G’day Guys Cass Here and today, I plan to dissect everything wrong with “Our Way” and clarify why you should avoid it like the plague.
The game quite literally is split into five different segments just as advertised, so why not rub salt in the wound and split the dissection the same way, starting with section 1.
“Repeating Rooms”- this entire section is basically just PT but extra lite and sugar-free. There’s almost nothing of note here besides a few nonsensically loud screamers and the games only flashlight, which surprisingly, they force you to pick up to proceed. After traversing two very minor key hunts which upon completion force you to listen to the abysmal voice acting and sound design. Unlocking doors with keys causes the player’s character to vocalize a garbled mess of words, and he will repeat this garbled mess for as many times as you can push the interact key. When you finally tire of listening to the angry mumblings, you’ll be greeted by the first real “obstacle,” the lack of light. The entire section is basically pitch black, with the only source of light being a few poorly placed candles and your recently acquired flashlight. Batteries in this game function like no others; a full battery lasts about 15 seconds. The first 10 seconds are a usable reasonably bright light, and the last 5 are entirely useless unfocused glare. Finally, after navigating through the pitch-black environment, you’ll notice that some random objects in the setting allow you to press “E” to interact; in most cases, this will do nothing except lock your mouse from moving horizontally or vertically. After restarting the game and using previous knowledge of the map to avoid wasting batteries, you’ll eventually come to a vent that asks you to interact with the crate below it to gain passage, or so you’d think. It turns out, unlike almost every single horror game in existence. You can go prone. Proning through the vent leads you to another disgustingly loud jumpscare and the 2nd area of the game.
Haunted House - The Haunted House section of the game is the worst idea and execution of said idea I have seen ever before in Indie Horror, all that “Quality sound processing.” Translates into a cat and mouse game where a random ambient noise will loop on a volume loud enough to be considered a jumpscare. Your goal is to find where the sound originates from, which doesn’t seem tricky until you realize that all the sound in the game has no direction. Almost all sounds are considered ambient, and all originate from your player character. Meaning that the “clue” of finding which room the sound is originating from doesn’t exist. You are left to run around aimlessly in the dark unless you cheat and exploit a massive gaping hole in coding logic that prevents you from dropping essential items. Such as your flashlight and batteries, if you do try to drop either of those items, you will instead drop a duplicate and keep the original. You essentially are given infinite batteries, which provides you with a somewhat solid chance of escaping the horror house as long as you turn your volume down and enjoy looping the same seven different rooms repeatedly until the game decides to open the door. After exhausting all the sounds that freesounds.org could provide, the next area’s entrance opens, which is where the story ends unless you have duplicated batteries. The stairs down to the cellar having a massive corner of geometry stopping progress that you can only see if you have a torch and must be crouched under to continue.
A Cellar - The Cellar is the shortest part of the game, a straight sprint to the end of a dimly lit hallway sparsely populated with screamers. At the end of the “cellar” is yet another battery check where, for no reason, the entire map is pitch black and tries to force you to walk down a staircase, battery dupe, and buckle up.
Maze - Mazes typically drag good indie horror games down; here, they pull an already garbage fire of an experience straight into patience-testing territory. There’s no trick, no fancy glitch to get through, and to make matters worse, the developer just completely forgot to make the wall texture two ways. So if you manage to make even minimal progress into the maze, turning around causes the labyrinth walls to disappear. This makes it almost impossible to keep your bearings; my solution was to continually guess a path and follow the ambient sounds’ mumbling until I found myself crammed into yet another narrow hallway leading to the game’s final part.
Hospital - Realizing that the player was about to finish what little was left, the developer threw his final holy hand grenade. Random screaming, a heartbeat monitor, obnoxiously loud flatlining and a child crying all layered on top of each other at the same ear piercingly loud volume. Most of the final map is just a flipped map asset with very few alterations; the staircase to further the plot is cleverly hidden in the hospital’s pitch-black corner. Which if you do manage to find welcomes you to experience not one, not two or three but seven jumpscares back to back in under 15 seconds. After all that and your character walking into a bright white elevator, the player character mentions that he doesn’t “want to wake up and just wants the voices to stop,” queue credits.
I cannot stress enough that every jumpscare in this game was loud enough to cause headphone crackling. I spent most of the editing process, reducing the game’s output to a level resembling normal.
This was offensively bad.
Speaking of offensively bad, here’s my playthrough of this train wreck.
https://youtu.be/-c2HuqCiQfA
