About 2 to 3 hours of psychological horror and convoluted navigation through the nightmares, if nothing else the visuals were very beautiful (in a disturbing kind of way), but unfortunately, I felt the game recycled some of its ideas a bit too much. It reminds me of a certain game, but I don't want to make a comparison because of the plot similarities, although I don't think the story is all that unique. I figured it was more of a chill walking game, but it actually takes some ideas from the RE1 remake with the knife counter and a few basic weapons. That said, you can dodge most of the enemies, and the game has a checkpoint every 2 minutes or so. There were a few parts that were slightly difficult, the game has a bit of a problem with stun locking (probably intentional), so getting grabbed next to 2 enemies is a bite rollercoaster.
I mean, there is not a lot to say about the narrative here if I am being completely honest, you have 3 characters and the game only covers a few locations (one house and a subway inside a nightmare), and as you might guess there is something that happened to the family in the past. I kinda expected it to make some kind of unique twist or change the formula a bit, but the ending was very much exactly what I expected.
However, I still like all of the detail in the rooms, the game has a lot of background material and various world-building - I was interested in the story, I just wish it was a bit different.
As already mentioned, the design if the scenery is really the best part here, just the coloring and the gore look very satisfying, plus the enemies feel very uncanny and unpleasant to interact with. As far as I can tell only 2 of the 4 regular enemies can be killed, and I didn't particularly like that design choice, you mostly use bullets to stun or give you a bit of room to dodge. The ammo conservation is not a very big part of the experience, the game resets your inventory between the dreams, so it never really felt like I really had to watch my bullets, aside from the last section, you can more or less just walk past the demon babies.
There are several optional achievements, and if I am not mistaken it seems there are a few hidden events, I accidentally walked into an enemy that seemingly appeared at random in the same location, not sure what that was about. It has some* optional exploration but not really, mostly illusion of exploration, the game wants you to follow a path, with a few extra rooms that don't have much purpose otherwise. I don't recall any puzzles, for the most part you just have to figure out where to go, and it's not always easy because of the "dream logic".
[h1] Pros: [/h1]
(+) The visuals were great, everything from various death animations to just the coloring of the rooms and the design of the scenery. Very gory, if you like that it has some interesting moments.
(+) I thought the atmosphere was not great, but decent enough and I was never really out of the experience, it's just that some unintuitive moments made me ignore the narrative a bit.
(+) I like all of the attempts at world-building, all of the useless trinkets you can look at. I wanted to follow the story, but in the end, it fees like something we have seen before many times.
[h1] Feedback: [/h1]
[u] Gameplay [/u] - for the puddle monsters, sometimes it was not clear where they are located, I know about the body parts, but in a place with the water sometimes I could not tell, so it felt too much like trial and error.
I am not sure if you really wanted the monsters to stunlock you, even 2 enemies can grab you endlessly. Not a big fan of zombies being immortal.
On a more subjective note, you went with the Resident Evil Remake combat and elements like ammo conservation, but because of the chapter changes and inventory reset, I felt like that part of the game didn't feel justified, I wish it played a bigger part in the game, maybe more conventional bosses you had to kill and not just run away from.
[u] Controls [/u] - for the keyboard, it would be nice if you could also hotkey all weapons to 1,2,3 as well as whatever you have now, I kinda wanted to map fire to mouse 1 too.
[u] Atmosphere [/u] - I liked the jump scares, but I felt like the first 60 minutes did the same thing as the last 60 minutes. I don't know, perhaps the game needed more slow moments with exploration, and fewer jumps.
[b] Overall Thoughts: 7/10 [/b]
My first impression was very good, I think it's a very good-looking horror game and I wish the combat mechanics had more purpose. Sadly, I just don't think the game did anything interesting with the narrative, I didn't mind the characters but for me, I think this is exactly the kind of plot you don't want to do, we have seen something similar so much over the years, I need something a little different. The game was priced a bit lower than I expected, so taking that into consideration, it's not bad, but it won't be a very memorable game for me.
[code]Niche, obscure and underrated games: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31294838-Hidden-Gem-Discovery/ [/code]
