Spirits of Xanadu

Few months back Steam had a little sale titled the 0451 Sale: titles of the immersive sim kind i.e. Deus Ex, BioShock, Dishonored, and the like. I already had all the big names since there are so few of them but the sale included a handful of unknown indie titles as well. They looked kind of suspect but I wishlisted a couple of them regardless to maybe buy them later when they're on sale again. Spirits of Xanadu was one of them.

Zero-Budget Immersive Sim in Space

The closest pre-existing immersive sim to compare Spirits of Xanadu to would probably be System Shock 2. Mostly because you're on a spaceship, the Xanadu, and there are gravity shafts to travel between decks. System Shock 2 is way beyond the scope of this game though.

While playing Spirits, I quickly came upon the realization that immersive sims are made with money: a tiny team production will never be able to reach the depth, scale, and quality required for such a game. You truly need a big development studio that is backed by a big publisher in the best case scenario if you want to make a proper immersive sim game.

Spirits of Xanadu looks blocky, sounds cheap, and it's just small. It might take an hour or two to get through on your first run but on a replay it can beaten in less than 10 minutes rather easily, which also unlocks an achievement.

Enemies come in the form of robots and to deal with them you get a pistol, SMG, and shotgun. Each gun fires some sort of laser projectiles without any kind of overhearting or magazine limit which doesn't feel very immersive. You also have regenerating health of the most boring kind.

I suppose the game would improve a lot by just being bigger and having more stuff. It has few funny vents but with larger levels you could have more interesting designs, more puzzles. The lack of NPCs is always kind of lame too but it's simply much cheaper to tell stories via text and audio logs. Also, it's maybe not the greatest idea to include an over a minute long audio log in which a pondering drunken guy barely even says anything. Someone might make such a thing in real life but it's about the most boring thing to listen to in a video game.