Misery Mansion

Misery Mansion is a psychological/survival horror game made by solo developer Manic Mice. Considering it is their first game, it is a pretty good effort but it does have flaws. The overall experience had me creeping around the mansion slowly with well executed audio-visual elements and environmental design. I mostly felt danger was just around the corner and the paintings gave me goosebumps. It took some practice to figure out how the enemy AI behaves and how to measure its distance (due to blurry/hallucinating screen effects the closer it got) from the player location. However, this did become slightly frustrating with some enemy encounters and a slog to try and overcome it - maybe I was just bad at the game. Unfortunately, the game suffers from frequent, but short frame rate drops when loading new areas. This is frustrating towards the end with the enemy patrolling around the mansion. This is probably a 3-4 hour experience if played slow and patiently. It is not worth the current asking price, so wait for a sale as I did and pick it up for a short horror game experience. Although it has ups and downs, I enjoyed most of my time playing it. Verdict: 6 / 10