Benign Land

This would have been perfect as a free experimental art "game". But for 5€ at the time of writing, I absolutely cannot recommend it. [h3]First, the "narrative"[/h3] Supposedly it is about various events in Northern Ireland. I say "supposedly" because other than the landscape hinting at it, you would have no idea what this is supposed to be about. At the start there was a warning that this contains imagery and content about political unrest and that it may cause discomfort. I cannot see what that was about since this experience presents it all as shallow as it can be. Maybe something would be vaguely recognizeable to people that experienced some of it firsthand, but even then I don't think it is that recognizeable. [h3]Graphics[/h3] Visually the "game" looks nice, it is VERY dreamlike, so everything is very foggy and blurry. Basically they've enabled any post-processing effect the Unreal Engine offers... For the dreamlike experience they aimed at this might be fine, but this also causes heavy drawbacks, see the point "Technical" below. [h3]"Gameplay"[/h3] Honestly, there isn't any. This is even less interactive than most narrative "walking simulators" I have played. The "gameplay" consists of floating through various extemely short scenes and reaching a portal to the next scene. There is also no verticality, no jumping, no alternative paths, nothing else to discover. Mostly it's enough to keep the joystick (or keyboard equivalent, didn't use it myself here) pressed forwards an that's it. The controls are extremely floaty, like controlling a hovercraft. It probaly would have been enough to turn this into a non-interactive short-film with little effort. [h3]Audio (Sound/Music)[/h3] The soundtrack is quite decent, a mix of ethereal drones, fragments of unrecognizeable spoken words, chants, weeping, etc... Sometimes some drumbeats sounding like distant weapons firing or bombs going off. This is actually fitting with the intended theme of the experience, and I kinda like it! [h3]Technical[/h3] Making heavy use of all of the "features" of Unreal Engine without regard for any optimization has some serious drawbacks. This game is locked to a mere 30 FPS, even the main menu feels stuttery. But even with 30 FPS, the game drops a few frames from time to time, making me believe this was an intentional choice to not completely overwhelm a graphics cards, since it doesn't go any higher anyway... I feel like in terms of performace this might be the worst offender I have seen yet with Unreal Engine. And all of this basically just amounts to running an interactive blurry shortfilm using over 10GB of disk space and several hundred Watts of power while running. "Optimization? Efficiency? Never heard of 'em" I have also found an issue that this game launches with the wrong resolution (1080p instead of 1440p) but it did not stretch the image, instead a 1080p-window anchored itself to the top left screen corner and navigating the menu to change resolution was a little challenging because the mouse location did not map correctly to the actual UI. [h3]Conclusion and Price[/h3] At the current price of 5€ this is not worth it, at all. All of the "scenes" (many of them very similar) can be seen in less than 30 minutes. Any events and themes this experience is supposed to cover are very vague. If this were free, I'd say it's fine for nice short experience, but over 1€ I'd say is not worth it. And if the price would be donated to a good cause that would be a different story as well, but I don't think that's happening here... so thumbs down from me sadly