I personally love cyberpunk settings. I particularly enjoy cyberpunk settings that delve into the mental states of individuals with cybernetics and explore the workings of such a world. Psychroma explores the idea of secret human experimentation and how it can affect and break the human psyche. The overall story itself is pretty good, but getting there feels like a chore. The story is broken up quite a bit and feels confusing to piece together through most of the game. A lot of backstory is told through computer logs that you must find hidden throughout the house. You play as a cyborg/human experiment named Haze. The atmosphere is quite unsettling. Outside, acid rain falls down from the sky, eating away at the corrugated steel walls and rebar. The mystery of the house and the haunting past is what you're uncovering.
This is a side-scroller adventure title, so there's no combat here. You have a limited inventory system and must interact with objects until things happen, hidden passages open, and new doors unlock so you can get that next item to advance through the story again. This is sadly very obtuse and obscure. Many times I ran around all seven floors and clicked on everything only to discover I had to use an altar to go back in the past and unlock something new. Usually info like a passcode you need for a new door. There are three altars in the game, and each one has a part of the house locked off and has isolated memories. You must find cards for housemates and determine their past and role in the experiments.
I don't want to dwell too much on the story since that will spoil the game, but the fullscreen stills and artwork are fantastically drawn. The haunting horror and torture of the children here and various subjects is gruesome. There's quite a bit of gore here, but what fascinates me is cyborg gore and how they work medically. I will only say that the premise of the game is that there's something sinister going on in the house, and a member of it might be a creep. Haze gets suspicious early on, but who it is and why is what you need to discover. There are a couple of plot twists, and the story is good once you can piece it together and make sense of it. I wanted to know a bit more about the character's past, but the game is only 2-3 hours long, so there's not a lot of time for character building.
I honestly just didn't like the aimless wandering, and the objective in the menu screen doesn't help at all. I was able to figure out a good portion of the game by myself, but I got to a few spots where I felt completely stuck, and the constant backtracking and running around room after room trying to find that one spot I missed drove me nuts. My strategy of turning on the lights in rooms I'd been in didn't help if I missed an object or didn't interact with it correctly. If the game had a map system with a flashing blip or something to indicate your floor, it would have been more fun.
As it stands, Psychroma does a great job giving up a disturbing cyberpunk mystery of hospitalization, experimentation, and creepy family values. The game dives into gender identity a bit (that's going to piss some snowflakes off) and self-discovery. I felt the overall story was pretty good, the artwork was fantastic, and the atmosphere was quite haunting and depressing, but the actual gameplay held everything back some. The constant backtracking and item hunting will put a lot of players off.