back to start for the third time, you might begin to feel like The Experiment is actually on you, and they’re testing the upper limits of your patience. Although if you’ve actually made it to the sequence I’m describing, your patience might very well be infinite. Unless your PC is well above the minimum system requirements, you can expect some sluggish framerates and long load times, slowing down an already slow game. If you’re being extremely generous, you could describe Lea’s pace as “moseying,” though when you have to walk her from the cargo bay back to the upper deck yet again, you’ll probably call it something you wouldn’t repeat in polite company.

Certainly if she put a little pep in her step, the 15 to 20 hours it will take to finish the game would be greatly reduced. Though it’s not until the conclusion of all those hard fought hours that you experience the game’s most unforgivable sin: the ending. One moment Lea is about to step forward to finally find what she’s been looking for this entire time, and the next she’s back again, having seen it and decided it wasn’t that important, and then the game is over. Yes, the climax of the story takes place entirely off-camera. This wasn’t helped by a glitch that caused the ending cinematic to play without sound the first time, enveloping the non-ending with an additional shroud of obscurity.

Still, these last several points don’t mean The Experiment is wholly without merit. The developers have forged a new, more realistic way of interacting with the in-game universe, one which both technically dazzles and emotionally captivates—at least, at first. By restricting your options to only those things you could feasibly operate from behind a computer, the game nurtures a feeling that somehow the player is bridging the gap between reality and video game fantasy. However, while the first few hours of play are so impressive you’ll feel like you’re witnessing the birth of an adventure game revolution, it ends with more of a whimper than a bang. By the time you’re more than halfway through, the number of flaws and glitches you encounter may cause you to forget why you were so excited to begin with. There’s a truly solid foundation here, but a few too many things went wrong in the execution to call it a success. Although it remains a formula with tremendous potential, this is one experiment that needs to go back to the drawing board.