[quote] This game was reviewed with a key provided by the developer for free through Curator Connect. [/quote]
All We Need bills itself as a horror game, but it isn’t, or at least not really. Over the course of the game, there are two potential jumpscares—at one point, the player turns around to see a figure, and at another, the lights go out. It’s stretching the definition of jumpscare, or scary imagery, but neither is particularly scary. Instead, the horror is meant to be in understanding Jack’s backstory, diving into the psychological horror of being trapped in this mysterious forest. But even there, the game’s sense of horror falters.
All We Need does a fairly decent job building a spooky atmosphere. Its setting of a rainy forest at night is always a good choice, and navigating an empty world peopled only by the occasional tombstone or abandoned building demonstrates a solid understanding of how to build a creepy world. However, the creepiness of the world and how well it does in evoking this sense of suspense on the part of the player is dependent on how well the player can actually navigate and engage with it, and how immersed they’re actually able to become.
It’s here that All We Need begins to falter. The game and its controls were a bit tacky and stuttery when I played, and I found myself slightly distracted by them for much of the game. The game’s controls also don’t allow the player to jump, and I got stuck in the environment multiple times. When coupled the lack of a save function, and the fact that one of those occasions was two minutes from the end of the game, this did generate a bit of paranoia, albeit not in the way I suspect the game’s developers wanted me to feel.
However, it’s in the story and how it’s told that All We Need really lost me, and it’s worth considering why.
The story can be more charitably understood less as a horror story, and more as a journey of self-actualisation. We, as Jack, are moving through an unsettling world, collecting and reflecting on memories, with the ultimate intention of learning something about ourselves along the way. While there are elements of that story that are horrifying, this voyage of self-realisation is not itself a scary one.
The story is told through a combination of voiceover and drawn art, with gameplay stopping after most item interactions to provide a small cutscene and flesh out the backstory of the world. The player has the opportunity to interact with the scene through dialogue, but is otherwise a passive observer.
Nothing about this set-up is particularly problematic and indeed, might even have worked well were it not for the fact that these cutscenes move painfully slowly and are coupled with abysmal voice acting. My head canon is that Jack is either suffering from a concussion or died in the car crash and is burbling out his last words, because no other explanation makes sense for how bad his voice acting is.
Even bad voice acting can be excusable, though, except for the fact that, as a walking simulator, this is a game that lives and dies by the strength of its story. If I’m too distracted by the delivery to care about the story, it’s a death knell for the game as a whole.
Even though, if I’m honest, All We Need might have benefitted from me thinking less about the story.
All We Need draws heavily on the Native American myth of the Deer Woman. Throughout the stories told about her, Deer Woman serves as a force for societal cohesion, steering men away from infidelity and promiscuity, and punishing those who have wronged the women and children in their lives.
That Deer Woman is present is an immediate clue as to why Jack is trapped in this forest. Whatever led him to this place is a clear consequence of how he’s treated a woman in his life, and indeed, as the story progresses, that narrative is confirmed. Much of why Deer Woman considers Jack’s actions worthy of punishment is because of their cyclical nature; hurt people hurt people, and Jack’s actions have contributed to that unending cycle of violence. Him being in the forest is an attempt to grant him either redemption or damnation, depending on what he does with his time there.
The core of All We Need’s story is solid. The idea of exploring the nature of cyclical violence is a good one, and asking someone to consider the consequences of a casual action is a good premise for a “walking simulator”. The issue with All We Need, however, is that its core mechanic, the means by which Jack—and therefore the player—engage with this narrative and the lesson it’s teaching remain totally opaque until the very end of the game. We, as players, are told we shape the narrative, but have no idea what that narrative is or how we’re shaping it until the ending is revealed. This leads to the awkward conundrum where the character is meant to learn from experiences they don’t remember, and the player meant to learn a lesson from stories they are never told. While I like the idea of the mechanic of keeping the criteria under which a player is judged opaque until the end, in practice, this renders the story nonsensical and the lesson essentially meaningless.
Without a story, what is there? Without some sense of what our decisions actually mean, what is a player meant to get out of this game?
All We Need has, at its heart, an interesting idea about how to tell an unguided story about redemption. Where it falters, though, is in how that story is told, both from a mechanics and narrative perspective. It ends up as a muddled mess, trying to lay its heart bare, but ultimately revealing it needed a little more.
[quote] For the full version of this review - complete with screenshots and a playthrough video! - check out my review on [url=https://summitreviews.biz/article/3/review-all-we-need]Summit Reviews.[/url] [/quote]
