Propagation: Paradise Hotel

Guys, there's no way you stopped this game to make a stupid multiplayer game, that maybe good but I don't care. This game is a gem, you need to finish it. It's one of the best VR game I ever played. We need the rest. It was amazing from start to finish and it ends up abruptly. You had a gem right here. Its only default it is that it is too short. Please guys. F that coop game. Finish what you started, make it a big game. Seven to ten hour long. It was amazing, you obvioulsy know what you are doing with VR

I feel bad leaving a negative review on an indie VR game but I gave this game several attempts and got to the point where it was just too frustrating and I had to call it quits. I had high hopes for this game when I initially bought and played it, the zombie infested hotel scenario, although hardly original, is a solid setting and initially the game looks promising. Female protaganist with decent voice acting? Great! Graphics are solid, certainly immersive enough for VR, and the lifesize zombies shambling after you are fearsome and the atmosphere is well done. Unfortunately there are too many incredibly frustrating elements which eventually lead me to give up on this game despite trying to come back several times. 1. This game's lighting engine IS TOO DARK. Even trying to up the gamma / brightness, in dark areas it is PITCH BLACK and you cannot see ANYTHING. Now there is a flashlight in the game, but guess what, it needs batteries, which are fairly rare and last maybe 5 real time minutes for a full charge. Without batteries the flashlight is USELESS. I cannot stress enough how frustrating this is, despite there being plenty of ambient light throughout the hotel, without the flashlight you cannot see ANYTHING in a remotely unlit area. Even a well lit room full of lockers, if you open locker to check inside for loot, you have to use the flashlight because the interior will still be PITCH BLACK. The inability to up the brightness to at least work around this, and the design decisions that lead to most of the levels being pitch black despite light sources being meters away, is so annoying. Obviously darkness and flashlights are a staple of the horror genre, but in VR this quickly goes from cool and immersive to incredibly annoying when I cannot see anything when in reality I would be able to see just fine in these dimly lit environments. Simply making the flashlight not need batteries or at least recharge by itself would have been fine, eventually this stupid design decision made me not want to play anymore. 2. The combat difficulty - this one is probably on me, but I decided to play on medium and after a couple of hours I found that killing even a single zombie without using a full magazine of bullets was very hard to do, and zombies getting back up after you "kill" them even with headshots became a chore. Maybe if I played on easy I wouldn't have had this frustration, and I dread to think how punishing hard is. What really annoyed me is that after playing for a couple of hours and finding medium was not my idea of fun, I tried to change the difficulty down to easy, only to find that you cannot change difficulty during the game. And I wasn't about to replay 2+ hours. 3. Puzzles err on the side of frustrating. I generally didn't have an issue but at the point in the game that I got ready to give up, there was a door code you had to figure out by cross referencing a found note, with a picture, a championship winning trophy year, another picture of a corresponding year's baseball jersey, and associating the number found on the jersey of a zombie that wanders into the area. Whilst this wasn't exactly obscure, this is the kind of puzzle that just did not fit well into a VR FPS where I'm constantly worried about dying to a single zombie, and every minute that ticks by while I'm trying to figure out this multi stage puzzle, the flashlight in my battery is running out. In my opinion puzzles like this needed to be streamlined a lot. Then immediately after this puzzle I obtain a key to open a circuit breaker box, great I thought, I have the item I need to progress, but upon opening the breaker box I am confronted with another puzzle that the main character remarks "I have no idea what to do, maybe the guy left a clue in his staff locker?" leaving me with no idea where to go next, as the map didn't update with any indicator of where to do. Under better circumstances I would have simply looked up a walkthrough or guide for these solutions and continued on with the rest of the game, unfortunately this game isn't popular enough to have had any easily accessible guides made by other players, and the closest I could find was a 6 hour playthrough, which I didn't feel inclined to sit through, just to keep playing a game that was now frustrating me at every opportunity of trying to play it. I wanted to like this game, and gave it multiple tries, but it feels like the developer didn't take into account how frustrating these things can be in VR. This game should have been more like 90% survival horror, shooter, scavenging for ammo, supplies, weapons and an item needed to progress, and much less on standing around figuring out puzzle solutions. Puzzles in this genre should be more "find item and bring to x" or everything you need to solve a puzzle is in one room for you to work out, not multiple layers of each on top of each other, if I wanted to play a puzzle game in VR, I would have looked for a game that sold itself as a puzzle game. This looks like a zombie survival horror, and I got less of that, and more frustration and being unable to see most of the time instead.