Oh to be a structural engineer tasked with wandering broken-down buildings and tunnels.... To call Infra a walking sim would be to somewhat underestimate its purpose as a game. Instead, it's more notably an exploratory/puzzle game that tasks you with keeping as close an eye on your surroundings as you possibly can. If you're not checking every nook and cranny laboriously, then you're not playing the game properly. In short, you're an engineer named Markku, or "Mark," working as a structural engineer in a city that leaves you believing you may be the only person capable of properly working on or fixing any part of its INFRAstructure. Indeed, in some ways I'd call this game more comedic than one might expect. I have to imagine that people who've worked the very job that Mark does may have had similar thoughts of: how in God's name does this city even run, man? It's actually absurd how much is broken down and not in working order until you come along. It's as if the very city itself would have fallen apart were it not for Mark's careful eye and unbeatable tenacity. Setting that part of the humor aside, there's also plenty of little jokes for the discerning players - and in fact there's just a lot of stuff hidden away throughout the game for players to find in general. I was fairly thorough for most of the game (up until the last couple chapters where I began to lose a bit of steam thanks to the game's surprising length) and I'm confident that there's a lot I just never found or saw. I'm aware of some ARG-type puzzles strewn about the game, and just looking at the achievements that I didn't get (over half of them!) I can tell that there's just a lot to chew on in the game even beyond the core playthrough experience. But, that's all just gravy, really. For me, one playthrough is more than enough, being an incredibly long game for what it is that really asks you to be as patient as possible with it. There's a lot of jank, in short. Many puzzles ask you to interact with movable objects, this being from time to time a fairly irritating experience (the effort of stacking boxes, for example, can prove to be more involved than you'd think it should be). There's also a lot of moments where puzzles are solved merely through what information you have rather than any real problem-solving. There's also plenty of moments where there's no real puzzle to solve at all and instead it's just a matter of finding easy-to-miss keys laid around in relatively arbitrary manners. Where this all comes to a head is in chapter 9, in Turnip City. In reality, I actually rather liked this area, but it will absolutely be a major test of your patience. For me, this was pretty much the last of my patience as thereafter I was pretty much ready for the game to be done. Thankfully, this is about 95% of the way through, so I didn't have much left! Even beyond the stuff that is explicitly time-consuming such as Turnip City, there were also several moments in which I experienced bugs or glitches that artificially inflated the time it took me to do anything. I won't hold that to the design of the game itself, which I think is generally quite good, but instead just to the fact that it's an old game built in an engine that is somewhat prone to jank. But, despite all the frustrations I had playing this game, and despite the fact that I truly was ready for it to be over a few hours before it actually ended, I come way from Infra incredibly pleased. It's a totally unique experience, there's just nothing like Infra out there that I could say. Sure, it grabs onto that loveliness of urban exploration that other games have touched upon before, and the environments you go through have all been seen before in bits and pieces, but the whole of this game is a singular vision, to me. If nothing else, what Infra did for me was give me a real appreciation for what all goes on behind the scenes. There's so much that goes into the act of running a city, so much that no one thinks about. It's easy to forget about all the things that lay beneath your feet, hidden behind walls of buildings you could never fathom the insides of if you weren't already familiar. All those hallways you've never gone down or doors you've never seen behind, Infra explores them all and highlights a part of urban life that most simply do not let their mind wander to. I love too the solitude of it all. In many ways, Infra is an unsettling, almost outright creepy game. For the most part, there's zero human interaction. After you leave your place of work, you're pretty much by yourself for the next 20 hours. But, at times it doesn't feel that way. All the time you're exploring, no matter where you are, there's always an impression of life. There's graffiti everywhere, things strewn about in ways that suggests people were there not too long ago, and on rare occasion there's even this oppressive feeling that you're not quite alone. You'll find blankets and mattresses, suggestions that these abandoned places were called home by some unknown person you'll likely never meet. The story too is fun to follow. The paranoia-inducing mystery unravels as you go through the game. You begin to piece together this massive blight of corruption inflicted upon Stalburg by ne'er-do-well business owners and capitalists that seek to exploit their workers and citizens alike. My favorite part of this, I think, was the discovery of what happened to the people lost in an in-universe infamous metro accident. Really, that's all I have to say, but I also wanted to touch upon a little extra note: At one point, I was looking at one of the many newspapers you can find on your travels and I noticed that one of the blurbs was about a horrific aircraft accident that led to the loss of 273 lives. The blurb explicitly stated this was the single worst airplane accident to ever happen in the United States. This made me curious about whether that happened to be true, as I assumed this was just a fabricated accident created for the game to just fill out a newspaper and give it a sense of reality. In checking out the wikipedia article dedicated to the very list of deadliest aircraft incidents though, I found that the article was actually about a real event and the claim was indeed true. Just thought that was a neat little touch, is all. (And yes, it's not the deadliest INCIDENT, but accident for sure - that one you're probably thinking of, after all, was not an accident).