The Ghosts of Hackney Mills

I really liked the atmosphere of this game. It's engaging and the story is interesting. It was a bit hard at times, but nothing that cannot be beaten. It doesn't hold your hand (read as no notes in the inventory or anything similar). I enjoyed it and look forward to playing more from the creators of this game.

It's basically a walking simulator in RPG Maker where you toch crystals you find and the audio it triggers tells the story. The story is pretty bad actually but I found the voice acting hilarious. The Dutch, Indian & French accents of researchers from those countries really sound funny and cool. So still gets a 4 from me for the voice acting. But there's little game here. 4/10

6/10

y i k e s In addition to having no idea what this was about, because I literally couldn't understand any of the audio crystals (and there are no subtitles), this is a buggy mess. Avoid.

I have a couple other Sapphire Dragon Productions games, but this is the first one I have played. I have to say, I'm not impressed. But there's more than I can simply say than "It's bad." I will never be one to rag on voice acting too much if not done professionally, but everything felt very, very forced. At one point I took a Snapchat and sent it to my French friend to see how fake the accent was and she burst out laughing. Not a good sign. I don't quite understand why we needed a mishmash of people; it actually made the characters harder to keep track of instead of easier. Their "accents" were their characters, and in a story-heavy game, they need far more than that. This had a very Soprano's-esque ending; very sudden, very jarring, no closure on anything, since I didn't particularly care for any of the characters. So an abrupt ending like this is also a smack in the face to anyone who actually sat through everything, listened, and put the story together. For that matter, I didn't really care about anyone, or the plot. The story is told as you have to sit there and listen and try to decipher these very stereotypical accents to figure out what the characters are saying. Something such as flashbacks enacting the scene may have helped. Sprites to the characters, if nothing else. I didn't remember the charaters' names, I didn't particularly care why they were there. I was thinking more of how unrealisitically this "campus" was laid out -- mazes through forests to get to another part of campus? I can assure you, that doesn't happen. A forest maze I can understand, but the library maze was completely unnecessary. It wasn't hard in the slightest, just padded the game out further. Our main character even lampshades this when he asks why there is a maze and switches in the back of a library -- if you can't tell me why it's there, then don't put it in. All in all, this felt very slapdash. It feels like there was a story wanting to be told here, but there was too much left untold (and not inferred or "oh figure it out" written cleverly; I know stories don't need handholding. A pet peeve of mine actually) and too many holes. On top of that, the main character's running speed should have been the walking speed. Holding down Shift to go everywhere was also tedious and a bit asinine. The cherry on it were the unchanged sound effects from RPGMaker defaults. This isn't worth two bucks, guys, and it makes me leery of the other projects by this studio. And hey, when people report and achievement is bugged? Please fix it. I'm missing the most complained-about bugged achievement, which was supposedly fixed and reported again with no updates since.

A sophomoric effort. Uninspired writing, atrocious voice acting, and a medium (RPG Maker) that can't be taken seriously.