Yay! One of my excruciatingly long reviews!
Overall it's a definite "worth the money" in my book. The asking price is fair for the quality of what you get. I'd say especially so if you're a fan of liminal space games.
Just so this aspect is abundantly clear:
At no point are you being chased by entities or dealing with cheap jump scares. (Or any jump scares for that matter.) This game has neither of those.
The eeriness comes through the environments and occasionally unsettling background noises. For example, in one area there's a subtle rumble that keeps getting louder and louder as you progress, though with no apparent source that's identifiable. Things like that.
One thing worth mentioning (that I've seen at least one or two people gripe about) is that there's no flashlight. To be completely honest, you really don't need it anyway. I can only think of just a couple of few spots (not even whole areas) where one would have been nice to have, but by no means necessary. Such instances were VERY few and far between, mostly being in the initial backrooms area. The way the lighting in the environments have been done up though, I think it would clash with the visual aesthetic and atmosphere that's already natively present. The way things are, they work and work well, imo.
The VHS aesthetic is... Ok. They went with what the game is calling the MPEG format of old. It bumps the [artificial] res down to either 480P or 540P. I wouldn't call it true 480 or 540. Think more within the realm of late-90s or early 2000s MiniDV tapes with [artificial] compression artifacts and all, but as a heavy mask so you don't feel like you're looking at pixel art or something. It definitely landed the early MPEG feeling though, that much is true. Perhaps a little too well in one specific aspect, where you're getting those color gradient rings appearing under lightsources. After a little while you don't really notice that bit, though. Perhaps my one big pain point with it in general was how it deals with VERY dark areas. You get a lot of flickering and large pixelated blobs.
If the dev reads this, I might tone down how it acts in dark areas a bit than the way it currently does. (Maybe with some dithering for smoother gradients on both shadows and lighting.) That old format, especially with MiniDV, usually produced more of that colorful flicker noise (which you do already have, and captured pretty decently I might add) than it would large flickering pixel blobs. I'm also assuming MiniDV the type of "tape" you had in mind with the filter (though VHS would have been about the same, sans certain resolution and compression artifacts depending on your camcorder), and you weren't aiming for how things looked through an early 2000s digital point-and-shoot camera which WOULD do that kind of pixelated blobiness in low light conditions at times - depending on if it were a decent model or the cheaper kind. (Sony's used to have issues with that... A lot...) Tapes (MiniDV or VHS) tended to handle that kind of thing much better than the old point-and-shoot digital cameras of old did anyway. (This is coming from someone who used a whole lot of both in the early to late 2000s. Hence the long-winded focus on it.)
I played with it on the whole time though, so yeah...
I do enjoy my fair share of backrooms/liminal space walking sims, and as such have played a healthy chunk of them. With that in mind, one thing I really need to compliment the developer on is that general floorplan and layout across the entire game is VERY well done. There was definite thought put in to each environment/level and how it played out. (If you want to call them levels. The whole thing is continuous with no breaks, though if you're familiar in any way with backrooms or liminal space games, you probably get what I mean.) That particular aspect is one of, if not arguably the single MOST critical aspect for games within this genre, and it's clear that care was put into it.
I never really got stuck in loops from an overly complex floor plan, yet right out of the gate - especially in the starting backrooms - it's very easy to get disoriented. (I mean that in a positive way.) Even then, you never really get that feeling of being stuck; things still manage to progress onwards somehow. After the backrooms, things become perhaps a bit more straightforward in how to advance, though I'd hesitate to linear by any means. There's perhaps just not quite as much chaotic variety in trying to figure out how to keep moving forward. That's not meant to be a negative criticism, more just an observation. (I also don't want to give the impression that I'm implying there's little variety after the first area or two, because that's not the case. There still is.)
I'd say the game's best sense of unease really peaks around the hotel area. It did for me anyway. Something about that place and the following areas in the way they flowed gave that solid sense of isolation mixed with the intuitive sense to still keep your guard up. I'll admit that part of that impression may also be due in part to having gone through so many yellow backrooms and poolrooms in the past with other games. The unease is still there throughout those others in this one, no question, but the other environments/levels in the game that aren't the standard backrooms / poolrooms trope perhaps make if feel a bit more fresh.
I've only done the one full playthrough right now, but from what I can tell, I would say there's definite replay value. There were plenty of other paths or routes I didn't take and areas I didn't explore further. (Sans the poolrooms, which did seem rather linear, though I also didn't try very hard to go off the obvious path. There may be a number of areas I didn't come across there or paths I think to poke at.) It doesn't seem there's only one singular path to get from point A to point B, especially in the earlier levels. I somehow doubt I magically picked the singular perfect path in the very first playthrough, or that it was the only possible route I could have taken from A to B, so undoubtedly there is more that I haven't found/explored yet. (That's within a given level, not that I think I skipped entire huge swaths of the game. I won't exclude the possibility I inadvertently did that, though.)
The part about it being on the shorter side is perhaps where I'm feeling most conflicted. The pacing and flow are great, but... I'm left wanting more of it by the time it concludes.
- On the positive side of that, no one area ever feels like it overstays its welcome. At all. You're transitioning between levels/zones at a good pace, which leaves things feeling consistently fresh and not monotonous. The pacing does feel very organic.
- On the negative side, given how well laid out things are and how well the atmosphere in the various levels were done, it does leave me wishing that the were longer than they presently are. Perhaps notably so, but that's also assuming that the same level of care and quality that's presently there would be continuous throughout such an expansion. Exploration in the game feels rewarding, and this is definitely a case where it would benefit from larger levels. The ending is somewhat abrupt, and at that point you're left wanting more.
The game is short enough that you can do a playthrough in a single sitting without having to dedicate 4 hours in a single sitting to it. As far as I can tell there is no save function, but given the length, that's fine. Overall, it's a great liminal game. Highly recommend if you're a fan of the genre.
I wouldn't really expect the dev to expand further upon this particular game (outside of some some QoL additions, of which some were apparently added last year), but I will definitely be watching to see if he releases more games of this type. If they're at the same level of quality as this one is, I'll definitely be buying it. (Hopefully where the game is longer to soak in more of the setting.)
