Evil Tonight

First things first, the positive. I love the anime-ish, pixelated style of this game. The sort that's familiar and welcoming to any player to get into it even if you're accustomed to this sort of art style. It made it better where the game doesn't overly try to explain the setting and plot. You learn more as you play and discover different things that are secretly lurking about which is something I respect. Evil Tonight, being a Resident Evil-inspired survival horror game, I believe has most of the right components down to make it a great experience for anyone who is a fan of the genre. For example, limited health items and ammo forcing you to look around for any more hidden around while at the same time trying to conserve as many of them as much as you can for emergencies like enemies appearing out of nowhere from chest boxes or them cornering you, you have no choice but to use them, always being on your guard. The puzzles are self-exploiting but they do require you to do a lot of backtracking to either unlock different types of doors with the right key or take the item back where you need to to solve a puzzle. Thankfully the map isn't that big, and you may eventually get familiar with its layout. Something to be aware of. There are also other types of puzzles that you can solve on the spot, like trying to order the different ballet models' poses in the right order with the information you are given and the answers to puzzles like this are all randomised but the way to solve them isn't which I wish more games did more of. Giving players agency to solve problems on their own rather than just looking up online for the answer which we are all guilty of, including me. Making it a great game for replays if you care about getting good overall stats and/or unlocking some achievements after completing it. The thing holding it back is the balancing. I played it on balances/normal but for me, it doesn't feel balanced enough. Either most of the weapons (except for the shotgun) don't deal enough damage or the enemy's having a lot of health points. Likewise, I believe the lack of health items is a bigger problem for me. And it made worse that a lot of times you complete the objective enemies jumpscare you within the location you're in, so if you ain't careful you may lose some health making a mistake or two. By the end of the game, I had no health items for the final bossfight which you can imagine was hard for me to defeat as there is a second stage. Eventually, I found the trick to cheesing the fight by going into the fight with no ammo for my weapon except for the shotgun (as it deals a lot of damage). Then once I run out of all of my ammo, I melee them dropping any random items. As long as I don't pick the dropped items the boss will keep spawning more items each time I melee them so you can imagine how the fight went. That's how I finally beat the game but it doesn't feel good that I have to exploit the boss this way to gather items that I could have got in other locations before. If this game were like this in any higher difficulty I wouldn't have this much of an issue with it, but for it to feel like this on balance difficulty? It doesn't feel right to recommend to anyone unless you have a lot of experience with any of the Resident Evil-style games. Evil Tonight is definitely met for those types of players which is more apparent with the way the stats and the achievements are designed. If those demographics were always the target audience I wish it were more noticeable in the game description. Something as simple as "for anyone with experience in Resident Evil games". Even so, I feel the developer alienated themselves by limiting the among of players who may be new to Resident Evil-like games or don't have much experience playing it (like myself) who could have picked up this game. Because generally, this game has all the right ingredients to be an enjoyable horror experience. It's such a shame the balance feels way off in my opinion.

The presentation itself is very nice, however I find myself getting frustrated more than having fun in this game, like other reviewers have noted it's lacking many quality of life features, the lack of a map of some sort is very irritating even if that's an intended design feature. Honestly I do not like the dialogue in the game, the main character is really rude to everyone they talk to, and for some reason keeps talking about how hot she is to children, it's very creepy and I don't know why she keeps trying to get validation on her attractiveness from children in the game, so it really makes it hard to return to this game. As well the enemies all feel like bullet sponges, you're given wayyy too much ammo, and every enemy just takes too many shots, I think it would be much better if you were given less ammo but the enemies had less health, but half the game I'm just spamming enemies with my handgun until they die and it never felt scary or tense, It really just feels like an action game with references to survival horror, so it's not really what I was looking for.

Although, it's less of a horror and more of an action game, it's still fun in gameplay aspect. Story is very simple, It's not that rich.

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It is surprisingly good.

A little rpg maker resident evil like, i like the pixel artstyle looks nice, the dialogue is a bad and cringeworthy but the gameplay is solid.

I have some mixed feelings: forget the story... it felt a little bland and lacked a satisfying conclusion. I was especially disappointed that the game didn't follow through on the characters mentioned in the diary logs. The gameplay, however, is great. It feels incredibly smooth, the level design is solid, and exploring the map to find its many secrets is a blast. The pixel art is also fantastic. My only major complaint is a specific design flaw that completely messed up my challenge runs. When you hit an enemy, they stagger back for a set time before attacking again. However, the stagger animation seems to be hard-coded to their physical backward movement. If you hit an enemy who is backed completely against a wall, they can't move backward, causing their stagger window to abruptly end in less than a tenth of a second. It is completely unexpected, and I lost both a no-save run and a no-healing run to this unintended mechanic. It’s no big deal if you are just playing casually, but it is a massive headache if you are hunting the extra achievement playthroughs. Bottom Line: The devs put out a good little game here. It isn't terribly long, running about 4 to 5 hours and it’s a perfect pickup on sale if you value smooth, tight gameplay over narrative.

It's a pretty cool game; think Illusion of Gaya, but with guns and creepy hallways with marked off keyholes. It's clearly inspired by Resident Evil, but it's about ghosts in a spooky dance conservatory. I've played some Resi-inspired games as of late, but this one I'm having the most fun with. The combat DOES get pretty stale, but I'm not a huge fan of this type of gameplay anyways, so take that as you may. I'm not sure if I'll finish, since I hit a spot that felt like a pretty steep difficulty curve after a major boss fight, but perhaps that's just by design, and if I play a little more I'll finally find that one gun I know I'm missing. Doesn't seem like there's much PAST beating the game, so maybe I'll come back to this one when I have more time. Until then, I recommend it, if anything I said above seems reasonable. It's a small studio game, making a SOLID SNES-like game.

This is a fun survival horror held down by some issues about difficulty. There are some parts of game where you can't find any kind of health item while you got to run around find key items and survive really hard mobs. I think if game had some sort of crafting system it would be beneficial and still not make the game easy. Other than that, story is cliche, music is great and game is fun to discover and play.

it's ok... it starts off really strong, but you will end up having to go through every door in the game every time you get a new item. there are simply too many random things that you need for puzzles and the areas simply aren't unique enough to remember. the biggest pain point this game has is no map, and considering everyone and their mother has complained about that I'm guessing the devs couldn't figure out how to implement one. you will end up using a guide or quitting at the halfway point, and if you have to look at a guide every 2 seconds, are you really even playing the game? might as well just look up the game on youtube