THE NORMAL THING

"THE NORMAL THING" sits somewhere between "goofy" and "spooky", which is territory I never thought any game would find, but here we are. You control an amnesiac cartoon dog and solve puzzles through a spooky forest, okay. Angling for a somewhat whimsical/artistic narrative, this misses the mark more than hits it. The game features really lacklustre 2D visuals (does the developer not know 3D graphics became mainstream in the mid-1990s?). Gamers don't spend thousands of dollars on gaming rigs to pretend they're mobile phones or Commodore 64s. Not every "free" game really is. There's often MTX, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of things that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away without any remuneration. This is a service to themselves, and the gaming industry, and should be applauded. Of course, just because something is free, doesn't necessarily mean it's valuable. Even though this is "free", it failed to appeal to the 120 million+ gamers on Steam. SteamDB showed the game peaked at just a dozen or so concurrent players, and now there's basically nobody playing it. Even though it's free. This is a dismal public reception, but it's easy to see why gamers rejected it. Bearing in mind that free games don't add +1 to your game collector count, should you bother adding this to your library and downloading it? This is a "maybe" experience... if you have a lot of free time on your hands and nothing else to do, why not? But for the purposes of a review, this isn't something I can say everyone must try. It's not quite there. Valve doesn't give us a "maybe" option in reviews, but if they did, that's what I'd choose for this.

Cute game and interesting concept but has many major flaws. Way too many flow gaps with puzzles that make no sense, a story that makes little sense and constant wondering "how?" and "what now?". The music was horribly repetitive. Although it has a lot of potential, it very much lacked substance. I really liked the art style and the ending was sweet, but I wouldn't recommend playing.

아름다운 기괴함. 잔잔히 깔린 평화로움 속에 드문드문 끼어있는 섬뜩함이 공존함 1시간 정도면 엔딩을 볼 수 있는 짧은 플레이 타임이라 더 좋았음. 무서운게임 정말 못하는데 이건 재밌게 플레이 했음 무료게임 치고 정말 퀄리티 좋은 게임 죽음과 이별에 대해 한번 더 생각해 봤던 게임이었음

내가 이걸 예전에 했었다가 중간에 그만뒀는데 그 이유를 까먹고있었단말이다 저 괴물 ㅍ ㅣ해서 도망가는거 나는 그런거 잘 못한단말이다 결국 같은데서 포기함 그러나 재밋어보인다..

‎

Not the best optimized game mechanically speaking. The random chase scenes annoyed me because they just had me run away across the map and then having to walk all the way back to where I was... The translation was good enough for me to understand what was going on but it wasn't great. And, finally, the puzzles were quite good -- the only one I really didn't understand was the spider one and I had to look up the solution, which was also frustrating because nobody explained WHY that was the solution. Overall quite a good game, I highly enjoyed the visuals and the story brought a tear to my eye.

It's an ok point-and-click. I hit stalemates more times than I would like to admit. It can be glitchy and uncooperative at times. I lost the shoes in the well. Turned the game off early out of frustration, but left a thumbs up for all those puzzle gamers smarter than me... it doesn't take much!