I think for the price this game is listed and the playtime you get out of this, this is a fair title. There are some interesting ideas in the game and the sections are short, but I think the way the game play will be very polarizing and either be what you like or what you don't like about the game
I'll start off by talking about some of the rougher aspects of the game. I understand this is an effort from a single person dev team, so for sure there are some fancy things that I wouldn't expect anyway, I was not surprised there is no ray tracing, but I think there is still room for improvement. The options here are limited to video options, so things like mouse sensitivity, key bindings, or sound options you won't be able to change. That might be a deal-breaker for some people, and I would understand that, but I can also assure you the game is self-contained enough in scope that you can play through and beat the game just fine. The gameplay itself is mostly straightforward, but the game also doesn't fit neatly into a certain genre like an FPS or a strategy game, so it can be hard to intuit exactly what the game wants you to do at some points because of the variety of different game scenarios. For example, the game will prompt you pretty regularly to use 'E' to interact with things in the environment, but when the game then prompted me to find and pick up certain items, I was expecting to also use 'E'. But it turned out I was supposed to use left click to pick the items up. Until that point, left click hadn't done anything, so it took me a minute to figure that out. Another thing I will say is that the game can be overly dark in some areas. You do get a flashlight, this is a staple item in horror games after all, but in some of the areas even with the flashlight, some textures seemed so dark I almost couldn't see anything.
The story is not incredibly deep, it could almost be a prologue to a larger story about The Eye Syndicate. But I also have to admit for all of the interesting ideas the developer had for the game, I wish there was slightly more to interrogate about the universe this takes place in considering you play as a detective.
One last nitpick, but I also wish the saving was more consistently when a new chapter began. I had reached chapter 2 and assumed it was saved, only to find that I needed to play chapter 1 over again in order to get back to that point, and saving was just a little farther than when the chapter 2 title pops up.
But what is Veranoia: Nightmare of Case 37 like? Well, it's a little of everything, and I think that's what I like about it and what some people might dislike about it. The gameplay switches gears basically per chapter; sometimes you're examining rooms to find and collect clues, and sometimes you need to hide to avoid a patrolling specter. The mechanics never get too deep, but I appreciate that the game mixes things up and tries different ideas. I think we've all played those games that become boring because every level is played the exact same way, and this is not the case in Veranoia: Nightmare of Case 37. However, the variety means that the mechanics are usually not very deeply realized. I didn't mind because it made for a brief playtime that didn't wear out its welcome with repetition, but I could see some players left wanting.
The story is mostly told through dialog, found notes, and nodes of "wisps" you can commune with to get explanations and flavor text. There is a certain charm to it that hearkens back to earlier days of gaming when titles were often programmed by a few close friends who run a software company out of their home and work on games as a hobby. I am reminded a little bit of Paratopic, which is also short with simplistic gameplay, but interesting for its style and presentation.
The game isn't super scary, but does have horror themes and a few jump scares within that I will admit got me a few times.
So who is this game for? I often see posts online where people ask for horror games to "get their feet wet" or horror games that are scary without being too intense or frightening for people who aren't big horror junkies. If that's you, I think this would be a perfect title to play. It's creepy but not too deeply frightening, it can be stressful and have tension but it's not overly difficult, and it has some variety but also won't bore you or overstay its welcome. There is at least 1 "chase" section in it, but it's low stakes and easy to accomplish with a few tries once you figure out what to do. If you have seen any of the other reviews that I have written, you probably saw a lot of them (most of them) are for point and click hidden object games. I think in some ways this game is kind of like a transition between those 2D games and a fully-fledged 3D first-person horror game. It doesn't have the twitchyness of a horror FPS or the sprawling environments or upgrade systems of some third person horror games. It's "cozy" in a way, not to throw the term around and imply that you'll be planting crops or anything, but there are no collectibles, no secret endings, no crazy challenges or achievements for beating the game in under an hour or anything, just a fairly linear experience that you can play and finish at whatever speed you wish. Once you beat it, it's complete and you won't have to waste time mopping up side quests or anything.
I didn't have any major technical issues or bugs. When you first load into a map, there is some stuttering while it is probably loading assets, but otherwise it was smooth on my machine at high settings. Didn't get any crashes or weird performance issues after the initial load into a new map.
It took me 2.2 hours to beat this according to Steam, but that is also including some time spent replaying chapter 1 when my game didn't save, so I might say you should expect to be able to beat this in 1.5-2 hours. Again, for it's current price of $5.00, I think that's fair, but I guess something to keep in mind before you decide to purchase.
In the future, I think this is an idea that if fleshed out more, with a deeper story and a little deeper but still varied mechanics, could make for an interesting series.
