I remember finding this game via the old fullyramblomatic website, which probably tells you too much about how long I've been online. Anyway, it was particularly memorable for being a surprisingly playable and funny free game. To my mind, it was amazing that it made by someone who wasn't even a professional games developer. That meant I could make games too! I mean I didn't, obviously. But I could have. Probably.

Anyway it was fun. Good scary bits, nice atmosphere, some puzzles that worked, some which... didn't, but that's true of a lot of games.

Going back to this game years after playing it is a very strange experience. Technically as a small very short horror based point and click, there is quite a bit that works here and you can see the start of 'Yahtzees' workings that would later feature in some of the bigger games he created but as spooky and surprising as some moments are, hoo boy there's a fair amount of stuff that doesn't quite work too.

Characters and Plotting for instance are very secondary to the theming and jump scares, every character is very one dimensional and none of them dont really do anything other than provide big unwieldy plot dumps at random, puzzles are messy and all over the place with doors unlocking seemingly at random.

That said the amount of weird scares, actual tense moments and overall feeling of dread does work well throughout. Its still worth flicking through if you happen to want to visit the series as a whole since its over and done with quickly.

I discovered this game in the early 00's when i was just a kid. I liked it so much that it even encouraged me to download Adventure Game Studio, the game engine in which this game was developed. The engine was slowly making it's way into the adventure gamers community, and that's way before Wadjet Eyes took the engine to a whole new level, being a part in what many calls the resurrection of Adventure Games. Of course i never got to make any game with the engine at that time, i was just a little kid.

Leaving my story aside, this is a really nice and pleasant videogame. The story can be linked to
Luis Buñuel's "The Exterminating Angel", a movie where a group of people is trapped inside a house, with no way of escaping, and no real logical explanation about why they're trapped there, making the whole thing pretty absurdist on purpose. Pretty much an experiment in storytelling. This game takes that premise and add a few horror film tropes to the mix.

The game is pretty short. You can finish it in probably a couple hours. Dialogue can be a little naive, but it's no big deal. Graphics are simple but still nice. Music is excelent. Puzzles are pretty easy and rewarding.