Remoteness

I wanted Remoteness to be a hidden gem. The pitch genuinely has something: a cordoned-off future New York hit by an electrical meteor shower, a wisecracking drone companion named Hanna, a dynamic day-night cycle that affects enemy behavior, and electricity as a dual-use resource you can channel through a crossbow during rain or spend as underground currency. On paper, that is a low-budget indie FPS with real creative instincts. In practice, KR Games shipped something that feels like it needed another six months of iteration before anyone paid for it. The open-world structure covers three distinct zones - the main city, Chinatown, and the subway underground - and the Chinatown setpieces in particular carry some genuine atmosphere. Organ notes bleed into the ambient soundscape near a cathedral, the guns have weight behind their audio, and the alien creatures snarl in ways that do momentarily raise the hair on your neck. The sound direction is honestly the strongest craft on display here, and I hold onto that because the rest of the experience is a constant fight against the game's own systems. The asthma survival mechanic, which initially sounds like a clever environmental pressure, resolves into a basic resource loop: find syringes underground, keep the meter filled, repeat. The electro-energy economy that underpins both combat upgrades and syringe access is never explained by the tutorial, so early hours are spent reverse-engineering rules the game quietly assumed you knew. Performance is the most punishing issue. Players with mid-to-high-range hardware have reported being forced down to low settings just to maintain playable frame rates, and memory leaks make extended sessions unstable. The map is genuinely difficult to use - a separate menu layer that shows only a sliver of the environment and vague directional markers. Navigation through the repetitive city blocks becomes a ritual of opening and closing that map rather than reading the world itself. Combat control, especially on a controller, has been described by multiple reviewers as nearly unusable due to severe camera snap behavior that works against precise aiming. The developer has pushed updates - a 1.80 build introduced a reworked ladder system, smarter enemy drones, color-coded minimap objectives, and performance improvements - so the game is not entirely static. Whether those patches have meaningfully resolved the core issues is still an open question in the community. A full run through the main quest and some side content lands around seven hours, and there are multiple endings for those motivated to find them - including a secret branch hinted at by one of the seventeen Steam achievements. The ambition is genuine. KR Games, an Italian solo or small team, reached for something in the neighborhood of a compact open-world FPS with survival texture and stealth options, and the bones of that vision occasionally peek through. But Remoteness sits at roughly 61 percent positive on Steam across a small review pool, and that split feels honest. It is not a cynical product. It is an unfinished one.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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