would robots be doing in a hovercraft in purgatory? Seems to me this was about aliens trying to learn about humans by controlling them and using them as lab rats in controlled settings

It was a corporation of the future doing experiments on stress which has become a HUGE problem in their time period. So far into the future that they had developed a time machine. Since they were in the future, they knew exactly when people had died and were able to 'snatch' them and bring them to the island seconds before their deaths in order to conduct experiments in the hopes of finding ways of controlling stress in people.

Every scene outside of the island (mortuary, high rise, accident scene) were designed to test people's stress and how much they could handle via the implant. I thought the situations and puzzles were very well designed to test that. Unfortunately, those same puzzles are also the bane of many adventure gamers like timed sequences and timed arcade puzzles. How else to test a characters stress than to put some stress on the player so they could experience the same feelings that the character is experiencing? Taken as a whole, I thought the developers did a really good job with the conveying that feeling.

After seeing the attention to detail in the game, I assumed that all of these situations would somehow fit together so I never got overly frustrated - except for the seatbelt arcade puzzle which I thought was WAY too difficult. I think it's unfortunate that most players didn't seem to look too deeply at the overall picture and story and instead got frustrated or bored and wrote the game off too early.

thalidomide in the drawer