TL;DR - No Spoilers - A short (~2 hrs) horror game with decent set pieces and good spooks marred by an overwhelming sense of various "jank" and inexperienced developers. Buy if you're a fan of early 2010s horror, otherwise, skip.
I picked this game up for 13.50 USD on the Steam Summer Sale and what I got was a short horror game clearly made by an inexperienced dev team. I initially thought this would be a cheap unity swap game, and I got something a little different.
First off, the good: This game did a great job at building tension. The story is that you play as a detective investigating into a series of homicides in southwest Pennsylvania. Right off the bat, it makes it clear that there's a supernatural element to the homicides, and the player is instantly put on guard. This makes the gradual fall into more elements not-of-our-reality more palatable, and keeps you on your toes even after the game fully embraces this element. While I won't say the story is particularly gripping, it did keep enough hanging questions to keep me interested for the entire playtime.
Secondly, the game has some great set-pieces. I don't want to spoil them too much, but there's a good moment near the middle of the game where you go into a multi-storied building with several rooms. The main antagonist has been teased constantly up until then, and the tension is thick as you slowly traverse through this building that has great narrative importance. These scares definitely feel like the devs took inspiration from other horror media and tried their own spin on certain tropes present in these types of horror games.
Thirdly, the game ran pretty great! I didn't note any technical issues during my entire game session, and the only glitch I saw was when a light switch model began rapidly switching between the on and off positions, creating this weird strobe-like effect. It was the only glitch I noticed, otherwise this game ran very smooth, even when a lot was happening on screen.
Unfortunately, this game has a few problems.
To start, this game is layered thick with jank. Not technical issues or bugs, but developer oversights, questionable design decisions, and poor programming. Doors are coded to be opened in one specific way, where you click and drag the mouse to open the door in one specific direction--Even if the door swings the other way. An enemy got stuck on a railing once. Reading notes requires standing in a near-perfect pixel spot and moving your mouse to a near-perfect angle for the note to appear. And the spelling errors--Every note in this game had some kind of error that an English teacher would take points off for. These errors were on documents that, in-universe, were distributed by the government, and not in a little "Ooh, that's a hint!" kind of way. Oddly enough, the only time a spelling error wasn't present was when I read a note written by a ten year old girl, who, for some reason, used the word "Furious" in a diary-entry. That kid's a genius. Your wife, writing you a personal note, signs it as "Your Wife" which makes me think her first and last name is literally "Your Wife."
Second, the "Groundhog Day" loop that happens in the Protagonist's house is great for building tension, but the loops last far too long without things happening. Get up, silence the alarm clock, walk downstairs, grab lighter, grab key, go into basement, grab jacket, repeat. Notes parsed throughout the loops make it feel like you're progressing, and some of the better scares happen during these loops, but the game becomes so much better once the house is left behind and the world opens up a bit with you leaving that for a different environment.
Lastly, the story doesn't end exactly with everything perfectly explained. There's a lot of room left for interpretation and the logical progression of events for the game doesn't feel like it's built up like a detective story, more like a horror story or ghost story ABOUT a detective. Don't expect to be able to solve the crime by the time the credits roll, I don't even know the full picture.
And I think that's the best way to describe this dev team's first outing, it's a game with a lot of promise and some good ideas that is weighed down by their lack of experience and some strange decisions. If the team decides to brush up and make a sequel in a few years, I'd check it out. I was a big fan of that 2010s-era "Free Horror Game from Gamejolt" and this feels like someone decided to put effort into one of those so they could feel good about monetizing it.
Soft Recommend.
