For some reason, I’ve been in the mood for horror games for a while now, so I took a look at my backlog, and gave this one a try. It’s a game based on a movie based on an actual Taiwanese legend of a haunted bridge, so it sounded quite interesting.
Well, first of all, the English localization is terrible. I can’t even imagine how it all reads and sounds for native speakers, if even I, a non-native found it abysmal. The voice acting is mostly lifeless (with no lip sync, of course), the subtitles and audio are out of sync, there are overlapping and missing sentences, characters talking at the same time, grammar and spelling mistakes, and so on. So yeah, do yourselves a favour and set at least the audio to Chinese.
Now, the gameplay. As a survival horror experience, I’d say it mostly worked. The walking simulator parts, the puzzles, searching for clues – these elements were all OK, in my opinion. Nothing groundbreaking, but the atmosphere was spot on, the jumpscares and creepy sounds were genuinely scary, even the lore was exciting (although the story got a bit confusing for me towards the end). The graphics were mediocre, nothing special there, and the characters were all pretty bland, maybe one or two of them had actual, complex personalities. I’m still not sure if it was a good idea to switch between them so often, some of them hardly contributed anything to the main plot. The real problem, though, if you ask me, was the chase/stealth sequences. They were unforgiving, just one small misstep and it’s game over, you have to know the layout of the map perfectly to be able to survive, and right at the beginning of the first chapter they drop you into one of these “fun little hide-and-seek activities”. I almost broke my controller several times during these parts. Also, it didn’t help that some locations were unnecessarily huge, and simply finding out where you’re supposed to go can be a challenge in itself.
So, the potential is there, somewhere deep within this mess, but as it is now, it’s mediocre at best, and I can only recommend it to hardcore horror fans. And sorry, but I have to deduce an additional star for the poor localization.
Well, first of all, the English localization is terrible. I can’t even imagine how it all reads and sounds for native speakers, if even I, a non-native found it abysmal. The voice acting is mostly lifeless (with no lip sync, of course), the subtitles and audio are out of sync, there are overlapping and missing sentences, characters talking at the same time, grammar and spelling mistakes, and so on. So yeah, do yourselves a favour and set at least the audio to Chinese.
Now, the gameplay. As a survival horror experience, I’d say it mostly worked. The walking simulator parts, the puzzles, searching for clues – these elements were all OK, in my opinion. Nothing groundbreaking, but the atmosphere was spot on, the jumpscares and creepy sounds were genuinely scary, even the lore was exciting (although the story got a bit confusing for me towards the end). The graphics were mediocre, nothing special there, and the characters were all pretty bland, maybe one or two of them had actual, complex personalities. I’m still not sure if it was a good idea to switch between them so often, some of them hardly contributed anything to the main plot. The real problem, though, if you ask me, was the chase/stealth sequences. They were unforgiving, just one small misstep and it’s game over, you have to know the layout of the map perfectly to be able to survive, and right at the beginning of the first chapter they drop you into one of these “fun little hide-and-seek activities”. I almost broke my controller several times during these parts. Also, it didn’t help that some locations were unnecessarily huge, and simply finding out where you’re supposed to go can be a challenge in itself.
So, the potential is there, somewhere deep within this mess, but as it is now, it’s mediocre at best, and I can only recommend it to hardcore horror fans. And sorry, but I have to deduce an additional star for the poor localization.