I got no idea why this game has got so many positive reviews, my experience with it was bad. Now, this was made by a solo dev, and as much as I wana be forgiving with those kind of solo projects, the fact that is 9$ washes that away.
I will start with was my biggest problem with the game, navigation. The maps are build like mazes, you can barely find your way around and get even more lost if you use the map. The map is made to be followed semi-manually I would say, it shows where you are as a circle, so, it gives you just the general area you are in, not a precise arrow or dot on the map like other games, and you gotta find out yourself where to go and in which direction you are facing in relation with the map. If you find this kind of immersion, that’s fine, it is a pro for you, but for me it felt like a GPS showing my position as a general area and only updates to another area once I manage to leave the current area.
And I am not exaggerating when saying the maps/levels are built like mazes. They are filled with dead ends, rooms/zones without anything of value and barely implemented pointers which mark important rooms/zones (you know, flashing lights pointing to an important door, or walls smeared with blood while others are clean to lure players through it, things like that).
Flashlight is the next worst thing. Most of the levels are pitch dark, which means you will use the flashlight a lot and the way it illuminates is a bright small circle in the middle of the screen, which means most of the time you will navigate with a small circle and black edges. And to add to the pain, the cursor when you point at an interactive item is white, so it gets masked by the flashlight…
Now for the enemies. They are easy to deal with. Even the boss, I killed him with 0 damage taken, but I do give credit the to the game, it doesn’t have that immortal 1-shot cliché which makes you run around aimlessly until you find a plot device. But on the bad side, enemies tend to glitch out, they sometimes clip through walls/doors and take too much to kill, so they are more annoying than challenging. Speaking of enemies, for the combat. I will start saying that hitting them in the head only sometimes counts (it should deal extra dmg), maybe this is why it feels like the enemies are bullet sponges. So, the hitboxes are off, however you at least got stealth kills. Walk, don’t run, to an enemy with its back turned and shank him in the back, 1 shot – 1 kill.
However, the immersion is broken with the weapons. For some reason it gives you a bunch modern weapons despite the game being set somewhere in the 90’s – early 00’s, it feels like the dev liked certain weapons and just slapped them in the game. And regarding immersion, the game is never quiet, always there is something creaking, screaming, laughing, etc.. and when you start to look around there is nothing, even after you clear up the whole mansion from enemies. There is even instances with keypads which trigger enemy sound effects even if you put the correct number or not, but there are no enemies around.
Saving is also an issue. It is autosave only, and that happens when you enter new zones. If you die you also gotta redo the whole thing from that savepoint, so, good thing enemies are easy. On the not so bright side, you can barely find healing packs.
Optimization is also bad, but since I got an old PC I won’t complain. It was playable, that’s all, in the lowest settings, not that you can customize much in this regard cuz there are 3 settings, resolution, graphics settings (from good to fantastic without any explanation on what each does) and a volume slider.
BTW, the gameplay is based on running around the maze-like maps I mentioned to find keys/items which are used to unlock the next level.
Anyway, I think this is long enough. I will say it, if this was free or about 1 buck then yeah, it would’ve fully give it a recommend, but with this price tag, nah. But it does seem that the dev did learn and priced the next two games at 4$ or bellow, not the sure how good are the ones priced at 15$ but maybe in the future I’ll try em. But for now, I got chapter 2 to play and if it’s anything like this one, I can just reference this review to shorten the one for that game.
