izigame.me

This was a interesting game for me, because it wasn't quite what I had expected. It's a kind of game I had never imagined before: a narrative stealth game.
I first heard about it from a FastLawyer review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GlDFMFU-TMs

Stealth gameplay

As with a game I played and reviewed recently, Eternal Threads, this interactive experience is more about the story than the gameplay. "Intruders" has gameplay in the form of navigating the house without getting caught, but it's so basic that it makes sense why it only took me three hours to complete the game. The developers didn't create a robust set of stealth mechanics and instead they focused on creating the fantasy nightmare of being a child during a home invasion. This gameplay is too simple and repetitive for a game longer than just a few hours.
Your character is no Kevin McCallister, so the only thing he can do is quietly sneak through the house to get to each objective. The only mechanics to the stealth gameplay are:

Different noise levels from running/walking/crouching
Hiding in cabinets
Panic mini-game when an enemy is searching near the cabinet you're hiding in. (This never came up in my playthrough except the tutorial about it.)
There was just one distraction opportunity I found, a record player in the game room, but it wasn't necessary to make progress.

I was reminded of "Alien: Isolation," which had a similar "hide-and-seek" kind of stealth gameplay with an invincible enemy. However, Intruders didn't feel as natural and unpredictable as the Alien. The predefined and scripted enemy locations and patrol patterns make this not nearly as exhilarating as tango-ing with the Alien.

Story

I thought this story was focused and effective. It has a small number or characters, but we learn all of their motivations and personalities. The mystery begins immediately and eventually the shocking truth is revealed. Two endings are available.

VR and Visuals

I've been playing VR games since 2016 and this is the first time I've played a VR game with a gamepad. Usually I use mouse and keyboard for seated VR play, but these developers failed so hard at creating a good control scheme for M&KB, that there's a message before the main menu that you should use a controller. I'm fine with no support for motion controllers since the game is so simple there no reason for it and it allows the game to be playable in non-VR. But M&KB shouldn't be so clunky that I feel the gamepad works better for a first-person game. Other than that, the VR support is good enough for me.
The house looks very nice. It seems way too big for just two adults and two children, but this game wouldn't really work in a reasonably-sized single family home. Most of the game takes place at night but the lighting is gorgeous and they didn't make it too dark. The game is scary, but it's not meant to be dreadful or terrifying.
There's a brief section in the forest outside of the house, which I thought looked very bad. The environment looked very low-effort. Animation quality is much more noticeable for me when I'm viewing a game in VR and there were only a limited amount of performance-captured animations. Cutscenes weren't fully motion captured, so characters would stand in idle animations, and characters would move around with janky walking animations. It's not great, but like I said in a previous review, I can fill in the blanks with my imagination.

A game-breaker

I had a game-breaking bug in chapter 6: at the end, you open a door and Mike surprises Ben. My controls were locked and Mike was speaking, but he was magically sliding down the hallway, eventually going out of view. The game state was borked. Reloading the checkpoint lead to the same glitch. This is when I tabbed out to look at the community discussions, but nobody had mentioned this glitch. I restarted Chapter 6, unfortunately having to replay the entire thing since this encounter with Mike was supposed to be the end of the chapter, and the event proceeded properly.

Let's end this before it gets too long (it's already too long)

I liked Intruders as a VR experience and the story presents some very tough situations. I'm in a very tough situation, myself, and though the situation is completely different, I could feel the characters' desperation through my own experience. I think others might be able to connect with this story, too. Either way, there's a huge twist to keep you entertained.
I think the standard price of $19.99 is far too much for a 3 hour linear narrative with basic gameplay, but check it out on sale.