A remastered version of my first ever custom story "Orion", released in 2018.
What I've seen is decent design and atmosphere, party to the credit of yourself and also Lester's, whose assets were put mostly to good use, so were the ones from Amadeus.
However what I've also seen is, so far basic story, very basic puzzles and that barely anything happens in the mod other than reading and solving things you have seen in a similar way a lot of times before.
I do admit it's a huge improvement upon the original, but as I learned from my own example, "remaking" old projects completely isn't really a worthwhile effort, usually what it tried to achieve at the time is not the best you can do right now. At best a patch is necessary to get your older mods up to your current skills, that's also how I settled for my own affairs.
All in all, I appreciate the effort you put into this, for now I'd give this a 6,5/10 for future encouragement. Give players action and more interesting things to do: the fire, water and earth puzzle was decent for example, and a good direction going forward. I'm hopeful for your upcoming projects, just be sure to keep this in mind.
A bland and boring experience for the most part.
In terms of level design, its decent enough, probably the only thing I would consider inherently superior to the original.
Despite some puzzle changes, they remain fairly basic. The one involving the magic door is the most unique one in this.
Scare factor and events are miserable, there are one or two events in the mansion maps that create enough tension that make you anticipate something significant to happen later on, but it falls flat on its face and the following maps have literally nothing to offer. You breeze through them while doing the occasional basic puzzle along the way.
I almost feel my maps were wasted effort on this one.
Story is okay, i suppose it serves as an introduction to the stuff in the upcoming Year Zero so im not gonna say too much about it.
There are no monsters, maybe its intentional, but that along with the lack of any proper events makes this entire thing have no tension at all.
EDIT: apparently there is a monster that appears in this cs, but the script area for it is completely avoidable which i happaned to do, im not gonna change my review because of poor script placement.
There are collectibles and hidden things in this custom story, i didnt find any. Maybe they would have made this custom story a bit more exciting, i dont feel motivated enough to go through this again simply to find them. But i wouldnt consider these secret things to apply to a generic playthrough.
Even if the way this entire custom story played out was intentional, that still doesnt make it good in my opinion.
Basically a straight up uneventful walking simulator.