A short indie game that makes me appreciate what goes into games.
I got this game because it's very inexpensive and said that it provided a nice, brief horror experience. I'm not a horror fan, but I like short stories, and that's exactly what this feels like: an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
You can get through it in less than an hour, and there are some repetitive documents both because you revisit a place as a different character and, presumably, so you don't miss the critical exposition required to understand the game. However, I enjoyed it. It felt like an episode of a television show that you played.
The Positives:
-For such a short game, it is atmospheric. There are roughly four areas you explore, and the world feels real minus the apartment missing a bedroom. While playing, all I could think of was, "Wow, someone made a little game where they designed these four areas and put them together to tell a little story. How entrepreneurial is that?" Yes, you can see the amateur nature with graphics quality from roughly 20 years ago and sound effects that aren't perfectly seamless with the game, but its flaws just made me appreciate game development even more.
-They hit the horror trope notes of building tension with a prologue, nothing happening but exposition initially, the requisite fake-outs, and then the moment it turns into a horror experience. the notes they hit work—I learned when creating a book cover from an expert in book marketing that the very thing people criticize, clichés, are what make a genre what it is and what make people like it. i.e., clichés are not only good but necessary
-The best parts by far are a recognizable prologue structure where you get foreshadowing, good information about the world and what's going on, and then a killer end-note visual/audial combination that cooks.
-There's a cameo from the SNES (it's 1992, after all), which is cool. They even put in a playable mini-game on the virtual console.
The Negatives:
-I'm not going to count the "Hey, these folks don't have a AAA budget, so don't expect Skyrim" nature of this short indie title as a negative, but I will say that the poor game-over animation (more like the lack thereof) is probably the biggest negative since the game just freezes and then you pop up where you were before...only when you actually make it, a similar animation happens, making you wonder whether you died or proceeded in the game (the same thing happened to me in SOMA when I got knocked out and was about to reset the game because I thought I died). One of the most important parts of a horror game is what happens when you lose, and this was good in that you could retry quickly, but bad in that nothing really happens other than a sound and a screen freeze.
-The final sequence, which is where the majority of action gameplay occurs, is a little too clunky for my taste. First, it's a sequence where you have to do several things (pick up items, open locked doors, hide, sneak around, and solve a puzzle) where, if you get caught, you have to repeat the whole thing over again. I had to do it about four times, and the first few parts of the sequence got a little long to get back to where I would've preferred to restart (coming out of the first door). Second, while the lack of cues as to where the bad guy is brings a lot to the sense of danger, in real life I'd have a decent sense of where he was and so I kind of had to guess when to make a break for it. I will say that, because of that, I found it easier to just speedrun it than deal with hiding. The reason why I resorted to just running quickly to solve the puzzle and get out was that the worst part of the game is the final action you take: upon getting out, you lose control of your character, get into an interaction, and then get disoriented when you regain control of your character where you only have three seconds max to reorient yourself and go in the right direction. I had to do the very last act three times before I did it successfully since the first time I had no idea which way I was facing and the second I got stuck running into the side of the gate.
-While I did like how they set it up, there's not a lot of meat here. The backstory, as I mentioned, is brief and repeats itself a couple of times. Using only information you likely have already read in the Store Page abstract, I'll give you an example: kids are missing. DId you know kids are missing? Kids are missing. Let's find out more about the kids who are missing. I have no problem with having the same fliers in multiple places so players don't miss them, but you get the same information 3-4 times. It might be because I'm playing in English but it's in Russian, as there is some audio that doesn't get translated that might have something interesting that I couldn't understand. Also, you perform daily tasks, and nothing (more than Sims-like daily tasks) happens for about 55% of the game. I have no problem setting up the mood, but there's not much gameplay despite the environment and basic story structure impressing me. I don't mind walking simulators at all, so it's not that; it's just that the tasks aren't necessarily related to the story nor building anything other than the player's wondering when something will happen.
Overall, I liked that it was a short but atmospheric game with enough story to keep me engaged for the 45 minutes of playtime. Would I have liked a little more story instead of repetition and some tightening of the most important gameplay elements? Absolutely. But I'm impressed assuming that this is a small shop of a couple of folks at most putting together something that kept me interested long enough to 100% it. It's not mind-blowing, and I wish there had been a little better in making you more invested in the story and interested in the characters or mystery, but it was really cool to play a game that was basically an episode of Unsolved Mysteries or similar kinds of shows. For that, I consider it worth playing. Support indie developers, have a good hour exploring an indie game that's clearly made by people trying to gain game development experience, and enjoy a short horror experience for Halloween. You're not going to like it if you want something longer, prettier, more in-depth, or with more polish, but if you don't mind something short and familiar but more like a horror TV show experience, this is something to consider.
