This review contains spoilers
While short in length and with a cast of characters you could count on one hand, the story and atmosphere pick up the slack. Fingerbones is a disturbing game featuring a snapshot of one person's actions and thoughts following the end of the world
family ties
4,5/10 - Length
5,5/10 - Enjoyment
6,5/10 - Story/Experience
5,0/10 - Originality
4,5/10 - Gameplay
Score = 5,2/10
4,5/10 - Length
5,5/10 - Enjoyment
6,5/10 - Story/Experience
5,0/10 - Originality
4,5/10 - Gameplay
Score = 5,2/10
This review contains spoilers
No friggin' way the dad killed the daughter?!?! I totally didn't see that coming the moment I read a note comparing her to her mother with in an insidious tone! /sarcasm
Considering it's his first finished project, Fingerbones was a cleverly thought game. The game has the polish of a game jam project which isn't much to sing about but it does what it wanted to do without issues mostly.
Your exposition is given through scattered pages which isn't very environmental in storytelling but other than that it plays upon it well. Password recognition is the puzzle here but it's not so difficult as to interrupt your game. The conclusion of the game is a bit of a curveball but it is well presented for the most part.
And it's a free sub 30 min experience! I'd say go for it.
Your exposition is given through scattered pages which isn't very environmental in storytelling but other than that it plays upon it well. Password recognition is the puzzle here but it's not so difficult as to interrupt your game. The conclusion of the game is a bit of a curveball but it is well presented for the most part.
And it's a free sub 30 min experience! I'd say go for it.
Playtime: 20 Minutes
Score: 7/10
Very short and simple horror game. Had some nice puzzles to solve and a very creepy atmosphere. The notes you read are very disturbing and it actually set up a twist over what character I was playing and that went in a completely different direction to what I thought it would. Its free on Steam, so its definitely worth playing for that and how short it is.
Score: 7/10
Very short and simple horror game. Had some nice puzzles to solve and a very creepy atmosphere. The notes you read are very disturbing and it actually set up a twist over what character I was playing and that went in a completely different direction to what I thought it would. Its free on Steam, so its definitely worth playing for that and how short it is.
Deeply unsettling narrative experience. Simple and short, but between the atmosphere and the writing, it accomplishes what it sets out to do. Definitely a Szymanski game.
Fingerbones- I don't even know why I had this. It sat in my Steam Library with only 1 minute of playtime back in 2016... until today.
The game even tells you that there is no saving and that this should take about half an hour to play, so even at worst I figured 30 minutes was worth seeing what this was all about!
And....I guess it was? But only barely. Fingerbones oozes with a depressing and almost worried feeling atmosphere. But the enjoyment really stops there.
The story is spelled out in notes that you find and read, but the gameplay amounts to little more than walking (slowly) and reading said notes.
The story is fairly typical edgy horror fodder, and feels more sad than scary.
A minor gripe about the gameplay, but you need to keep walking back to the first room to input passwords into a keyboard as you figure them out, just to walk across the play area back to where you left off.... to then walk back to the main area to put in another password after you got the next clue... this is really the only reason this game can take about 30 minutes on your first playthrough.
That all being said, there's promise here. The look of Fingerbones is great, and after looking into the developer I see this was pretty early in their catalog. I'm hoping that things only got better from here.
The game even tells you that there is no saving and that this should take about half an hour to play, so even at worst I figured 30 minutes was worth seeing what this was all about!
And....I guess it was? But only barely. Fingerbones oozes with a depressing and almost worried feeling atmosphere. But the enjoyment really stops there.
The story is spelled out in notes that you find and read, but the gameplay amounts to little more than walking (slowly) and reading said notes.
The story is fairly typical edgy horror fodder, and feels more sad than scary.
A minor gripe about the gameplay, but you need to keep walking back to the first room to input passwords into a keyboard as you figure them out, just to walk across the play area back to where you left off.... to then walk back to the main area to put in another password after you got the next clue... this is really the only reason this game can take about 30 minutes on your first playthrough.
That all being said, there's promise here. The look of Fingerbones is great, and after looking into the developer I see this was pretty early in their catalog. I'm hoping that things only got better from here.
Enjoyable and interesting experience but at the end of the day its a 20 minute game.
Bleak, sad and sometimes creepy. It was also quite the leap to the developer's career. Despite the simple story, edgy predictable twist and annoying backtracking, the atmosphere is good enough to hold this game above the "short indie horror game that Markiplier will play one day", even if just BARELY. I don't like this game, but I do respect it given the context.
boring atmosphere is whatev
A promising start for David Syzmanski but really nothing else to write home home about
Jogo simples, curto e interessante, em alguns momentos os puzzles me tiraram da experiência por ser um teste de reconhecimento de senha meio obtuso, mas ainda assim consegue proporcionar sentimentos desconfortantes pelo vazio dos ambientes e as implicações proporcionadas pelo texto, que vagamente discute moralidade e liberdade de uma forma curiosa.
Fingerbones is an odd one to review, as it feels more like an experience than a game really. It mainly is trying to tell you a story, and with that it has very barebones gameplay to go with it, you literally walk point A to point B, and then point B back to point A. But what makes it good is the story, and the experience that it gives, it is certainly a must play, and with the fact that it is free, you should play this game.
Overall: 8/10
Overall: 8/10
A very short but very intense experience. Tonally it was pretty good, keeping up an incredibly oppressive feeling of dread throughout its runtime. The use of space is pretty good too; constantly going past the same locked doors over and over somehow makes them more forboding each time you pass.
But the gameplay is actually just bad, I think. It's crazy basic, as is part-and-parcel for most of this subgenre, but the need to find 'passwords' for each room is just irritating; also either I missed something, or working out password 3 requires some hefty moon logic (I had to look it up). This really did dampen the experience unfortunately.
As a general rule I quite like this super lo-fi art style for indie horror games, but at a few points in this one it was so bare bones that I didn't know what I was looking at (and not in a 'oh god what's that over there?' way, more of a 'why is this grey cube buzzing now? is it a generator or a woodchipper?' way).
Not all bad though; after all, its free. It's definitely made me interested in trying out this Dev's other games.
But the gameplay is actually just bad, I think. It's crazy basic, as is part-and-parcel for most of this subgenre, but the need to find 'passwords' for each room is just irritating; also either I missed something, or working out password 3 requires some hefty moon logic (I had to look it up). This really did dampen the experience unfortunately.
As a general rule I quite like this super lo-fi art style for indie horror games, but at a few points in this one it was so bare bones that I didn't know what I was looking at (and not in a 'oh god what's that over there?' way, more of a 'why is this grey cube buzzing now? is it a generator or a woodchipper?' way).
Not all bad though; after all, its free. It's definitely made me interested in trying out this Dev's other games.
I hate to be this guy but I don't know what the other people are talking about. The gameplay is barebones, yes. It has a lot of backtracking, yes. But that's not necessarily a bad thing at all. Some games can be this simplistic if they serve a deeper narrative.
The notes you keep finding don't just spell the story in bits and pieces, they also bring part of the puzzle that is exploring the bunker, unveiling a dark backstory with unnerving atmosphere.
I really didn't think of this as a predictable twist, since the fundamental bits to understand everything are given at the last moments of the game and it's supposed to work that way.
Anyway, a great game and an excellent first try on a short horror experience that I enjoy so much from Szymanski's work.
The notes you keep finding don't just spell the story in bits and pieces, they also bring part of the puzzle that is exploring the bunker, unveiling a dark backstory with unnerving atmosphere.
I really didn't think of this as a predictable twist, since the fundamental bits to understand everything are given at the last moments of the game and it's supposed to work that way.
Anyway, a great game and an excellent first try on a short horror experience that I enjoy so much from Szymanski's work.
Nice short horror game. It definitely has an unsettling atmosphere and tells an interesting, albeit simple story, but at the end of the day, it serves it’s purpose as a concise, 20 minute experience.
Not bad for a first go but not all that interesting either. The atmosphere can be striking at points but there simply isn't all that much to do in Fingerbones. The story, while well-written from a prose standpoint and conceptually interesting, is entirely predictable and doesn't end with any sort of shocking revelation. The gameplay features a total of two maps and you have to do a whole lot of backtracking to solve incredibly basic puzzles which don't take much brainpower to figure out. The visuals are simplistic but David Szymanski gets quite a lot out of bloomed lighting and low-resolution textures. The game employs pretty interesting ambient effects such as atmospheric groaning and a little girl's crying but reuses the latter a bit too much to be unnerving. Overall, Fingerbones is a bit of an average and mediocre experience, but for the debut project of Szymanski, you can see a lot of the concepts and elements of visual design that would permeate his future works.