encrypted_nightmares

This is the story of a man that's been kidnapped and held inside a remote ramshackle building filled with cameras following his every move...and you are the one operating the cameras. Similar in vein to games like Night Trap and Not For Broadcast, the game is mainly an interactive FMV as your role is to switch between a series of nine live feeds to keep the eye on the action. Doing so increases your viewer count and bitcoin donations while the victim of your torment copes with the situation. While there is not a lot of interactivity beyond that, it's not often you get a solo dev with the commitment to make an FMV game and make it work, so I'm very happy to recommend this!

I decided to give this game a try as a fan of found footage horror and frequent patron of small indie projects. Prior to playing, I noted that the premise reminded me of the 2013 film 'The Den'. The idea here is decent and the game looks great visually between the minimalist UI and grungy basement setting, but the gameplay turned out to be very bare bones. As the player, your only goal is to switch between different camera views within a small maze-like building to try to capture the actions of a wandering kidnapping victim and his assumed captors. Without spoiling what happens, the scenario that ultimately unfolded ended up feeling fairly Scooby-Doo-esque (i.e. visually tame and humorously stretched out). Adding onto this problem was that the displayed chat window for the stream viewers usually contained conversation seemingly unrelated to the events actively unfolding at any given time, further diminishing player immersion. I'm giving it a positive review mainly for the novelty, but I think there is a ton of room for improvement in the story department, and potentially a lot of little gameplay tweaks to provide better player engagement and allow for more replay value. Final note: I already did 2 playthroughs but annoyingly still haven't obtained the 300 coins achievement despite following the action fairly closely in my view.

Very nice horror game totally worth the price, now I tryna figure out how to get 300 coins achievement.

This game has real time stuff, it makes for me top game in this category.

Definitely worth the 3 bucks I paid, but I sadly don't see myself returning to it any time soon. It was a pretty one note horror experience that had potential to be interesting, it just didn't capitalize on the tension very well in the end. This felt like it could have been an intro experience to a wider sim about running these red room experiences, but as a standalone game it felt closer to a short film than an interactive experience. That said, it felt artsy, raw, and was compelling, even if it didn't pay off IMHO. The chat was funny, but again I felt like with a longer experience we could be following these people's bizarre friendships as a B plot. I wish there were a "Maybe " option for steam reviews, because this is definitely for a certain type of person.

Overall, pretty decent. I did find that a lot of the motion notifications meant nothing and a lot of the video scenes didn't sync up with characters moving into different areas where I knew it should have. I also encountered what I assume was a bug toward the end where camera one just permanently stayed frozen on a scene of the main character so I didn't see anything happen for like 10 minutes (assuming the action was happening but I couldn't see it). But this is indie so I can't dog too hard. I'd love to see either this continue to receive updates for more story and better motion detection to guide it ( I didn't know where i was supposed to look for most of the game if I'm being real). Worth the play! A fun little hour long game!

Good mix of found footage videos and simple but interesting gameplay. Vibe is cool and it is very cheap game so totally worth it to spend one hour on it and enjoy something new in found footage genre.

the tension is real

Идея и визуал норм. Можно было бы придумать много разных интересных интеракций, но вместо этого мы просто сидим и смотрим видео с камер, где два глухих и слепых мужика ходят полчаса кругами по подвалу, а потом по-мужски прощаются и расходятся по домам. Определённо треш, сделанный, чисто чтобы сделать.

not really a game