They Came From Venus

Voice acting is almost entirely generative AI. For a game intended to be a suspenseful horror experience, it's hard to suspend disbelief when the narrator mispronounces words and gets inflection wrong in almost every sentence. This is the one thing the developers should have made sure was rock solid and instead they painfully and obviously phoned it in using AI. No disclaimer in the store page either. Gameplay is almost entirely a series of throwing levers, backtracking, and answering communication devices which then subject you to more godawful generated VO.

I give this game as may stars as Frames I get per second: 1 On lowest graphics its playable. It still sucks. The real horror is the game itself. The dialogue... How can Enderal have some of the best voice actors I ever encountered as just a mod and here we have people that try their hardest to do a text to speech impression? Maybe the game truely was AI generated: Sure, AI. I was literally stuck in the first room for 15 min. Everything is black and white and its hard to see anything... especially a key inside a mug. Then I have to answer the phone which I had to echo locate by the sound since its a white object on a white desk.... Art style not doing any favors. I played the golden city. I expected something similar here but maybe falsely since I knew most talented people have moved on from SureAI to do other things.

I want SureAI to make more games, but this is not it. Look - I'll pretend this is a solo project done by a 17 year old boy. It makes a lot more sense. I thought Unreal Engine couldn't produce an ugly game, but the 17 year old boy decided to be artistic, without having any understanding of color theory or design or any art background. That's fine. German boy is doing his best. He found some friends to make really complex, confusing, but appropriate architecture for a 1960/1970s camp horror. Little German boy did well. The level design is decent. The furniture is appropriate. The music is nice. The first 2 days of the game are almost excellent. Good mood, decent existential horror vibe. Alone against the unknown. Really good vibes. If everything was like the first two days, I'd forgive most of this game's sins. But no. The gameplay loop is just... a 17 year old boy's first game. Generic robot alien whose only strength was the mystique that surrounded it. But then you get a gun and you just shoot the enemies and all mystique is lost. No horror, no mystery, no innovation. You just shoot enemies with 1 gun while not having any health indication, and terrible sound design (that is, almost no sound design when it comes to the enemies at all). The writing is bad. And I don't mean "camp bad" I mean just incompetent. There's maybe... 15%? I want to be generous. Let's say 15% of the writing is good. The rest is not just boring, it's just... underbaked. It's okay though. 17 year old boy is doing his best and the writing is age appropriate for a 17 year old boy with no writing experience. It's his first AO3 fic. Let's be forgiving. What I absolutely will NOT tolerate is the "voice" "acting". There's one good voice in the game, and yes, you've guessed it, it's a 17 year old German boy. No jokes here, that was an okay voice. But the fact that this studio cannot find $50 and hire even a few mediocre voice actors in Fiverr or Discord or somewhere is just unacceptable. Play stupid games, win stupid prices. Any developer who uses Generative "AI" and thinks he can get away with it is just gonna get negative reviews. If you don't think voice is important enough to spend effort on, why would I think it's worth my time? There's a few other big issues, most notable rendering performance, but also broken English ("save" versus "safe", seriously would it seriously kill you to hire an editor? You cannot afford to pay someone to proof read 300 sentences? Embarrassing.), some audio is too loud, some too soft (especially with the crappy voice lines). The author, shockingly, for being a 17 year old boy, has never met a teenager in his life and doesn't know what they speak like. The house is confusing, which is by design, but the game sends you to locations ("go to the laboratory") without telling you where to go. Like sure, not everything should hold your hand and show you a quest marker on your HUD but the protagonist just goes "yeah sure laboratory. I've been in this house full of locked doors for 1 day I know where that is". I really want this game to be good, but this is barely a beta version. This needs a few more months of work, fully rewritten dialogue, tons of rendering related bugfixes and optimisations, and a few more gameplay gimmicks and then it's going to be a game worth $10. The house is good. The setup is decent. You can make it work, 17 year old German boy. Luckily the game is short enough that it can be completed

Let's start with something positive. The overall tone/aesthetic of They Came From Venus is really good. This is were my praise ends. This game was a total let down and I will be requesting a refund as soon as I finish this review. The games first strike was poor performance. I struggled to maintain a stable frame rate despite my modern hardware and there is no discernible reason for this other than terrible optimization. This game looks like it came out a decade ago. The second strike was the terrible dialog. At first I thought the graphics and the cheesy voice acting was intentional. I came to realize its just awful. I question whether or not these are even real people talking at times because even Siri could deliver some of this dialog more organically. The third strike is a fairly mild game play and story spoiler.[spoiler] This entire game is essentially FNAF. You sit at a desk, monitor cameras, and try to keep cheesy low poly robots away from you by pressing buttons that control doors. I didn't even actually see the robot approach me on the camera. The main character made some generic [i] ow [/i] noise and so I backed out of the monitor view to see that I was being "attacked." There is no animation to this attack, the robot gets close to you and say ow. I then proceeded to run in circles around the house while the robot followed me around until eventually it just slowly walked away. I was so confused by this, turns out I defeated the robot and I even got an achievement to reward me for my hard work. [/spoiler] After this third and final strike, I immediately turned the game off and raced to the reviews. Like I said, I'll be uninstalling and requesting a refund the moment I post this review.

I don't know why most other reviews are so negative, if not even insulting. Therefore, here is my spoiler-free review. Story: 1973: You take on the role of the young teenager Lynn, who actually wanted to go to a concert with friends but is now reluctantly taken by her parents on a trip to her uncle's estate. He owns a very large estate, which apparently also served as a Space Research Facility. Lynn is visibly uninterested and doesn't want to join when the parents leave the estate with the uncle for a day trip to Riverfalls the next day. When the parents don't return the following day and Lynn also finds a strange package at the front door, things take their (alien) course, and you find yourself in a fight for survival. Now my review: Positive: + finally a first-person perspective in an original SureAI game + good, atmospheric level design + many small details + large area where you can explore freely + fantastic soundtrack + retro feeling from the post-manned moon landing era of 1969 + the first two days are really scary + Support is incredibly fast. Bugs are quickly fixed Negative: - occasional small bugs - character voices are AI-generated - Characters are relatively emotionless, especially Lynn (but Lynn almost has meme potential ^-^) - story still has room for improvement (but not that bad!) - towards the end, the horror atmosphere decreases - black-and-white design is atmospheric at first but becomes tiring to look at towards the end Conclusion: A successful horror-action game that is continuously being improved. I didn't find the game nearly as bad as others have described it here. Everything is exactly as described on SureAI's shop page. One should not make the mistake of comparing it with Enderal; these are two different things since Enderal is a mod, but this is its own game. The team is also significantly smaller this time. As a result, the workload is different. Therefore, I give it an absolute purchase recommendation and look forward to future SureAI projects! :) A small tip: watch the video on the shop page if you get stuck in the first room.

The music and over all style is good, that where it ends. the majority of voices sound AI generated. The game also has a major performance issue im running reasonably high end hardware yet see constant frame drops almost making the game unplayable. (this could just be a proton issue though.) the final issue i have is the main ground texture seems to be missing, (from screen shots iv seen this seems to be a proton issue, im still leaving this in, in case anyone on actual windows is having the same issue)

It honestly feels like the very first project of a solo game dev that just likes tinkering with Unreal Engine.

I REALLY wanted to like this game. I'm a huge fan of SureAI (so much that I bought a coffee mug with their logo). They made one of the best games I've ever played (Enderal). This one had some world-building detail that was good, such as the newspapers and the cassette tapes. The music was great, I liked the jukebox aspect. Voice acting was mediocre, which I can overlook. But the game is not good. It starts out ok, until after the initial escape room puzzle. Then it turns into an open-world game with no map, no direction, no threat, no real indication of what you're supposed to be doing. A huge problem I had was there was no indication to "check for a package at the front door", much less where the front door was. The house is the size of a county civic center and I'm supposed to just know where the front door is and that I'm supposed to go there? That was my biggest problem, there is no real indication of what your "mission" is or clue to what you're supposed to be doing after you leave the bedroom. I couldn't finish it, it was just boring and went nowhere.

I thought there was no way the company that put out one of best games I've played this decade could be that bad. Obviously everyone is just mad about the AI voice acting -- a new hot button issue. I was very very wrong. I would have been embarrassed to have my name attached to this. This really felt like a cash grab, like maybe the project was falling apart so they put it out just to make some of the money back. The writing is terrible. Everything reads like it was run through a translation twice. MAYBE this is on purpose and you later find out you're an alien or something, but I'll never find out as I'm refunding this. They also decide to just lock you in your room and let you bumble around angrily as though to snub your nose at the fact the game is doodoo. I then wondered around the house for 5 minutes trying to locate a ringing phone which I couldn't see due to the colors. The graphics look like something from the PS3 or PS4 era, yet somehow it still ran at abysmal framerates (I ran Elden Ring at at least Very High so it ain't my card). The controls are horrible. I tried to play with a controller, and apparently the game has built-in controller support which binds joystick-left and joystick-right to both movement AND jumping? So I couldn't even use Steam's built-in WASD template unless I wanted to jump around constantly. And then even with mouse & keyboard it controls weird. The sound was ok, then you turn on the radio in your room and get a single guitar strumming mindlessly, as radios are wont to play. As far as the AI voice acting, yes I think it's a gross thing to do, but I figured, "whatever, let's give it a shot". The voice pack they used had to have been free, because every line of dialogue had the weirdest emphasis on random words or no emphasis whatsoever. I soft-locked the game once in my 0.3 hours just using the menus. This game is free-on-Itch-tier, and even then I'd be annoyed that someone decided to released it. This is simply unacceptable for a studio to put out without a disclaimer of some kind. Grade: F. Please see me after class. :(

Wow.