This review contains spoilers
I am super conflicted about this game. I love chose your own adventure style games like this so playing it with friends was a set up for a good time but man I just, did not come away with good feelings on this. The biggset issue for me personally was that I cannot bring myself to like 90% of the cast. I'm a girl that loves herself some good characters and if a story doesn't have that it can make it really difficult to get into it.
I struggled with that a lot at first since they make every character except Sam and Matt super easy to dislike from the start. The writing team do make a good job of making some of the characters likeable as time goes on, I mean hell I hated Mike at first since he was the dude at the center of the incident that started the game. Then after watching him go through like 12 torturous events back to back he I kinda felt bad for him and was hoping our group of people playing could get him out. Then on the other end of the spectrum are characters like Emily, who I can only describe as a cardboard cut out of a real person that one of the writers going through a divorce wrote to "get back at" his ex wife. In general I think the way this game handles its characters is really varied and it hurts the overall experience for me since sometimes we have a really good scene with Ashley and Chris searching the house for stuff and genuinely showing characters falling for each other; followed immediately by Emily just tearing into Matt for the crime of not kissing the ground she walks on. It feels like each character was written by a different person at times and that makes the narrative feel extremely inconsistent. Also typing this I think in our playthrough our group had exactly two scenes where the women directly talked to each other and that feels weird given how half the cast is female. One last thing on the characters before I move on but damn is some of the dialogue just, bad at times in this. No teen/young 20's person I know talks like how any of these people talk. I will never forget the sheer shock I felt hearing Chris unironically go "SPROING OING OING" to mimic a spring while trying to impress Ashley in the earlier part of the game. He said this completely out of nowhere. If a dude said that to me irl while hitting on me I would die on the spot I think.
So despite my problems with the characters I did genuinely find the plot compelling up to a point, which is isn't unheard of but its a lot harder for me to get invested if I'm not super into the people the story is following. I think the build up and mystery of the earlier part of the game is genuinely really well done and I was trying to piece together what could have happened on this mountain leading up to the reveals. Which, I personally found kind of lackluster. I think a big issue I had with it is how the two mysteries don't connect in a satisfying way for me personally. We have Josh's wannabe Saw traps and we have the Wendigo's (do not get me started on this I will be a big nerd about how this game got their depictions of wendigos wrong) whole thing going on and they just, don't connect outside of Hannah being the Wendigo that killed Josh in our playthrough. I think above all else this separation hurts the Josh plotline more though because without the connection to the Wendigo's it just, makes him look kind of stupid? Like the two people at the center of the event that caused both of his sisters to die were Mike and Emily. He sends Mike and his new girlfriend Jess off into a cabin in the woods that he has no plans to visit and then lets Emily and her new boyfriend Matt leave the lodge entirely while he torments Ashley, Chris, and Sam. Chris and Ashley make sense to a degree since they were directly involved with the prank even if they were a bit removed from it, but from what I could tell of the opening Sam went to warn Hannah about the prank but was just too late. So Josh is tormenting the people who were partially responsible but not the main culprits while he leaves the people that directly were involved to go fuck around and it feels kind of unfocused? I know from the point of view of the game's story its because the others are gonna get chased after by the Wendigo's but its a completely separate scenario from what's happening. Its like if in a Saw movie one of the characters accidentally walked into Nightmare on Elm street somehow. Maybe Josh's pranks could have accidentally freed the Wendigo's somehow which is what brings them into the plot if I were to rewrite this? I'm not sure, its midnight and I'm just kinda stream of consciousness'ing this since I have a lot of thoughts on the structure of this game.
I will say despite those criticisms I am impressed at the level that your decisions impact the story. knowing that all 8 characters can survive is genuinely insane to me considering how much that has to change some scenes. Our group that was playing ended with only two alive at the end (Sam and Jess) due to messed up QTE inputs and not understanding what certain choices would do at times and despite my issues with the game I almost want to do another run just to see the different outcomes of some of the choices we made or QTE's we flubbed.
Just some quick final notes, I think the first half of this game would be so much better if they removed the stock jumpscare noise whenever something scary happens. It was noticeably absent in the second half of the game and it made the scary bits feel a lot more tense and unnerving because it lets the moment speak for itself. We also found out that there was a bonus dlc chapter that takes place in the middle of the game that show where Matt and Emily disappear to for like 2 chapters that you can only get if you preordered the game when it came out. That is genuinely insane to me on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. Like why not make it like a prologue or a side chapter with the wendigo hunter instead of like, a chapter in the middle of the game that involves two characters who noticeably get less scream time than everyone else because of its absence?? Extremely weird decision that I'm not sure where to even begin trying to parse.
Overall, I don't know if I like this game or not. I think it has great ideas, some genuinely good horror set piece moments, and a good character or two. But it doesn't really know how to combine all of its elements together into something great. They all ultimately feel disconnected from each other. Whether thats through each character feeling like they had a different writer, the disconnected nature of the two main plots, or something as bizarre as a chapter of the game that adds extra characterization being lost to the aether forever unless you preordered the game nine years ago, the game doesn't really come together and feels just as fractured as the main group of friends are after they essentially bullied their friend into accidentally getting herself and her sister killed.
5/10
I struggled with that a lot at first since they make every character except Sam and Matt super easy to dislike from the start. The writing team do make a good job of making some of the characters likeable as time goes on, I mean hell I hated Mike at first since he was the dude at the center of the incident that started the game. Then after watching him go through like 12 torturous events back to back he I kinda felt bad for him and was hoping our group of people playing could get him out. Then on the other end of the spectrum are characters like Emily, who I can only describe as a cardboard cut out of a real person that one of the writers going through a divorce wrote to "get back at" his ex wife. In general I think the way this game handles its characters is really varied and it hurts the overall experience for me since sometimes we have a really good scene with Ashley and Chris searching the house for stuff and genuinely showing characters falling for each other; followed immediately by Emily just tearing into Matt for the crime of not kissing the ground she walks on. It feels like each character was written by a different person at times and that makes the narrative feel extremely inconsistent. Also typing this I think in our playthrough our group had exactly two scenes where the women directly talked to each other and that feels weird given how half the cast is female. One last thing on the characters before I move on but damn is some of the dialogue just, bad at times in this. No teen/young 20's person I know talks like how any of these people talk. I will never forget the sheer shock I felt hearing Chris unironically go "SPROING OING OING" to mimic a spring while trying to impress Ashley in the earlier part of the game. He said this completely out of nowhere. If a dude said that to me irl while hitting on me I would die on the spot I think.
So despite my problems with the characters I did genuinely find the plot compelling up to a point, which is isn't unheard of but its a lot harder for me to get invested if I'm not super into the people the story is following. I think the build up and mystery of the earlier part of the game is genuinely really well done and I was trying to piece together what could have happened on this mountain leading up to the reveals. Which, I personally found kind of lackluster. I think a big issue I had with it is how the two mysteries don't connect in a satisfying way for me personally. We have Josh's wannabe Saw traps and we have the Wendigo's (do not get me started on this I will be a big nerd about how this game got their depictions of wendigos wrong) whole thing going on and they just, don't connect outside of Hannah being the Wendigo that killed Josh in our playthrough. I think above all else this separation hurts the Josh plotline more though because without the connection to the Wendigo's it just, makes him look kind of stupid? Like the two people at the center of the event that caused both of his sisters to die were Mike and Emily. He sends Mike and his new girlfriend Jess off into a cabin in the woods that he has no plans to visit and then lets Emily and her new boyfriend Matt leave the lodge entirely while he torments Ashley, Chris, and Sam. Chris and Ashley make sense to a degree since they were directly involved with the prank even if they were a bit removed from it, but from what I could tell of the opening Sam went to warn Hannah about the prank but was just too late. So Josh is tormenting the people who were partially responsible but not the main culprits while he leaves the people that directly were involved to go fuck around and it feels kind of unfocused? I know from the point of view of the game's story its because the others are gonna get chased after by the Wendigo's but its a completely separate scenario from what's happening. Its like if in a Saw movie one of the characters accidentally walked into Nightmare on Elm street somehow. Maybe Josh's pranks could have accidentally freed the Wendigo's somehow which is what brings them into the plot if I were to rewrite this? I'm not sure, its midnight and I'm just kinda stream of consciousness'ing this since I have a lot of thoughts on the structure of this game.
I will say despite those criticisms I am impressed at the level that your decisions impact the story. knowing that all 8 characters can survive is genuinely insane to me considering how much that has to change some scenes. Our group that was playing ended with only two alive at the end (Sam and Jess) due to messed up QTE inputs and not understanding what certain choices would do at times and despite my issues with the game I almost want to do another run just to see the different outcomes of some of the choices we made or QTE's we flubbed.
Just some quick final notes, I think the first half of this game would be so much better if they removed the stock jumpscare noise whenever something scary happens. It was noticeably absent in the second half of the game and it made the scary bits feel a lot more tense and unnerving because it lets the moment speak for itself. We also found out that there was a bonus dlc chapter that takes place in the middle of the game that show where Matt and Emily disappear to for like 2 chapters that you can only get if you preordered the game when it came out. That is genuinely insane to me on so many levels that I don't even know where to begin. Like why not make it like a prologue or a side chapter with the wendigo hunter instead of like, a chapter in the middle of the game that involves two characters who noticeably get less scream time than everyone else because of its absence?? Extremely weird decision that I'm not sure where to even begin trying to parse.
Overall, I don't know if I like this game or not. I think it has great ideas, some genuinely good horror set piece moments, and a good character or two. But it doesn't really know how to combine all of its elements together into something great. They all ultimately feel disconnected from each other. Whether thats through each character feeling like they had a different writer, the disconnected nature of the two main plots, or something as bizarre as a chapter of the game that adds extra characterization being lost to the aether forever unless you preordered the game nine years ago, the game doesn't really come together and feels just as fractured as the main group of friends are after they essentially bullied their friend into accidentally getting herself and her sister killed.
5/10