I almost never buy any game newly released because of price and bugs, but this looked so tempting I couldn't help it. Wish I had though.

No manual. No fucking manual. Trial and error as a way to learn in a survival game. What a concept. I'm not looking for strategy help, but knowing what buttons did what, what the number of moves means, what picking up or not picking up items means, how to use items, nothing. Trial and error. Incredible.

Also, too, some sort of warning box came up when I tried to save and quit. The print was too small for me to read so I just hit "Deny" as it appeared it was asking permission to either send or receive info somewhere. WTF is up with that? Then, of course, I hit DENY, and therefore couldn't SAVE and QUIT.

So, no manual, and it appears as though you need internet connection to save and quit.

Two strikes. Strike three is yes, there are bugs. The cursor stops working after awhile. You can click on things, and it makes the sound effects of clicking on things, but nothing on the screen happens.

I sure wish the money back guarantee included just not liking the game instead of just not being able to get it to work on your system. Because right now, this sucks. If they fix the bugs, come out with a manual, and remove the requirement to be connected to the internet to save (if that is indeed the case, as it appears) then I'll give it another go.

Probably should be a review, but it's too long. I'll put it here in case others wander in.

ADDED IN EDIT REGARDING INTERNET CONNECTION: No, it appears to save the game without an internet connection, so that box that came up asking for permission to do something must have been regarding something else. If a manual ever becomes available so that I care enough, I'll change my desktop text size to make it bigger so I can see what the damn thing says, but until a manual comes out, I'm done playing it anyway. Just wanted to let anyone know that whatever that box is, it isn't stopping my game from being saved when I hit deny because when I went back to check, it was at the same spot I had left.

Oh, THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!

Now why couldn't GOG just list that as a separate download since it's a PDF file so if one wants to just download the manual and read it before downloading the game they can????

Oh well, at least there is one. THANK YOU.

Yeah, it would make a LOT of sense to include it as a download.

I sent Judas a PM this morning and he added the manual within hours. :)

WOW!!! Thank you VERY MUCH. AND THANK YOU JUDAS!!!

Awesome. I've been reading it and man this game does sound really, really interesting and very challenging. I am now looking forward to playing it again and now understanding what the buttons do and what the choices I make mean. I can't thank all of you enough for your help.

This particular incident is indicative of why I always insist on a manual. I was frustrated and not even remotely interested in playing this after 15 or 20 minutes of actually playing the game. After some time reading the manual, I am hyped and very excited to play it.

Developers/sellers take that for what it's worth, but it's the absolute truth. I had no intention of picking this game back up. Now I'm looking forward to playing it and won't immediately write off any new releases I see from this developer.

I've been supporting NeoScav through it's beta for two years, so I'm probably biased, but I agree with the OP that this is an "old school" kind of game where first-time players NEED to read the manual. Not having it included with the GOG version is nuts!

The "popup" is the game asking if it can save files to your PC, because the game was designed in Flash and that's default behaviour for Flash. I don't think there's a way around it. It worried me the first time I saw it, too! Also note something very important: a lot of "cache cleaners" will delete NeoScav saves because they are stored in "temporary" folders used for Flash stuff.

AFAIK, the best workaround is to backup your saves just in case, which can be done manually or (if you can use Windows "batch files") using my hacky workaround here:
http://bluebottlegames.com/main/node/1280

For even more help, there is also a pretty extensive wiki. It's fallen a bit behind because of all the changes, but we're in the process of updating it. You can find it . Till then, the official [url=http://bluebottlegames.com/main/forum]Bluebottlegames.com forums are a good place to ask questions and get more answers than you ever wanted. ;)