The Entity

Fun horror game from small dev

[h1]First look video (gameplay + commentary):[/h1] https://youtu.be/X7qiUW2jbN8 [h1]Quick summary[/h1] The Entity has an interesting premise but gameplay-wise needs quite a few fixes and fine tuning. If Steam offered a "neutral" rating we'd probably go with that until some solid changes were made. [h1]Longer review[/h1] Story-wise, you wake up in a house at 3am, and it turns out to be your late grandmother's that you're now living in, apparently alone. Your grandma has left notes all over the place for you to find which is how you learn about a creature somewhere in the basement. The Entity gives you two objectives to start: find a bunch of keys and get in the basement. In practice, this means roaming all over a rather large home with a great deal of bedrooms that start to look very similar and comb each space for keys and notes. Most things in the house can't be interacted with. Time is also a limiting factor -- the creature will kill you if your house runs out of power, and your house is running off a generator. For that reason you need to juggle using house lights and your cell phone's flashlight, except your cell runs out of battery extremely quickly. You CAN recharge your phone at any outlet (in a magical few seconds) but doing so is at the expense of pulling it from house (and thus, generator) power. It's an interesting idea, but the payoff is minimal. It doesn't create tension so much as just makes it hard to see and we found ourselves stumbling around every room more than once, hoping to find something in the dark so we didn't have to waste power after our cell had died. There are a few interstitial moments where you have visions outside of the house that (presumably) the creature is showing you. These moments are neat and do well to show a little more about the creature we keep reading about in grandma's notes. We wish there had been more of these moments more frequently as they make for wonderful motivators for us to soldier on with key-locating in the hopes that we can unlock more pieces of the plot. Gameplay-wise, the game suffers from some wonky movement and unclear moments as to when you can or can't interact with objects. Sometimes if you're standing still, you can't activate a light switch. Sometimes you'll be too close to a note AND an outlet, and the "Use" button will activate both. These moments were frequent and made it difficult to navigate the house. The game's menus and UI are also fairly basic. All said and done, when we were shown visions about the creature, the story felt like it was going to get interesting, and we simply wish there had been more of that and less endless room searching. This combined with the wonky controls left us hoping some of these things will be fixed to create a solid experience.