This review contains spoilers
Played and written October 30, 2020:
I played and finished this on stream for spooooooky October and had conflicting feelings about it.
I'm playing with English audio, which may have an impact. Overall, I found the environment and monsters great and scary! However, I have huge problems with the story and characters.
I didn't know what to expect going into this, and was really creeped out as the sun sank going through what seemed like an abandoned village. There was good suspense building up to the encounters, and meeting the creatures had been creepy but intriguing. It looks beautiful, the skyline and how it changes throughout the story is impactful, and the sound design really fit well with the environment and added to the eeriness of the world.
The game is a little clunky and stiff, as walking over rocks or other objects really impacts the character's position in camera and the camera perspective. I also believe I had an encounter that was bugged, where I believe a monster was supposed to kill me but I walked through them a bunch of times - there's an achievement to die from them from what I gathered.
After a while, the protagonist became frustrating. There are audio lines that sound and feel unrealistic considering what I've experienced already in the storyline. For example, I don't know if playing with English audio had an impact on the poor quality voice acting or the rhythm of dialogue, but I felt like a few things were delayed or did not make contextual sense.
While that stuff I could laugh off and still be convinced I was in a horrifying world, there are politics in this. The protagonist's backstory is brought up at the climax, which unfortunately reinforces my dislike of the character I'm playing. Her story is
There are a lot of problems to unpack with this climatic story line. I gave the benefit of a doubt to the writers and looked up local Norway statistics and analysis of this, but this narrative has the same problems if it were written in North America. While I can absolutely remove this game from reality and our real lives, there is an huge problem with telling fictitious stories that involve real life social issues and use myths raised by Edit: Also, how did I forget that every time
There are ways to talk about these tropes, but how it was handled here really turned me off of the game. This plot line reminded me so much of The Room I think I exclaimed it out loud on stream and just pushed to finish it. It's also what tipped me off to not recommend this, otherwise I would have felt this was a fine scare for a little bit with some clunkiness.
I played and finished this on stream for spooooooky October and had conflicting feelings about it.
I'm playing with English audio, which may have an impact. Overall, I found the environment and monsters great and scary! However, I have huge problems with the story and characters.
I didn't know what to expect going into this, and was really creeped out as the sun sank going through what seemed like an abandoned village. There was good suspense building up to the encounters, and meeting the creatures had been creepy but intriguing. It looks beautiful, the skyline and how it changes throughout the story is impactful, and the sound design really fit well with the environment and added to the eeriness of the world.
The game is a little clunky and stiff, as walking over rocks or other objects really impacts the character's position in camera and the camera perspective. I also believe I had an encounter that was bugged, where I believe a monster was supposed to kill me but I walked through them a bunch of times - there's an achievement to die from them from what I gathered.
After a while, the protagonist became frustrating. There are audio lines that sound and feel unrealistic considering what I've experienced already in the storyline. For example, I don't know if playing with English audio had an impact on the poor quality voice acting or the rhythm of dialogue, but I felt like a few things were delayed or did not make contextual sense.
While that stuff I could laugh off and still be convinced I was in a horrifying world, there are politics in this. The protagonist's backstory is brought up at the climax, which unfortunately reinforces my dislike of the character I'm playing. Her story is
There are a lot of problems to unpack with this climatic story line. I gave the benefit of a doubt to the writers and looked up local Norway statistics and analysis of this, but this narrative has the same problems if it were written in North America. While I can absolutely remove this game from reality and our real lives, there is an huge problem with telling fictitious stories that involve real life social issues and use myths raised by Edit: Also, how did I forget that every time
There are ways to talk about these tropes, but how it was handled here really turned me off of the game. This plot line reminded me so much of The Room I think I exclaimed it out loud on stream and just pushed to finish it. It's also what tipped me off to not recommend this, otherwise I would have felt this was a fine scare for a little bit with some clunkiness.