The Forgotten Tapes: Twisted Forms

This is not a bad collection of horror games! Did a live stream covering 3 or 4 of the games in this, may in the future play the rest by myself or record. But yeah, solid collection. Thanks to Niven Hedinger for getting me a key for this!

Similar to my review of the first FT instalment I know a review is odd when you can't buy it anymore but whatever. In the case of the first I would still recommend it on sale mildly since it had some neat stuff in the crap and at least some of the crap was bad in a funny way. But THIS?! Ok so this is for a different reason. This is to tell anyone (not likely there's many but still) that even if you find this off steam for deep discount just do not even bother. I don't say this lightly, I consider myself now pretty seasoned on these horror compilation games. I've played through every DreadX collection, and every single HPSX title now not just the demo discs, and I can tell you that even though those two series have some lows, they are nothing compared to how dismal this collection is. Let's start with the wrapper. A creepy hospital as a coroner is a neat idea! and I thought it a great touch that the games are in cadavers that you select via clicking their respective body lockers in the morgue. Ok, that's it! That's the positives. Otherwise this is a lazy under-cooked mess and the only time I jumped was when a jump scare at random appeared and was the equivalent of the spooky skeletons pumpkin guy dancing with a loud distorted scream, then nothing. I mean I was startled sure, mostly cause i was falling asleep, but also after that no mention of this? no reaction from character? no connection to the story or anything? But how about the games? Well let's start with the positives: The Fallen Spirits: This is a neat little game that is basically if you took a tiny piece of an N64 Zelda overworld, and then painted it all over with Dark Souls or Berzerk. So you have this Link style protag in a very dark world fighting creepy monsters. That's it for the positives again. Make Beautiful: Great concept and setup, then the game starts, and you watch cut scenes, and then basically do quicktime events... where no matter what you choose you lose. then the game is over. So about 5 minutes here. Game design? Classified: This is also 5 minutes long, and is basically a rip-off of Discover My Body by Yames (which is awesome by the way) except this dev removed all of the engaging writing, bio existential horror, and terrifying presentation and replaced it with a Z grade SCP alien who just makes the doctors fall asleep and then leaves at the end. Glad that's classified, wouldn't want all that excitement and danger to fall in the wrong hands! Nano: Neat concept, then the game starts and you crawl up to the right, zap a polyp, screen transition right, then an enemy clips through the walls of the maze to immediately kill you and you lose with no way to defend yourself and not enough time or warning to get into cover. Flesh Simulator: The game starts and you are a noisy annoying hunk of bloody meat that looks like my five year old niece making a blob out of playdoh, but less effort than that. The game starts, you walk through a dimly lit red hallway and you are red and everything is red. A bigger red thing runs into you and then a noise I can only describe as "worthy of filing a class action lawsuit against' plays at full blast and it's game over/try again. I guess Bloody Vulpine don't mind working with game devs who don't play games, don't like games, and don't like making them? I can't think of any other reason for this to exist other than the dev likes to just exhaust people's patience. Vaporwave: Neat concept, then at one point phones started ringing, and no matter what I did nothing else happened. I think this is one of those games where the "level design" and "progression" is you just go in and out of rooms to "investigate sounds" and maybe something spooky happens but oops you weren't looking so you missed it, etc. Then again, maybe it's an input issue becauuuuuuuuuuuuuuse... Autopsy: I can get behind a "The Thing" type set up in an arctic base, but this one makes you at the start walk up and down the longest hallways known to man just to turn the lights on and for nothing to happen. Then a guy get eaten and after some tentacles appeared I completely lost inputs and couldn't play the game. Softlocked. I didn't enjoy the riveting long hallway light switch simulator to start all over so I'll never know how this romance ended. The Sculptor: I was really rooting for this one. Neat Silence of the Lambs finale-ish setting, fixed camera angles, tank controls, striking aesthetic (very weird run animation tho but whatever) and I could forgive the occasional camera hiccups in closed quarters, but then when I was exploring I clipped through a fence and broke the camera. By this point I decided not to pursue this collection. Play the Dread collections, HPSX, This collection is wack, stay away.