The kind of experimental game high budget companies would only attempt in the late 90s to early 2000s. The title is arranged like a file investigation regarding the whereabouts of more than 15 characters over the span of three days, 10 of which you control through the adventure. Most of them are characterized with enough thematic depht to make them memorable, even if there's not a lot of development and most of their backstory is found out via background elements (the TV reporter who became older and lost her job, the medic who became emotionally distant to his brother because of growing up in another family, the anthropology teacher who lost his parents on a landslide when he was a kid...), which is what makes the game so compelling to play, to discover the story of this village.
The thing is that what one character does at his point of the story has repercussions for someone else, and this means that for the true ending, there's a lot of cryptic things these characters (because the player saw later events and replayed the earlier levels) have to do which would require having telekhinesis to know it's needed to be done and amidst all the horrific things happening no one in their right mind would do (like going to open the bathroom of a hospital on another floor despite not having anything to do there just for another character the one you are controlling doesn't even know for that one to enter it later) or if it could have been done because out of curiosity (like grabbing a cassette) it ends up being a convenient solution for another character (fighting the character that grabbed it means you can grab what she was carrying and using the cassette's tape as a string to pull down something to distract an enemy). It becomes quite ridiculous but given the fact the game takes place in another dimension between earth and hell, there's a level of macabre surrealism at work with things lining up perfectly for everyone or else everything goes wrong, even if it's still kind of contrived.
And yes, the atmosphere is excellent. No wonder this is the same director as Silent Hill 1. It's still kind of clunky in terms of current moment dialogue (not helped by the weird delivery in the english dub and the british accents) but there's so much attention to detail in how it builds up the lore that it ends up being very fascinating.
Thanks Gsar for recommending the game. The sightjacking mechanic that lets you see what your enemy is seeing and how inventively it's used here left this piece of crap obsolete
The thing is that what one character does at his point of the story has repercussions for someone else, and this means that for the true ending, there's a lot of cryptic things these characters (because the player saw later events and replayed the earlier levels) have to do which would require having telekhinesis to know it's needed to be done and amidst all the horrific things happening no one in their right mind would do (like going to open the bathroom of a hospital on another floor despite not having anything to do there just for another character the one you are controlling doesn't even know for that one to enter it later) or if it could have been done because out of curiosity (like grabbing a cassette) it ends up being a convenient solution for another character (fighting the character that grabbed it means you can grab what she was carrying and using the cassette's tape as a string to pull down something to distract an enemy). It becomes quite ridiculous but given the fact the game takes place in another dimension between earth and hell, there's a level of macabre surrealism at work with things lining up perfectly for everyone or else everything goes wrong, even if it's still kind of contrived.
And yes, the atmosphere is excellent. No wonder this is the same director as Silent Hill 1. It's still kind of clunky in terms of current moment dialogue (not helped by the weird delivery in the english dub and the british accents) but there's so much attention to detail in how it builds up the lore that it ends up being very fascinating.
Thanks Gsar for recommending the game. The sightjacking mechanic that lets you see what your enemy is seeing and how inventively it's used here left this piece of crap obsolete