Picked this game up on 90% off discount normally $19.99 and got it for $1.99 on a sale Steam has going on. Game is actually pretty good for those who like the Myst type of game play of trying to figure stuff out without directions. Its really easy to overlook a path you need to take when scaling the side of a hotel in which you see a platform to jump down to and miss the pink vines of flowers above it which also is a path of travel so I have found myself going in a few circles around a hotel trying to figure out why I couldn't get to a area where there was an item I needed to gather, to finally on the 2nd or 3rd time around take a much slower and cautious approach to it all and look around for an alternate means of travel in the game in which "DUH" I need to not leap down, but leap up to a pink flower vine and then I get to the chest that holds the material to gather for that level etc.
The weirdest part of the game so far was seeing some humanoid guy on the top of a building and wondering what type of interaction I will have with him. To finally make it over to where he was and he is nowhere to be found. So I was like "what the...." looked around to see if the guy moved around but nowhere to be found. Gathered the chest and then was leaving and then the outro leaving showed the backside of some sort of humanoid zombie like maybe sea creature guy watching me leave. So I was like OK THEN.... that is weird!
Game load was slow and audio was choppy at the most demanding parts of the game. Mainly the intro part of the game with piano music playing and her boat traveling through a flooded destroyed city after some sort of disaster where the ocean claimed what was once a large city. When playing this on my AMD FX-8350 8-core 4Ghz with 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM and 240GB SSD with Geforce GTX 780 TI 2GB I have no choppy audio and it loads much faster, but my electron sipper build that normally doesn't have choppy audio a AMD A8-5545m 1.7Ghz with 2.7Ghz turbo with 8GB DDR3 1600Mhz RAM and an old healthy but naturally noisy Maxtor 500GB HDD with built in GPU as part of the APU Quadcore the graphics are smooth but the audio at the most visually resource hungry part of the game gets choppy and I haven't had this issue in any other games of the over 200 games I play on this system. Looking at resouces the there is 1 of the 4 cores that is heavily hit over the others and perhaps the audio stream is competing for a single core that is heavily hit with other single threaded processing needs to where that core that's used for the audio starts to rattle the audio output. Once the most taxing part of the game is over with which is mainly the cinematic like automated hands off controls intro of the main character moving in the open world the audio clears up and the game plays just fine on this lightweight mobile processor. However the minute long intro on game launch I wasn't sure of the APU was going to cause the game to crash as for I have never heard an audio chop that caused a rattle in audio output ever before in this build.
The closest thing I can relate the audio chop rattle to was if you ever heard a speaker that was blown out but still able to make noise, so your able to hear music but it has a death rattle to it.
Looking online I didn't see any other complaints about audio for this game title, but it also isn't that popular of a game and I suppose most people play it on better hardware than an entry level gaming APU mobile processor.
For the fact that the problem goes away when the game is ready for play I will just live with it. If I knew the actual stream that is for audio and could set core affinity I suppose I could tell audio stream to use whichever core is lesser heavily loaded, however it might not be accessible due to hard coded in the game itself so its all likely running under the same identity as the EXE itself.
Well lots of snow outside with Winter storm in NH,USA and I need to go see if the snow blower will work, I don't think the wife will appreciate me playing video games as she is shoveling and I'm lazy in doors playing with video games.
http://www.pcgamer.com/submerged-tells-three-different-stories-without-saying-a-word/
