Good game for a kind of watch party setting. I played this one with my mom lol
It's a pretty decent interactive movie kinda thing. It fully embraces horror movie tropes and runs with them, which is both charming but also kind of just makes everything a little too safe and predictable in a way, for the most part. It plays it safe until it goes a bit off the deep end in a more surprising direction, though I found that that change in direction kinda broke the experience a little bit.
The game also expects you to just accept certain things that are a liiiittle too convenient and far-fetched for me. There's also some revelations that are a little too obvious, while another one that also seemed pretty telegraphed, but less obviously so, never actually manifested. Like, for instance, there were some moments of especially bad acting by one of the characters that made me suspect there was something more going on with him than there ever actually was. It was just... bad acting. You know, instead of intentionally bad because of the character, in universe, being untruthful.
Overall it's a bit hard to talk about the narrative here. For one, I don't want to spoil anything but also, it's a narrative that changes based on your choices and, to a lesser extent, your performance. There isn't much gameplay to speak of, besides some clunky exploration where you walk around and examine things marked by a shiny dot in a very linear way, and QTE's that can also be a little clunky.
Besides that, you just get presented with a few choices to make in a pretty short moment and while they don't always clearly mean what you think they mean, that only very rarely ends in any real frustration and if anything it just matches the vibes of having to make quick, rash decisions while panicked out of your mind, like the characters are in that situation.
The consequences of your choices are really impactful, though, which I love. There are some cracks where you can peer behind the curtain of how things are put together a bit too much, like how a choice just loads up a certain scene that doesn't always transition the most gracefully and doesn't take every nuance into consideration, but it didn't break my immersion all that often and was mostly just impressive, especially compared to other, similar games that came before this.
It really is like an actual modern (well, it's almost a decade old at this point, but you know what I mean) take on the kind of FMV game that was popular during the infancy of CD-based gaming.
Also, for a decade-old game, it still looks pretty dang good.
Now, one thing that didn't work for me at all was the scare factor. I guess this makes sense since it's supposed to emulate generic horror movies more than, say, a Silent Hill or Resident Evil game, and horror movies almost never have any kind of effect on me, but I was hoping the fact that I was (somewhat) in control of the action would be enough for me to feel... anything. But I didn't.
Jumpscares by themselves don't do much for me, except annoy most of the time, even when they work. But in this case, I didn't even flinch once. They all just felt really cheap and were way too obviously telegraphed for me to be taken by surprise at all. Plus, the beginning of the game had so many cliche fakeout "just a prank bro" scares that I was already jaded by the time those were replaced with real jumpscares.
I can't say the same about my mom, though, who is in her 60's and doesn't have much experience with horror stuff. They got her pretty good with almost every one of them. To the point where I was wondering if that's something I should subject her to lol. I didn't know there were gonna be that many jumpscares in the game when I started it :x
But anyway, your mileage may vary. If you get spooked by horror movies, you might get spooked by this one. But even if not, it's an enjoyable ride nonetheless.
It's a pretty decent interactive movie kinda thing. It fully embraces horror movie tropes and runs with them, which is both charming but also kind of just makes everything a little too safe and predictable in a way, for the most part. It plays it safe until it goes a bit off the deep end in a more surprising direction, though I found that that change in direction kinda broke the experience a little bit.
The game also expects you to just accept certain things that are a liiiittle too convenient and far-fetched for me. There's also some revelations that are a little too obvious, while another one that also seemed pretty telegraphed, but less obviously so, never actually manifested. Like, for instance, there were some moments of especially bad acting by one of the characters that made me suspect there was something more going on with him than there ever actually was. It was just... bad acting. You know, instead of intentionally bad because of the character, in universe, being untruthful.
Overall it's a bit hard to talk about the narrative here. For one, I don't want to spoil anything but also, it's a narrative that changes based on your choices and, to a lesser extent, your performance. There isn't much gameplay to speak of, besides some clunky exploration where you walk around and examine things marked by a shiny dot in a very linear way, and QTE's that can also be a little clunky.
Besides that, you just get presented with a few choices to make in a pretty short moment and while they don't always clearly mean what you think they mean, that only very rarely ends in any real frustration and if anything it just matches the vibes of having to make quick, rash decisions while panicked out of your mind, like the characters are in that situation.
The consequences of your choices are really impactful, though, which I love. There are some cracks where you can peer behind the curtain of how things are put together a bit too much, like how a choice just loads up a certain scene that doesn't always transition the most gracefully and doesn't take every nuance into consideration, but it didn't break my immersion all that often and was mostly just impressive, especially compared to other, similar games that came before this.
It really is like an actual modern (well, it's almost a decade old at this point, but you know what I mean) take on the kind of FMV game that was popular during the infancy of CD-based gaming.
Also, for a decade-old game, it still looks pretty dang good.
Now, one thing that didn't work for me at all was the scare factor. I guess this makes sense since it's supposed to emulate generic horror movies more than, say, a Silent Hill or Resident Evil game, and horror movies almost never have any kind of effect on me, but I was hoping the fact that I was (somewhat) in control of the action would be enough for me to feel... anything. But I didn't.
Jumpscares by themselves don't do much for me, except annoy most of the time, even when they work. But in this case, I didn't even flinch once. They all just felt really cheap and were way too obviously telegraphed for me to be taken by surprise at all. Plus, the beginning of the game had so many cliche fakeout "just a prank bro" scares that I was already jaded by the time those were replaced with real jumpscares.
I can't say the same about my mom, though, who is in her 60's and doesn't have much experience with horror stuff. They got her pretty good with almost every one of them. To the point where I was wondering if that's something I should subject her to lol. I didn't know there were gonna be that many jumpscares in the game when I started it :x
But anyway, your mileage may vary. If you get spooked by horror movies, you might get spooked by this one. But even if not, it's an enjoyable ride nonetheless.