CULT OF FLIES

It all begins with the death of your grandmother, who allegedly took her own life. After the funeral, you return to the family home and go to sleep. The rest does not last long, as you are awakened by the sound of a gramophone playing downstairs. Soon after, you hear something moving in your grandmother’s room, and then the lights go out. First, the visual design deserves mention. The game uses a grainy, monochromatic sepia filter that makes it feel as though it came from the last century, reminiscent of an arthouse film. However, the overall quality and atmosphere depend heavily on the strength of your hardware. Despite the seemingly undemanding visuals, the optimization is quite poor. On the lowest preset settings, most of the detail disappears and the atmosphere suffers, with no shadows and lighting that is far too bright. On higher settings, the game struggles with stuttering and noticeable frame rate spikes, especially when looking in certain directions. The house itself does not offer much to explore beyond a few pictures you can examine. As is often the case in such games, nothing is clearly marked, and you need to get close. You must then move the dot in the center of the screen over objects of interest and click the mouse button. Sometimes you receive a brief comment, and other times there is no feedback at all. Unfortunately, this lack of feedback also extends to the objectives, which are never clearly presented. As a result, you spend time wandering without knowing exactly what needs to be done. For example, the first task is to turn off all the lights, but you are never informed when the task is complete or when you can return to your room. The second task requires a code that can be found on a picture on the porch, yet it is barely visible. If you manage to progress, you eventually reach a series of tunnels that are more straightforward and contain no real puzzles, unless stumbling upon a tiny opening in the darkness counts as one. When you reach the end of this section, the game abruptly concludes in less than half an hour. Given the price, the overall experience feels disappointing and forgettable. It should be significantly cheaper, closer to the two-dollar range. Even that might be generous considering the numerous bugs. During my first attempt, I became stuck on some garbage in the kitchen. On my second attempt, clicking the photo album a second time consistently broke the game. There is no save feature, and even more astonishingly, there is no proper way to exit because the menu is completely missing. The only option is to force quit using the Alt F4 shortcut.