Phobia

(This review contains Spoilers if that is what you want to call them, also it NEEDS a Warning for Flashing Lights/Epilepsy Warning - please implement this) Phobia makes me scared of games. Not in that sense of being spooked, but by not playing another game again. The game features, someone, that needs to "Penetrate a house". There's some massive text wall before that but let's ignore that. You then traverse through some extremely dark woods until you find a house and next minute, you are warped from one location to the next. And thus, Phobia becomes a nightmare. You go from these locations and you have a couple of things to do. First, you will probably get some monsters start charging at you (or run into a wall, depends really) and you can shoot them with the ONLY gun you get in the game which doesn't work at close range. You can insta-kill some monsters and some don't take any damage and the game doesn't explain that. If you get cornered by a monster, they just kill you and you are defenseless to their attacks. Also I hit doesn't stun you, it just takes chunk of your HP away until you die. (And as for Health, you drink wine to restore it which is barely anywhere in the game) Second, you have to find keys to open a door. Third, You have to find keys to open a door. So you go through these pretty rough looking environments trying to figure out what to do. You can look at "Notes" which give you clues and basically if you ain't trying to kill janky AI Monsters (That are probably the best looking assets in the "game"), you are looking for keys to enter a door somewhere. There's a room which is a trap and you can climb through a little manhole to escape, which was the most exciting bit of it. But the ending was super confusing. Not only do you have 2 massive Werewolves trying to rip you to bits, you are told to simply "RUN". So that's what you do, RUN. You go back through the woods you came in getting stuck on all sorts of trees and the lighting going extremely dark, then super shiny and bright, trying to go back and you get to a gate that has some Russian text pop up. I assume it asks you to get a key because of the key icon...thus begins our journey. An hour of walking around in circles in this super dark area of the woods trying to find a key. I finally find a shed like place to get the key and then yeet my way over to the end and I get to choose 4 doors. Ending 1: The game restarts and you are back at square one with no explanation. Also a jump scare flash. Ending 2: Zooms out from a door that has your characters name on it written in comic sans and that's it. Ending 3: Shows a flayed body lying in blood in a cage (From earlier in the game) and then end. Ending 4: Has a text wall saying that you quit your detective job and the germs of a Xenomorph are bad or something. Phobia is unfortunately just another indie game that won't get far. With some time and effort, this could maybe be an alright experience. But finding keys in a pitch black environment (or super bright, depends) is not that fun. And the monsters AI is just whack. Sorry folks, not the GOTY here.