***This review contains MAD SPOILERS***
It's subjective, but if you're looking to get scared, this game does a pretty good job of making that happen.
Unfortunately, that's the best thing I can say about it. It's a collection of unsettling environments wrapped in a buggy walking simulator. It severely lacks both polish and direction. The visuals could use some work in a lot of areas, particularly on scene transitions. However, what bothered me the most was the story, because the game puts so much emphasis on it.
The story is subpar. It basically follows a group of four friends. They formed a club in high school and were pretty cool with each other, then they randomly decided to explore an abandoned train station. One of them ends up getting run over by a train... that was apparently being driven by a crazy hobo scientist. Somehow. The rest of the friends went their separate ways for 7 years, before getting kidnapped by that same hobo and forced into VR headsets. The VR headsets force you to sleep and are capable of killing you in real life. They are also somehow hooked up to some magical brain-crystals, which were created in a lab by that hobo before he became a hobo. The friends are tasked with overcoming their personal demons, which are scary and frightening. Eventually they do, only to find out that the whole reason they were doing this was so they could get over themselves, because apparently they can't be possessed by dead kids while they still have emotional baggage. Fortunately, only one of the dead kids was trying to possess them, but the only thing she was able to accomplish was killing that hobo. Somehow. Yeah, he's dead now. The rest of the dead kids go ahead and let the protagonists escape from VR. Oh, and their dead friend who got run over by a train was there... but then he died again. The friends decide to become friends again, and idly wonder if the police will ever find those brain-crystals... which are still at large... because, I don't know, they can move or something? They're rocks.
Trust me, I worded that the best way I could. Much of the story is awkwardly worded and awkwardly paced. It constantly skips back and forth between the present and the past within an array of "dreams" the characters are having, interspersed with not-particularly-well-done dialogue. Characters frequently blurt out things that seem either out of character or inappropriate for the situation. At first, you play it off as glitches in the VR simulation, but eventually you realize the writing just isn't good.
Speaking of the characters, only one of them has a proper backstory fleshed out, that character being Liam. This concerns me because he's not really the main protagonist, but since he's the only character you know anything about by the end of the story, he feels as if he is. He had problems with his career and his marriage due to problems with his father, and he wasn't dealing with any of it in the best way. Okay, well done. What about everyone else? Well, you find out about Thomas (the actual main character) and his issues with his father, but you never delve into what he's been doing for the past 7 years. He's peeping on some girl through a telescope, but that's never explored. You find out about Aubrey's social anxiety, but you get conflicting information concerning her grandmother. Did she kill her grandmother? I don't know, they conveniently cut to a different scene when she was about to talk about it. Which, by the way, she was doing while standing directly over Thomas's blood-covered body (he got hit by a virtual train), but apparently him being dead wasn't important enough to influence the conversation. Aaron has some connection to the hobo and the underground experiments, maybe, but he's the one that got run over by a train in real life, and when you get run over by a train, we officially stop caring about your life.
...oh yeah, I forgot to talk about the gameplay. Well, what happens is that you have a sprint button, but that sprint button doesn't actually do anything. So you walk around in the dark using the arrow keys, looking for little white dots. Every area is always dark all the time, so you're stuck looking at a small circle on your screen for 95% of the game. Occasionally, a puzzle will pop up, and then a rather disinterested monster will lazily follow you around as you try to solve it. You can't fight most of the time, but that's okay, because you're both too fast and too thicc for anything to be of any serious danger to you, anyway. I said the game was scary, I didn't say it was hard.
On the merits of simply being a 2D horror game, it works, and I will say it's worth the asking price when it's on sale. It just doesn't deliver on anything else. This would have been a better game if they just didn't bother with cutscenes at all and just let the game be a long series of disconnected scares.
