Absence

I saw this had no reviews and the description sounding interesting. I figure, for $10, it's gotta be something semi-good, I'll give it a shot. Nope, wrong again. Stock unity assets. Loading screens after walking 20 feet. Poor design choices. Generic environments. Uninspired gameplay. This is what I get for trusting steam and this developer. Not even entertaining enough for a Markiplier Let's Play. There's nothing horror or scary about this. I want a refund. **UPDATE: I got a refund. This is the second time ever out of my 800 something games I've requested a refund on. The other was War Z. ** Dev: I'm sorry to be so harsh, but you should seriously be ashamed charging $10 for this. And it's not like it's even an early access with plans to keep working on it.

[b]REVIEW COPY PROVIDED BY DEVELOPER[/b] As much as you want to encourage independent development in gaming, there are truly some creations that should never see the light of day. Take [b]Absence[/b]. It's far from the worst horror title on here but it shares a lot of their traits: it's dull, sparsely plotted, ugly, buggy and cobbled together with pre-purchased assets to the point where there are copies of 'The Daily News' lying around proclaiming that 'UNITY MAGIC IS HERE TO STAY!!!'. Come on. Really? You want that in your horror game? The stand-out mechanic here is that sprinting will eventually kill you. A red haze closes in around your field of vision as your heart begins to give out, doing more and more damage as you go. There's three enemies in the game: a bird, some sort of brain damaged starved gorilla that honks like a goose and the invisible water monster from [b]Amnesia[/b] and all of them will kill you in a single hit if you've been abusing the run key... which you will have been on account of it taking too bloody long to walk between locations. It's the random cobbled together nature of [b]Absence[/b], the sheer laziness of its design that kills it. First you're in a public park trying to grab a key from a crazed magpie, then you're running around a sewer flipping off power boxes, now you're in a refinery running around a lava pit...? What is this, Quantum Leap? You wander from a submerged flood tunnel to a warehouse in the space of one door. Good lord. Hope they're storing bath toys in there. Like I said, I don't want to crap all over what is obviously somebody's very early design effort but just because you make something like this doesn't mean you should sell it. This is the kind of project you make and revel in the experience of simply having made it, take what you've learned and move on; not charge £6.99 for it on Steam. Runthrough below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slIoO8f1eUo

Some truly horrific games have been made throughout history, games which have left us terrified, afraid, scared, shivering in our boots (or clogs, come on represent yall).. but even if a game hasn’t left you feeling any of these things you’d at the very least hope it was good... Sometimes horror games get made that leave you scratching your head and wondering WTF did you just play... Now I’m not going to say Absence was a bad game because it’s a unity asset flip,, I mean the game only cost .99 cent, if you go into the game expecting something awesome like Outlast or The Evil Within you’ll be highly disappointed. If you go into the game with an open mind you might find yourself having an hour or two of fun... Well actually.... The game really seems to miss the mark.. The first part of the game sees you wandering through a forest with no real direction, you’re greeted by Five or six “locations” a bathroom where you start, a tiny shack which has a flashlight, a set of swings where you can find a picture.... another tiny shack with pretty much nothing, another smaller room with a table because why not.. A locked gate, and a tent which you can clip through .... Awesome.. So after searching around forever you’ll eventually either quit or figure out you need to find a key to get through the locked gate.. The game hardly gets any better although I guess when you reach the sewer and the turd monster gives chase and you’re left to try and traverse the way too big sewer while trying not to over extend yourself and die, you’ll wonder why you’re even playing.. I mean I guess the ripped off version of a Demogorgon from Stranger things is kinda cool... Does the game get any better.. Not really, but it’s cheap and has one easy to get achievement provided you can sit through an hour of pretty much nothingness.. Gameplay - a walking simulator where you can interact with very few things, keys, generators, a flashlight. You can jump and go into high beam mode with your flashlight.. You can sprint, but it causes you to have a heartattack I suppose,,, overdoing it will cause you to die.. Awesome sauce. Pro’s Easy 100% achievements The Demogorgon is neat I guess.. About an hour of gameplay Con’s Kinda boring, no real direction on what you need to do The raven and your flashlight... LAME... The Turd monster is too fast and your run out of stamina too quickly.. Recommendation A game for .99 cent, which not only has easy achievements but also adds +1 to the game collection and to the completed games list.. AWESOME.. The game itself... not so much.. You can see that it had some potential to be a decent game, but either the developer lost his passion for this game or the unity assets became too costly.. While I won’t outright recommend this game if you’re looking for something decent to scratch that horror game itch, for those of us who enjoy the finer things in life, like making out e-peens’ bigger, this game will be perfect.. *Pro Tip - use the flashlight to blind that dirty raven.. If you run out of flashlight because that’s a thing apparently... restart the game and continue, you’re flashlight will be back and ready to roll..

[h1]"When horror turns into absurdity"[/h1] Absence is an atmospheric horror / exploration game like "Cry of fear". Unfortunately it still costs 5.99 EUR in Steamstore. Instead of being completly F2P. The only speciality is that you have a pulsemeter installed in your HUD. Too much running can even kill you. Quite unrealistic but nice for the challenge. In some situations this game is indeed mean. Birds attacking you at night without that you have a defending weapon or you can see them. In some dungeon a monster is chasing you in same speed that you exhaust and die of heart attack. And some waters contain a rushing death of which you cannot swim away fast enough. And then you get stuck at some stairs or micro-gaps and die trying. Sometimes it's pretty unfair. The graphics btw look good in the woods, lanterns and steamclouds. But also pretty bad like the ugly monster model or the endless boring dungeons. Somehow the options are unsafeable. I tried several times to deactivate the disturbing motion blur. The game changed it back itself and the resolution to one setting higher. Strange. Because of the unpolished state I was somekind of LMAO watching a LP (thanks to Fragnostic) before I played it by myself. I also figured out to simple jump on the monsters back to relax for a while. After 1 hour the whole fun was over and I got the one PhotoCollector achievement. Just buy it on sale or in a bundle. Otherwise keep your hands away.

Sadly, I can't recommend this title at this time. I feel like I need to give it a shot after a few months(and hopefully patches). Though this may simply fall into the 'Not for me' category personally. As you can see I don't even have an entire hour logged. This is not so much due to bugs as it is the frustration that I've dealt with in this game. [b]I really wanted to like this game.[/b] It has a lot of potential, but I feel like it sort of missed the mark for me. I'm not bothered by the length or aesthetic at all. Just the actual game itself. It wasn't fun that running kills is lethal. I feel like you already walk painfully slow but to be forever bound to moving so slowly everywhere was making me batty. I like to explore a lot so moving slowly can be very problematic when I'm trying to get back to what I was doing before I wandered off. Second, I kept dying to some strange beast creature that would spawn on top of me, knock me over, and appeared to be humping my unconscious face. This isn't a git gud situation. Sometimes pursuit music would play when it was following me, but more often than not it wouldn't. This left me feeling not scared but very confused about how this thing keeps spawning on top of me and one-shotting me. I am a huge fan of horror games and honestly it doesn't take much to scare me at all. But this game only came off as mildly spooky because I couldn't get past the frustration. It looks like there were a few who were able to complete the game without having the same problems as me which is cool. :) I didn't have the same experience though so it's gonna be a no from me until some changes are made(if at all).

The game was a little short and the story is a bit hard to put together. Careful attention to the notes and audio logs pieces it together. You have to figure out what is going on for yourself. This game does not lead you by the hand. I jumped out of my chair a couple of times. The health mechanic took a second for me to get used to, seems this girl can scare herself to death, literally. Overall I enjoyed the experience. You can tell the developer is a little inexperienced. If your looking for a good scare, play this in the dark with little sound in the room.

cons: ps1 graphics. worse than ps1 controls. cookie cutter graphics. terrible sound. cheap gameplay. awful awful awful. pros: first scare made me go "ACK ACK ACK!"

Definitely more of a school project over a game that can be sold for money. I was fairly horrified whilst playing this, not because of the “scary parts”, but because of how bad it was.

I got Absence for literally 2$ in a bundle with other 7 games. I never heard of it before. Then, I read the reviews. The reviewers of this game seemed to really having great fun mocking it. As a developer, this really angered me. One reviewer also received a free copy for evaluation and he even made a video for his own profit, literally spitting on it for half a hour. Ha-ha, so funny. Meh. So I decided to play it. Absence surely doesn't shine in storywriting, in gameplay or in the tech field but it's not THAT bad. We're talking about an indie game, which often means the budget is REALLY tight (often 0 or less) so you can't complain the developer for buying third party assets. It's not a game to pull out a full finished game. That said, I played the game for a while and it definitely delivers what promised. I jumped on my chair quite a few times, and was very anxious all the time. The environment isn't that bad, it just needed some more detail. So, yes, I enjoyed this game. A bit buggy, unpolished, with unfair difficulty in some points, but I liked it afterall. I would probably wait for a Steam sale to buy it, I have to be honest. I like to support indie games so yes, please consider the fact that you may also like it. It's easy to destroy other people's work, even for AAA titles, and there is nothing to be proud of when you do that for a smaller developer. Add it to your wishlist and buy it while on sale. My personal score il 5.8/10.

I love indie horror genre, so I naturally had to check this out. If you like indie exploratory games, this is a good one to explore. But don't spend too long exploring without checking behind you. Great jump scares and some interesting puzzles. Thanks for a cool game. Looking forward to what you come out with next.