The first sequel to a previous game! And, more than that, the first new release since I first became aware of the site (Dangle doesn’t count, it didn’t quite occupy the same brain space as this game did). There was a good bit of a drumroll on Nitrome’s end in the lead-up to this game’s release, and I can see why: even beyond its status as the very first sequel, this breaks the ground in a ton of ways. There are animated cutscenes, a Super Mario World-esque world map, you can customize your character's skin (and, at one point, even create your very own balloonsona), and there are even multiple save slots in the menu. This was truly something special within the context and scope at this stage of Nitrome’s lifespan, with features that even games later down the line wouldn’t have, and even though the first game was fucky when I tried to play it with Supernova I’m hoping that with the two-year gap might mean that this’ll still be beatab-

oh um

this loading screen for the intro is uh

going on forever, huh

okay refreshing puts me on the world map and lets me play the first level let’s- oh that’s just the same loading screen

uhhhhhhhhhhhh

So I tried playing it on Nitrome.com. I got stuck on a loading screen. I tried playing a HTML5 port another site made. I got stuck on a loading screen. I tried doing the same things on a different browser. I got stuck on a loading screen. Not knowing what else to do, and not wanting to give up on even playing the game, I found a dump of all the raw .swf files for… a good percentage of Nitrome’s flash games, downloaded Adobe Flash Player via an archive link, and… holy shit it ran like a dream. Genuinely. None of the lag present in either the Supernova emulation or the HTML5 ports. It played the same way in 2023 as it did in 2007. Honestly, running into these issues might have been best for the long run: while I fretted at the idea of not even being able to play a game (and such a landmark one in Nitrome’s history) due to technical issues, what it led me to means I don’t have to deal with any of the kerfuffle over what poison to pick between the emulated original or whatever HTML5 port exists. Thank god.

Especially because it meant I could play… what's easily the first truly great Nitrome game so far. It plays exactly like the first game: use the mouse to blow a fan and guide a hot air balloon to the end without touching any other walls or surfaces or enemies. It’s simple, but after a gentle difficulty curve the game starts to show its teeth. Precise movement (knowing when and how hard to blow the fan) is required if you want to make it through the level, and the little bonus objectives in stars do a lot to customize the experience: do you want to play the level the normal way, or do you want to take on all the little extra challenges so that you can do the bonus levels after? Either way, failing just once will send you back to the beginning of the level, in a way that’s absolutely brutal but in a way that leaves you ready to take on the challenge again. The game goes against Nitrome’s ethos so far in that enemies and obstacles are generally one-and-done, but this works to its benefit: levels primarily defined by one obstacle and how you navigate around them, and really neat designs that show up, play around the constraints of the game in generally neat ways (I especially liked all the obstacles that reacted to the fan) and disappear before they wear out their welcome.

The game knows how to balance its difficulty, giving you tough, genuinely stressful levels (there’s one in particular that's the equivalent of an autoscroller and even despite beating it first try I was fretting about how one twitch or mistake would send me right back to the beginning), before then easing up the throttle, giving you a chance to relax, calm your nerves, let you believe you’re good at the game for a bit before it ramps back up again. And in the midst of this you’re treated to this loud-coloured, retraux artstyle brimming with charm, both through the enemy designs and all the facial expressions — giving you new balloons is a genius reward for completing levels, and honestly if it weren’t for wanting to do them all anyway, seeing which little guy I unlocked next would’ve been the perfect motivator for doing even the post-game bonus levels. I dock it a bit for some fucky physics and some… maybe stinker levels, and it’s clear that Nitrome’s first implementation of boss fights… leaves something to be desired, but otherwise… yeah: this is Nitrome firing on all cylinders, and the first of their efforts, I’d say, that’s truly a cut above all the rest.

…I wonder, now that I have Flash Player, if I could go back and actually beat the first game…?
























































(nope)

Y’know, I probably would’ve added some checkpoints if my levels were marathon-length slogs with constant one-hit-kill obstacles that supersede the lives system already in place, with buggy mechanics where I can be affected by, say, an enemy blowing wind when I’m not even on the same plane as them, borked controls where I can literally be clicking the bottom of the screen and my spider will still move upwards into an enemy, constant leaps-of-faith where I need to know what’s ahead to make the best decision, and level design where I’m constantly fighting against the game to move forward, but I guess also “if you hit an instant death trap because you were trying to play with the physics in a physics platformer you have to go back to square one” doesn’t really seem like that big a deal compared to everything else. It starts off okay, and relatively simple, even if some of the more technical things are evident immediately, but once things feel a need to get more involved and complex it gets intolerable real quick. I spent, like, half an hour on the first nine levels, found a couple of them to be straining but otherwise bearable, then level ten took like, a whole 40 minutes of making it several minutes in, dealing with all the fiddly stuff, then hitting a one-hit kill or accidentally moving backwards into an enemy. I thought, maybe, like, this was just a low point and that the game would become better once it got all that out of its system. It didn’t. I found out level 11 was even more of that shit and decided, maybe, this wasn’t worth my time. Cowardice, I know, but having beat my head against the wall for 40 minutes only to find that there were more walls made me figure that I’d gotten enough of an impression. I looked at playthroughs of the remaining levels and even watching them felt too tedious for me to wanna stick around to the end.

The first Nitrome game I ever played! Not for long, though. I'm fairly sure when I found the site I didn't even beat the first level of this before bouncing onto Skywire and Frost Bite, and now, having actually gone through it for the first time… maybe it was for the best that past me didn’t. The core of the game is that it’s a collectathon platformer with a main mechanic of jumping from planet to planet — the gravitational pull and the traversal through the landscape almost make the game feel like a traditional side-scrolling platformer… except that platforms, in this case, are circular, and centre gravity around them as you jump. While it starts well enough, the game starts to show its warts as it goes along. Individual levels veer loooooong — like, 5-7 minutes just to complete it — and not for good reasons: most of what you do after the halfway point is just stand around waiting for planets to come near you, or stand around on moving planets waiting for another go to try and the one star you need to get to complete the level. This could be bearable… if dying didn’t send you riiiiiight to the beginning, forcing you to do the entire process from step one each time. This is even worse given how finicky the platforming can be, or how cycles can sometimes work out that sometimes there’s no way to escape taking damage and the fact that the player jumps upon taking damage can randomly undo progress or immediately lead to more damage and, as a whole, this game… does not feel polished. Or particularly fun to play, after a point. Wouldn’t call it the worst so far, but for the first game I ever played from this company, for the game that, however indirectly, led me to obsessively follow the website (and, in a way, led me to become as active on the internet as I am today)… man, past me could’ve done better.

do have to shout out the music tho

Skywire is a game where you use the arrow keys to move a gondola across a linear path, avoiding all the obstacles in your path in hopes of getting at least one of your passengers to the end of the stage. What initially seems like mostly a matter of proper timing soon, however, betrays a fairly complex system revolving around gravity, and how that impacts your momentum: the path curves up or down, the former causing your gondola to move slower, the latter causing you to rocket forward, even if you’re not holding that specific direction. Soon it becomes a matter of controlling your momentum — knowing how long in advance you need to start climbing something, knowing when exactly to start slowing your roll so that you don’t accidentally veer directly into another obstacle, and, sometimes, knowing exactly when you can abuse i-frames to gun it to the end. Its simplicity is complex, and the varying obstacles are mixed and matched in a way Nitrome is clearly adept at at this point. There are… technical issues — obstacles that spawn right on top of you in a way that’ll force you to lose a life unless you explicitly know they’re coming, obstacles with funky hitboxes that at points guarantee you lose a life when the level forces you close up to them — and there are some levels which are, like, three minutes of waiting for obstacles to go through their cycles (which if you mess up sends you right back to the beginning) but as a whole this is definitely the first game I’d consider to be above 'pretty good': just really solid execution where its quibbles don't hold it back as much. Plus! Iconic music! And uploaded to YouTube with decent recording quality this time! Can’t wait to replay the sequel and remember just how it iterates.

While not the first Nitrome game I played, nor the one that drew me to the site in the first place, this was the first game to really hook me in (pun unintended). While Space Hopper hadn’t held my interest, this one had: leading seven-year-old me to spend his entire period in the computer lab trying to get as far as he could, eventually compelling him to play the other games on the site: both within the (much, much smaller) backlog at the time, and actively awaiting for new games to release so I could play those as well. Sixteen (fuck I’m old) years later… this holds up! While I didn’t particularly remember anything about the level design — the little snapshots in my head all seemed to be from this game’s sequel, actually — I was surprised to find that playing this again did unearth some memories, my brain in particular adding the exact same mental lyrics to the background music as I did when I was seven years old. I don’t think this was exactly the exact nostalgic experience I was particularly expecting — I think I’d have to reach 2008’s output to really get the ‘oh my god this was the thing I used to play while I was a Childe!’ brainworms — but it was neat to revisit this.

Speaking of the game itself, though, it… almost feels kind of like a spiritual successor to Feed Me than anything else. You’re a mountain climber, rather than a venus fly trap, but the core gameplay feels quite similar, in that it’s a platformer where your main ‘tool’ allows you to click on a platform to propel yourself towards it, with most platforming challenges requiring quick and skilful use of your grappling hook, and most enemies differ in how they happen to interface with it. While it starts simple, it gets surprisingly involved, with later levels having individual sections longer than earlier whole levels, and with some particular setpieces being enough to give me a game over all on their own. It’s finicky, in places (which, sidenote, do not play the HTML5 version of this, literally you cannot collect extra health or lives) and perhaps a bit bare mechanically, but I’d still say this is fairly solid: if you’re looking for something to take 30-45 minutes of your time, and you don’t know anything else in this dev’s catalogue — like I had, so many years ago — you can’t really go wrong with this as a first choice. God knows it managed to hook me in.

Little history lesson: this was a quick ‘time waster’ (in Nitrome’s own words) made within a month or so to celebrate the Christmas season. When their next game was released the following March, the hyperlink for this game disappeared from the site, rendering it inaccessible (unless you had the direct URL) for several years — a period which included my entire time frequenting the site. Now that I’m back, and now that this lost game (or, well, lost to 8-year-old-me, anyway) has resurfaced, I’ve now been able to discover that it’s… pretty okay. You’re tasked to find one given Christmas present out of the pile below you while under a timer — one that ticks down perpetually, with five seconds awarded for each correct guess. While it starts off easy, it becomes much harder to find the outline of the specific item you want: items on screen will start being placed sideways or upside down, the game will introduce new items that look rather close to ones you’re looking for (ice skates/socks, violins/wine bottles), and the thing you’re looking for will be planted in a sea of identically coloured items, making it harder to find the specific item when it’s layered under several others. It works well for what it is! It’s just that what it is maybe isn’t the kind of thing that especially excels at wasting my time. I could see somebody (meaning: a younger me) making more of a go at it and making a real attempt at a high score, but on my end… I got the vibe the first time around. Didn’t feel the need to go back for more.

The other Nitrome game inspired by Lemmings! Unlike Sandman, though, you instead use your mouse to physically draw on the level, providing ways for your Lemmings to make it through the level, both directly — drawing lines to act as platforms to get them across a gap, or walls to change their direction — or by using it to influence something in the level: drawing a wall within an enemy to cut it in half, or turning the line you draw into a makeshift fuse to blow up a bomb. Each new obstacle brings a new way for the player to interface with the draw tool, and the game does a great job at mixing and matching all these different elements: never letting anything drop by the wayside, never making any given obstacle feel overdone. Combine that with level design which at times feels both frenetic and cerebral, a genuinely cute artstyle, and with some truly banger music, I genuinely think this game’s super charming. There are… issues, of course — there are some real finicky hitboxes, and one of the core mechanics where your lemmings must reach several different exit flags (and your progression through the game is gated behind a certain number of lemmings hitting the flag) seems to… straight up not work: so long as you get one little guy to an end flag, it seems like the game lets you through no matter what. They’re minor things, though, and in the case of the second one it just seems to make the game more friendly: if you’re willing to try to forgive some 17-year-old-flash-game jank, and you’re down for an experience that’s… more meaty than any of the other Nitrome made before this, I recommend it! Definitely my favourite of their 2006 output.

“Hey, what if we made Mario Kart, except also all the cars had guns and could shoot each other? Except also the A.I doesn’t care who wins so long as the player doesn’t so only ever target you? And also if the player gets shot they stop moving for a bit which leaves them in a perpetual cycle where they can’t meaningfully get ahead of the pack because the rest of the pack keeps stunlocking them? And also what if the player could never really do enough damage to kill any of the other tanks unless they actively threw the race to do it, meaning that all this mechanic ever amounts to is that the player's car has a health bar and also the comeback AI can red shell you at any time unless and only unless you can get an early lead and maintain it? What if we also made the game control really badly? Where turning is ridiculously slippery and will often cause you to careen into a wall? Where acceleration is non-existent and whether you’re moving fast or moving slow feels super arbitrary? And where the controls are force-bound into a setup that’ll cause intense pain to anybody right-handed where trying to move forward will forcibly scroll the page up in the HTML port we make 16 years later? What if we also didn’t have things common to other racing games like difficulty levels, a minimap on the screen so you can tell what’s ahead, or some sort of multiplayer so that it isn’t solely the player getting ganged up on by the AI? Wouldn’t that be great?”

Having gone through… so much of Nitrome’s back catalogue over… oh wow it’s been a year at this point? time fucking flies, man. But anyway what strikes me is how little I stuck with a bunch of these games — and, in particular how little I played of their… pre-2008 output. In hindsight, it makes sense: my ability to access the internet pre-the-age-of-ten was limited to whenever I’d completed my work early in the computer lab, or whenever we went through the back fence to my aunt’s place every Friday afternoon. Oftentimes I’d go full weeks in between playing games — not to mention how different computers would mean different save files, resetting my progress to the beginning each time — and oftentimes those gaps often meant I had some new toy that took precedence over the Nitrome game I’d already gone through: a new Poptropica island, maybe, or some new website like Crazymonkey.com or the Bubblegum Arcade. My impression is, a lot of times, I’d pick something up, give it my best shot, then never play it again, save for a couple I’d return to, a couple (like Frost Bite or Hot Air 2 or Off The Rails) that stuck around my memory. But even then, there was nothing here I was super gung-ho about beating, nothing here I’d super try to revisit.

Until this one: Dirk Valentine. I can’t begin to tell you just why this game was what kid me latched onto, why this one was what truly began the process of making him a Nitromehead — iirc my family didn’t get access to home internet until, like, January 2009 at the earliest — but god it got its claws in me. It was my first exposure to steampunk, and with no Horrible Histories to tell me otherwise, this was just what I assumed the Victorian era was like. It was my first exposure to the Wilhelm Scream, and even back then eight-year-old-me knew that was the funniest shit ever — he’d shoot enemies that weren’t even in his way just so he had a chance to hear that soundbyte again. He loved the core gameplay conceit: how the chaingun you wield is both your main way of fighting enemies and your main method of getting through the level. He loved bouncing shots off the walls, he loved making those weird webs of ricocheted chains that he could jump up and climb. He loved all the mechanics the game kept introducing, all the enemies, all the ways they impacted the chaingun. It gave me the brainworms, long, long before that word even entered my vernacular… yet I was never able to beat it. I made it far, near the end, but there was always one level I couldn’t beat. I was eight, I was nine, I was ten, and I’d keep coming back, keep thinking maybe this would be the moment I was good enough of a gamer to get through my plateau, but it never came to be. I’d reach whatever level it was that walled me (I can’t quite remember but it was probably Control Room 1) and I wouldn’t be able to beat the game before computer time was over, before next week gave me something else to fixate on. It was… certainly important in the context of my history with flash games, yet I never actually beat it. I never actually saved Queen Victoria from the evil Baron Battenburg.

At least, not until today.

…Playing the game again, in 2024, with whatever wisdom the past sixteen years have or haven't given me, what I’ve realized is that this is a fairly major step forward, at least in the context of Nitrome’s progression as a studio. This is their first game to have a proper story — or at least, more of a story than a ‘congratulations, you beat the game!’ screen and maybe a quick intro cutscene — your mission control’s consistent chiming in doing a lot to lend a sense of context and gravitas to your actions, even if, perhaps, his dialogue could’ve used some commas. I like, too, that the background changes as you go outside the fortress to inside then back to outside again: it’s baby steps compared to some of Nitrome’s later stuff (simply adding a filter to the outside background and then taking it out again), but it helps lend a sense of overall progression as you fight through the titular Fortress of Steam. Beyond that, a lot of what kid me found fun about it still applies today: how cool it is that your gun makes this both a shooter and a platformer, all the cool things the game explores with that mechanic, and how… frenetic the game grows to be, especially near the end (kid me’s dreams to beat this would’ve been absolutely doomed, lmao). I’m still fond of all the sounds you make as you do things: the screams the enemies make when they die, the extremely bitcrushed voicelines as you get a game over or pick up a healing item, they all lend so much character. I think perhaps the boss battles felt rather basic (and a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you get hit upon entering the arena or not), and in general it’s… easier to softlock yourself in a bunch of levels than I feel it maybe should be, but as a whole this was a blast. Perhaps it’s not fully polished to the point where I could call it one of the best Nitrome games nowadays — moving the mouse to move the camera was… rather rough, the recording quality of the music wasn’t that great and there were a non-zero amount of points where shooting the chaingun didn’t feel like it maybe should — but if any game has done enough to earn the right of pet favourite, it’s this one. God knows how much past me loved this. And I reckon he would've been happy to know that I eventually got good enough to finally clear this, even if it, uh, took a good bit longer than he presumed it would.

Nitrome’s second racing game! Much better than the first one! …Not much to say, otherwise. This is a game that’s evidently meant to be played multiplayer, and the fact that this can go up to four players yet at the same time can only be played on a single keyboard perhaps speaks to why it feels… rather limited, compared to the games surrounding it. You move your UFO around the track by tapping the boost button over and over again, you turn to try and avoid hitting obstacles or falling off the course, you complete three laps and win. There are only three courses, only two unique obstacles, and not even any AI UFOs to race against — doing the game singleplayer merely has you racing against the clock, which leaves a game that’s… effectively ‘done’ in ten minutes. Evidently, this was more meant to be something endlessly replayable — something for whenever the eight-year-old me had free time at the computer lab and four friends all willing to play Twister on the keyboard — though even then I’m not sure this has enough here to return to after a couple runthroughs of each of the racetracks. More like a demo for further multiplayer capabilities — and, perhaps, for the non-zero amount of racing games Nitrome would make after this point — rather than something that really stands on its own.

It’s wild what banal memories from these games rush into my head the moment I play them again. I didn’t remember how exactly this game played, or whether this was one of the games I beat back when I was a kid, but I heard the main theme and I saw these anemone decorating the ocean floor and that unlocked something I… don’t think I’ve thought about since before I was ten. Like I just remember seeing those things dotting the bottom of the level and being so amazed and weirded out about how much they looked like brains that they buried themselves somewhere into my long-term memory. Kind of insane. And the game itself is pretty fun, too! You point and click your submarine to move it both under and over the ocean, trying to avoid enemies, trying to find treasure, and using your depth charges (rather reminiscent of Toxic’s bombs) to clear the way, being able to fight back against enemies but only if they’re directly below you. There’s a fun diversity of levels: ones where you have to effectively find your way through a giant maze, ones where you have multiple valid paths through, ones with one path, yet optional objectives you can take if you wanna get more points, and then ones where it’s a tight squeeze and you’ve got to go through the gauntlet. Combined with the ways the game mixes and matches with different enemies, distinct mechanics, you get a rather solid little undersea adventure, that, unlike… a good amount of similar games this dev has made doesn’t become a massive slog in the second half. Perhaps because they… apparently patched this so that you get double the health (which might be why using i-frames to gun through the last portion of a level worked as well as it did) but either way it shows a pretty good amount of iteration and forward progress, and, as we leave 2007 and enter 2008, shows a good bit of promise for the output ahead.

I can’t profess to know fully the timeline of triple-A gaming — just when exactly we reached the shift towards what we’re getting now — but something funny I found as I played through David Cage’s Heavy Rain is how it honestly predates a lot of the trends present nowadays. The core relationship (or, at least, one of them) is between a father and his son, the latter representing the father’s attempts and desires to be redeemed of his past sins. It’s a game that’s evidently attempting to be more than just a game, to prove that the medium can be seen as art, yet, rather than leaning into being a video game, instead tries to achieve this by trying to emulate Hollywood films, with a specific focus on cinematography, hiring screen actors, using mo-cap amongst other things. It got praise in its time for bringing the medium forward its approach of interactive narrative being seen as revolutionary by mainstream critics, showing to the world what the future of gaming could be (and, admittedly, while Cage did not invent interactive narrative, he did make games such as Heavy Rain, games where “your choices matter” a trend for years to come). You even watch your child die in the first half hour of the game. I’m not sure whether it’s necessarily counted amongst, say The Last of Us or 2018's God of War in terms of cinematic AAA gaming, but to some extent it did walk so they could run. For better or worse.

The game follows four particular characters, who, while not initially knowing each other, are tied together in their attempts to find the Origami Killer: a serial killer who entraps and drowns children during periods of extreme rainfall, challenging their fathers to Saw-esque torture games where both their, and their sons, lives hang on the line. You play as Ethan Mars, who, after the accidental death of his first son, Jason, now must race against time to save his second son, Shaun, after the two of them are chosen as the Origami Killer’s next victims. You also play as Scott Shelby, a former cop turned private investigator visiting the previous victims of the origarmy Origami Killer, trying to unearth old clues to find new leads. You also also play as Detective Narmin Norman Jayden, an FBI agent investigating the origammy Origami Killer and attempting to find Shaun, while at the same time dealing with his crippling addiction to drugs and VR sunglasses. You also also also play as Madison, who, after being attacked by dream terrorists in her apartment, goes to a hotel, finds Ethan, and gloms onto him for the rest of the story. But every minute that passes is one less minute to save Shaun, and only through the four’s combined investigation may the secrets of the Origami Killer be revealed…

I’ll give it a few things: I do love all the ways individual scenes can diverge and reconvene and take into account most of the things the player does. While everything on an overall arc level tends to streamline and go down the one path, it’s kind of incredible just how differently individual scenes can diverge based on what happens, and just how many outcomes you can get. There was one early scene as Scott where a store I’m in gets targeted by a robber who doesn’t notice me. I’m encouraged to sneak up and grab a weapon, but then I fail the QTE, which leads the robber to see me and point his gun in my direction. What then follows is… a completely different scene, one where I can either try and talk the robber down, or try and stall for time until I can get close enough to attack. And this is all just from a branch that occurred when I fucked up a QTE. There’s also another moment where you can stumble across something you’re not meant to, finding yourself in a life-or-death confrontation with a completely different threat… or you can get what you need and get out without triggering that branch of the scene, your character not even having an idea of the bullet they just dodged. On a scene-by-scene level, a lot of the way the game constructs its interactive narrative is honestly pretty awesome, and I really loved looking up a lot of individual moments afterwards and seeing just how many different outcomes I could’ve gotten.

I’m also fond of how this game styles itself after detective noir, yet at the same time avoids the pitfalls I’ve seen other noirs trudge into. From the persistent heavy rain backdropping the game no matter where you are in this nameless American city, to the drab, grey, muted colour scheme that avoids the perils of low saturation, the game wears an aesthetic and wears it well, providing a little throughline that helps to suggest its colour and tone. I’m in addition a fan of the way they used mo-cap: not merely just to capture the actor's likeness and such, but also to choreograph many of the QTE action sequences. And not only are they pretty well-choreographed in their own right (they’re clear, they have a bit of slapstick style, you can easily tell what’s happening) but I love how seamless they feel with the many ways they can go. Every action by a bad guy, every action by you can succeed or fail based on the appropriate QTE, yet never at any point did the editing feel choppy or unable to handle a particular combination of wins and losses, providing an overall sequence that’s fairly unique in terms of how it specifically shakes out yet still flows without much interruption.

Unfortunately, before any of that, the first thing you get to experience is just how awfully the game plays. I’m not sure what exactly possessed David Cage to put tank controls in his interactive narrative but good god are they a mismatch. As opposed to moving via tilting the control stick, doing that merely has your character tilt their head in that direction, and you must instead hold down R2 to actually have your character move. This makes things so much more cumbersome than they need to be, between having your characters get caught on objects, getting stuck between camera angles, and in general having a hard time getting to the precise place they need to be to interact with something. The quicktime events… are better and also worse. On default they’re fine, even if oftentimes it’s really hard to see them given the way they fly around (and behind) things in the environment. Other times they don’t fare as well: there’s this one specific type of QTE you have to do which effectively requires you to pretzel your hands across the controller in a way that's so uncomfortable to hold for an extended period. Anything that requires using the Playstation Move controls isn’t exactly great. You’re told to physically move the controller down but because up/down are reversed (and this isn’t changeable) you're actually meant to move the controller up. You’re told to move the controller up and then you get in position to do so and then suddenly you pass the QTE without even trying. You’re told to shake the controller and you have to do it for so long that it could honestly qualify as a form of exercise. Legitimately by the end the motion sensors were auto-succeeding QTEs without any input on my part, which was great when I was trying to get somewhere specific but the game instead pulled me away from it over and over again. I’m honestly a fan of how long the QTE action sequences go on for — they’re the type of endurance test I think works fairly well, imo — but as a whole, this game does not control well. At best it’s stiff and clunky, and at points feels physically painful to have to interface with.

The story also has some pretty major problems. Amongst other, more minor things (this city apparently has at least four separate serial killers) the overall mystery... feels rather slipshod, at points. The game directly lies to you at several points regarding the identity of the Origami Killer, and while that’s not something I hate in theory, the game doesn’t have nearly enough grace or proper consideration to pull a twist like that off. There are little moments that you can point at, in hindsight, but as the game actively goes through with the reveal and flashes back to all the things the culprit did throughout the story, many of the things you see are either things you, the player, never actually got to see, or actively plays a completely different scene to the one you saw, leaving it feeling like the story was actively trying to trick you for the sake of its twist as opposed to providing you any sort of clues or natural progression (and, at the same time, bringing into question why the culprit would’ve done certain things the way they did if they were the culprit the whole time). The game will assume you’ve gone down branches you never actually took, with Madison referring to events that she wasn’t there for, having the contact information for somebody she never meets depending on certain events, and, at one point, being whispered the identity of the killer, reacting in shock… despite, due to what was likely a cut interaction, the killer being somebody Madison has never met before.

And honestly, you can tell that certain plot elements were cut mid-development, yet the vestiges are still present, and leave quite a lot of plot points that never conclude or get expanded on. Ethan explicitly has visions, gets teleported across the city, gets sent into psychic realms, and it’s brought up that maybe he’s not fully in control of himself… and the moment this is addressed as a problem is the last time it’s ever brought up, apparently because they wanted to excise all supernatural elements from the mystery (yet still keep the sci-fi sunglasses?), meaning there’s this whole aspect of the plot that just ends up going nowhere. The game keeps track of how many inches the titular Heavy Rain reaches in every new scene (just like Indigo Prophecy did by showing the temperature continually dropping) but this doesn’t amount to anything, it’s just some background detail that this city is receiving continuous, unending, apocalyptic amounts of rain while everybody runs around and tries to find this one serial killer. Jason and Shaun were aged up from 4/5 to 10/11… yet still act like they’re the former, making it really feel as if this game doesn’t know how children act. There was meant to be a whole backstory beat where Madison is trying to live with her memories of being a journalist for the Iraq war, but then this is never expounded upon, so Madison just has her first scene be this dream sequence of being stalked and attacked by two men in her home, which, speaking of, it’s kind of incredible how literally every scene Madison forces her into some archetype: either being subservient to a man, or being subjected to some sort of sexualized violence. She goes from potential assault victim to being Ethan’s wetnurse to being Ethan’s wetnurse again to potential torture victim to being forced to strip at gunpoint (and of course the way the game frames this is very classy) to very suddenly becoming Ethan’s love interest and giving the player a fucking incredible QTE sex scene. The very first scene she’s in you can interact with a clothesrack and then very suddenly she takes her clothes off and has a full-on shower scene. And meanwhile, unless you look at something rather specific in that same segment you don’t even get to know that she’s a journalist until the game’s almost over. She at least manages to be the main driver of the plot during the endgame — and manages to do so without the game relegating her into some sexist trope, barring her potential endings — but god, is the road to get there so Frank Miller-coded. And this isn’t even getting into the game’s two black characters.

Something that struck me is that the audio quality is, uh, quite bad. And this is from somebody a bit too hard of hearing to notice stuff like this. Oftentimes I’d find that the music, or the titular heavy rain would overpower everything else in the mix, making it impossible to hear anything the characters were saying unless you turned the volume down. The mic quality — particularly for the kids — is rather spotty. Every time I listened in on a character’s thoughts I legitimately thought something was wrong with my setup because it sounds so rough: the echo effect is so loud and tinny and the same channel as the unaltered line and it legitimately feels like the line is playing twice at once instead of merely being an echo filter. And this doesn’t even get into the voice acting. Most of the cast seem to be British or otherwise European playing Americans and it really shows. Everybody seems to be in a perpetual state of fighting with their accent. There are pretty consistent intonation issues across the board: nobody pronounces “origami” consistently, or even correctly. There are a couple of decent performances among the muck — Madison pretty consistently does a good job, Norman tries his best despite being the most hamstrung by accent issues — but a lot of the other performances either strike me as either… bad direction or screen actors not quite being used to motion capture/voice acting. People meme the whole ‘press X to Jason’ thing but it’s clear that there’s some sort of miscommunication between intent and execution: the direction was evidently ‘call for your son’ but absent context it feels more like Ethan’s trying to get Jason to set the table more than he is desperately trying to find his son in the middle of the crowd. So many performances feel kinda apathetic or robotic or like they have a really bad cold, including the two main characters guaranteed to make it to the end. It’s very funny that, among other things, this game mostly predates the trend of using non-voice actors in voice roles (at least for video games — Aladdin and Shrek had long pushed voice actors out of film roles) because it showcases a lot of the pitfalls that doing so can lead into, not to mention all the other, persistent issues with this game’s audio.

…It feels weird, in the end, to place this lower in rank than the two other Quantic Dream games I’ve played thus far. If, in part, because of what Heavy Rain has going for it. As opposed to Beyond: Two Souls, which plays it rather boring except for the parts that maybe don’t stand out for the better, or Indigo Prophecy, which honestly reads like David Cage got concussed halfway into writing it, Heavy Rain does a decent amount well. It builds up a tone, its action sequences are well choreographed especially considering how many permutations of them are present, and it’s really cool to see just how its choice-and-consequence is structured on a scene-by-scene basis. It’s a pity, then, that all these good parts stuck in an overall package that… struggles, between its awful control scheme, its poorly edited mystery, the rough audio quality and how David Cage really needs to drink Respect Women Juice. Sure, compared to everything else, and considering its place in history, Heavy Rain has a lot I’m personally willing to bat for, but under the deluge, after the storm, when the rivers and the creeks have burst their banks and dealt irreversible damage to the ecosystem… it’s rather difficult to care about the water amongst the mud. 3/10.

The third, and final, winter-themed game Nitrome released to close out 2007, and also apparently one of their most popular games? At least up until 2009? I’m a little surprised at that: frankly, like the quote itself says, I would’ve thought it’d be something a bit more flagship, like Skywire or Final Ninja, as opposed to this, which was… not a game I had much memory of. Even when playing it again, the only things that really came back to me were bits of the music and the visual design of the lizard enemies. Other than that, this was… mostly rather unfamiliar to me, but frankly, playing through it, I can see why it caught on! It very much focuses on Nitrome’s strengths, turning a simple concept (walk on the level to freeze it below you, freeze the whole level to win) and slowly ramping it up and up with enemies and mechanics, making something simple rather complex without taking away from what’s fun in the first place. Not to say there's nothing new, though: in particular, I love the use of dynamic music here, the way the main theme starts to incorporate sleigh bells as you freeze up more and more of the level. It's a neat way of tracking how close you are to beating the level, and while it's certainly not as ambitious as some of the stuff you'd see done later on, it's cute, and a fun new iteration this game brings to Nitrome's repertoire.

The game also manages to sidestep some of the issues present in other Nitrome games, or at least the ones up to this point. While dying takes you back to the beginning of the level, levels themselves are short enough that losing is never a major setback, and nothing in particular ever gets to the level of the stupid endurance tests that plagued games like, say, Twang or Headcase or Dangle. There’s a multiplayer mode, but the game isn’t assuming you’re doing it co-op — all it does is add a fun PVP element where you can compete with player 2 to see who can freeze more of the level — and, unlike previous multiplayer game Square Meal, you’re not kneecapped just because you don’t have a friend over. There are problems, of course: I think the game has way more levels than it needs to (even if I do appreciate how gradual this game’s difficulty curve is), and the final levels in particular are rather rough in how they basically become all about keeping out of enemy sight lines lest they undo vast swaths of your progress, but as a whole, I had fun throughout the game’s runtime. Which is appreciated. After going through a year's worth of… mostly platformers, each mostly plagued with the exact same flaws, seeing this and Snow Drift finally put the work in to try and combat those issues… it’s a nice way to leave off the year that just passed, and a decent promise for the one ahead. And knowing just what Nitrome released in 2008, I’m excited to revisit what’s to come.

The third Dread X Collection, released… wow, two months after the second, keeps a lot of the same ideas in play. There are still twelve games in total, all following the same prompt, all wrapped together with an interactive launcher. This time, each game is tied together with a central theme of ‘SPOOPY’ — dancing the line between scary and cute, making things that appear innocent on the surface but become evidently not as you delve deeper and deeper — and, like, man this is so my shit. Weird genre mashups. Bizarre and evocative visual styles. Throwbacks to the most out-there of things, and gameplay conceits unlike many other horror games I’ve seen. And better yet, even though the theming itself is already pretty strong, and well-realized across each of the twelve games here, almost all of them are at the very least really solid in their own right. There’s one or two stinkers in the pack, but all the others are hits, between the fun and weird things they do with the prompt, their perpetual really strong aesthetics, and just how well they play, especially for games each made in ten or so days.

There’s one continual weak point, though: the launcher. Not the game itself — developed by KIRA of Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion fame — which works fairly well as a wrap-around, solving puzzles in a castle to unlock more games to unlock more areas in the castle which unlock more puzzles which in turn unlock more games. More the… story content. How it screeches the game to a halt just so it can exposit to you for literal minutes. How if you just wanna go to a different game or somewhere else in the castle you’re forced to walk as slowly as possible in the meantime to listen to these two people babble on about whatever it even is they’re babbling on about. How you can mess the game up by walking past a dialogue trigger when you’re already in dialogue, causing it to not trigger and making you have to go all the way back just so you can trigger it and let the game continue. The way they handled the overarching story in Dread X 2 worked well: it was brief, it only popped up a couple of times the whole game, and if you didn’t care for it you could let it become background noise as you went to solve another puzzle/put another game into the VHS. Here they made it so much longer, so much less optional, and so much more boring: seriously, whatever it was they were talking about was really in-one-ear-then-out-the-other. Wasn’t necessarily something that tanked the collection as a whole for me, but man did I dread completing a game and going into the launcher for that exact reason.

Anyway, onto the individual games! In order from which I played them:

SATO WONDERLAND:
Fun! I love how everything comes together here: the retraux graphical style, the odd camera angles, the voicelines that sound cute but clash so hard with the vrrs and buzzes of the machines around you, this game sets up its vibes really well, and as a mood piece is consistently strong. It’s not let down by the writing, either: you’re set up with a breadcrumb trail at the start, and every part you uncover tantalizes you into wanting to know more… yet at the same time brings on even more questions, circling around and around before it all becomes clear at once. I… do think there was room for some more polish on the core mechanics, perhaps? Namely the part where you have to combine keywords: some sort of system where exhausting all the combinations for one particular word removes it from the list could help to ensure the player is continuously moving forward through things, in addition to preventing any situations (like what happened with me >_>) where the player forgets what specific things they’ve covered and start trying to brute force the game/repeating old combinations to try and find something that’ll let them progress. Other than that particular quibble (and some, uh, bugginess near the end) this was solid! Doubt it’ll end up my favourite of the pack but certainly an encouraging enough start.

BUBBO: ADVENTURE AT GERALD’S ISLAND:
So this game takes the style of, say, a Banjo-Kazooie, a Mario 64, like one of those N64 early-3D platformers where you run and jump around a singular large level, doing quests and searching for hidden nooks and crannies to get all the Jiggies and get all the coins. What I think I like most about this is how hard it commits to the aesthetic: characters grunt noises as their dialogue unfurls across the screen, the character models are simplistic but not obviously blocky, and even as the ~spooky~ things start it does so in a way that never truly undercuts the idea of this theoretically being an N64 platformer. Or at least, never really does anything that Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie wouldn’t, tonally. It’s also fairly fun as a platformer. The platforms are simple, floaty enough that you can get away with some jumps you maybe shouldn’t, yet some of the coins/objectives you need to do require enough engagement with the mechanics that you can’t just waltz through the game (let alone all the stuff you need to do for the secret ending). I think perhaps the final challenge is kind of annoying? It’s a fun idea to have to run across the entire island in one mad dash, and there are a lot of cool shortcuts you can take if you’re confident enough to try, but it’s so rough having to go back to the start every time your chaser nothin’ personnels right in front of you when you’re in the middle of a jump. Bittttt of a lowlight on what’s otherwise a pretty fun game. Would otherwise rec, though!

SPOOKWARE @ THE VIDEO STORE:
A horror… microgames collection? I’ve… never actually played any WarioWare, or anything else of that ilk (other than the Smash stages) but when I found out there was a game pack in my game pack I was rather amused, to say the least. And I stayed that way going through it! It almost feels… roguelite/endurance run in nature: to clear a level, you have to complete ten randomly chosen microgames in succession. If you clear one, you get to continue, but fail three times, you’ve got to go right back to the start. It becomes a macro game, both of desperately trying to figure out the rules of the game while you still have time to clear it, and then also hoping you’ll roll the levels you're good at and also come to understand the games that are a bit more ??? to you. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to figure out how a rotary phone works under a time limit. It’s great. Not to mention how cool the individual games are: how divergent they feel from each other, the layered-photorealistic-patchwork aesthetics going on, and all the little jokes when you pass or fail a game, this was super fun. Enough so for me to actually try the endless mode for a good bit once I was technically done with the game. Good stuff. Found out there was actually a full release for this one and honestly… I’m a bit surprised, but I’m happy. Always glad to see which out of all of these games manages to go the extra mile.

SOUL WASTE:
…Another N64-styled get-all-the-coins platformer. Huh. At the very least, it’s considerably different than the one before. You’re barely given any instruction beyond the premise, no real direction the game points you to, you’re merely just left to explore the wastes, searching for the things you need to find while fighting enemies and collecting all the things you can. It’s a vibe, honestly. The game achieves that Goldilocks-esque middle ground between requiring your attention if you don’t wanna die yet also letting you zone out and listen to your friends talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. Patricia Taxxon did the music and it works well: synth-heavy tracks that run the gamut from sparse to simplistic to suddenly loud and complex and frenetic. It’s great. Maybe wish the physics didn’t feel as icy? Maybe also wish some of the enemy encounters didn’t flood you as hard as they do? Made some sections feel a little rough playing through, but otherwise… yeah, I enjoyed this a good deal. Honestly if there were a solo release of this I’d one hundo percent play it again. This was a fun time.

NICE SCREAMS AT FUNFAIR:
Well, they can’t all be winners. I guess sometimes when you only have a few days to make an entire videogame you sometimes won’t be able to make the deadline. Nice Screams at Funfair is, theoretically, a game that involves you scooping ice cream for customers at an undead amusement park. The reality is that it’s a rather buggy mess. Customers think about the ice cream they want for a split second before standing there, listlessly, endless patience in their eyes as they watch you fumble with the tray doors as you desperately try to keep their order in your memory. Putting scoops on the cone requires you to throw your scooper, for some reason, and my booth quickly became littered with pitches that missed or bounced off the cone, almost all the challenge having to navigate the rather fiddly physics. There’s a system where you can try to avoid the gaze of the security drone in the booth to attempt to sneak in tips but also it’s bugged and even if you do it when it’s not looking it’ll catch you out anyway. I tried this once and then a customer came in and gave their order while I wasn’t looking so I was forced to restart the whole game. There’s no real rush to complete orders in time — no mounting pressure of, say, more customers coming in as you try to complete the order currently on hand — so even if the game worked as it was meant to there… really isn’t much depth here. You do like five orders and then the game ends. Perhaps, if this had more time in the oven, there… could be a little bit of something here, but as is it mostly feels like the side of game jams nobody tells you about. Sometimes you make something that’s honestly incredible given the constraints in place. Sometimes those same constraints force you into putting out a rushjob.

CHIP'S TIPS:
I’m sorry, I can’t not love this. It might not necessarily have as much as some of the other games in this pack do but it makes up for it in sheer charm, and just how hard it kinda goes for it. A Blue’s Clues style horror game is a silly idea in theory, and frankly just as silly in practice, but the game does a fantastic job at making you laugh with it, from its rather irreverent sense of humour, its animation, the way the FMV interacts with the pre-rendered backgrounds, it certainly leans towards humour harder than any of the other Torple Dook games I’ve played, but it does it so well. And not to say the game isn’t without its substance: it’s a fairly solid puzzle game as you explore and unlock new parts of the house to tick off all the items on your checklist, and honestly? as a horror game? it actually got pretty unnerving, to the point where I was loosely dreading what was going to happen as things started going more and more off the rails. I… don’t think I can particularly say more about this. It’s very much one of those games that appeals specifically to me. It’s also very much one of those things that you’re gonna have to see for yourself.

SUBMISSION:
(spoilers for this one. this game buries the lede on what it is for a non-zero period of time but tragically to talk about requires one to loosely ruin the surprise. if you were at all interested in playing this one skip this review I guess)

Having played and liked The Open House, a previous game by the same developer, I was eager to see whether this game would be just as fun and inventive, and it didn’t disappoint! Beyond the intro — which is fairly on point for what it’s trying to parody — the core of the game is you, the player, going through the same perils most game devs go through having only a few days to make an entire video game. Find the store-bought assets that don’t clash with your vision! Physically fight the code of the game to get basic mechanics to work! Solve the mystery lying at the heart of all these disparate indie horror stock locations! On sheer conceptual level it’s very, very strong. In practice… it’s a rather solid puzzler, with a decent core of mixing and matching areas and mechanics to open new spaces up and eventually complete your very own video game. It’s fun, clever, and at one point honestly a bit unnerving, though it admittedly did get rather tedious manually creating the mechanics over and over again every time I had to switch from one to the other, especially when I was stuck and a bit confused on what I’m meant to be doing next. Also awkward when you manage to break through and progress with one mechanic… only to then have to go back out and switch it out for another mechanic. Kinda wish there was a way it could’ve been streamlined because it felt rather clunky as was. Not enough to ruin the game — the concept alone super carries this, let alone just how well the game’s style of parody characterizes the whole thing — though perhaps enough to knock it below the upper echelons of this pack.

MATTER (OVER) MIND:
The… third collect-the-notes style platformer, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this retro-styled — the top-down camera, I think, pushes it out of that realm and more into letting it feel like its own thing. On the other hand, I think the top-down style also makes this game feel a lot clunkier than I think was intended. You play a goopy thing that jumps onto people’s heads to take them over, but there’s no way to really be able to judge your height as you jump, which often led me to sail past people’s heads or accidentally hit a platform I’m trying to jump onto. And even if it weren’t for the camera, your jump feels so clumsy: you have to hold down the jump for a little bit to be able to get any height at all which is great when you need to climb up a staircase while one the guards are firing 18 times into your head and chest region. The stealth… felt rather borked too, guards detecting me through line of sight blockers, remaining procced on me even when I’ve left the room, in general not feeling like it works the way it should. There’s a secret ending you can collect if you get all the coins, but dying resets the counter back to zero, meaning that should you mess up a platforming section or should the platforming stop you from getting away from a guard you have to scour the entire facility all over again. There’s certainly a good concept here: I love the “organism wrecks shit in the lab he was born in in an attempt to get free” genre of horror, and I did like the general sense of humour, but I think if any game here suffered from the game-jam time limit it was this one. Polish wise it only feels like it's only partway there.

REACTOR:
Neat little walking sim. Perhaps doesn’t truly go anywhere out there — you can kinda guess the way the story’s gonna go once it gets in motion — but it’s competently told, and even then a lot of what this game is going for is stylistic. The endless desert landscape outside your little station. The stark, blinding black and white all around you, only broken up by the pink of your AI assistant and the red of the meteor. The way walking across the ground feels: the smooth floors and staircases of the station compared to the grooves and bumps of everything else, there’s a lot that characterizes the experience even if the main story doesn’t quite feel so unique. The game was also rather buggy? Driving the car through the desert felt like I was fighting against the game a little bit, and by the end I managed to get myself stuck in such a way that I couldn’t move and had to start the game over again. Maybe gave me a bit more time to notice stuff I didn’t before, but, uh, perhaps something that would’ve been nice to avoid. Sticks out a little for the worse amongst the rest of the pack given how standard this feels compared to the… varied ways the rest of the anthology goes out there, but I’d still say it’s solid.

DISPARITY OF THE DEAD:
My favourite of the… wow there were four separate N64-era collect-the-notes platformers this pack, weren’t there? Not especially a genre I look at and naturally think ‘horror’, but this game in particular I think works in how it leans into it. The afterlife is desolate — disparate platforms dotting an endless void, the denizens left with nothing but to contemplate their life and death for eternity. Plays… a bit odd with the whole “you are a detective finding CLUES and figuring out a MYSTERY” element, thinking about it, but even then I think the writing is one of the strongest parts of this. Death and suicide are fairly common topics of conversation as you jump across the wasteland; specifically, what happens after somebody makes that choice to end their life, and how one ultimately copes with the reality of eternity. At the very top of the world is a payphone that delivers a constant stream of last words, and what struck me most was... forgive me, the disparity between how those about to die approach the end: how much consent they have in the choice, how at peace they are with what’s about to happen. It all builds up to you crossing over and visiting the land of the living, and while aesthetically it’s rather striking… it perhaps plays less well than the 3D platforming you’ve done before. The game suddenly takes on fixed-camera tank controls… and it does not control well: your perspective frequently changes and so do the controls, to the point where I honestly never knew what direction I was going to move when I tried to move. It’s at least a fairly minor part of the whole experience, and doesn’t take away too much from… just how strong this is in general. At least thematically, at least for most of the game's runtime. Honestly, the fact that it’s not first place really just speaks to the strength of this pack. There's some real heavy hitters here.

BETE GRISE:
This one is carried at least a little bit on its aesthetics but man do its aesthetics carry it far. The pixel art is just gorgeous: the bright yet off-colour… colours present everywhere you go, all the little things you can find in the background, and the way Pom always looks ever so off model whenever she’s on screen, there’s so much effort to making this all look a little off and yet at the same time just so visually striking. It made me so happy to see new things for the sake of seeing these new things. Also loved the grid movement, how reminiscent it is of, like, the flash games they used to have on the Cartoon Network website, how it always feels like you’re going to open up the elevator to something you don’t particularly want to see. Do wish there were more minigames to do as you go through the hotel — especially given that the most tedious of the three is the one you do the most — but honestly that complaint feels a bit pocket change: even if it is a bit sparse in terms of content it more than manages to make up just for how well it does atmospherically. Really wanna see what else this dev has done. Perhaps not the most memorable on paper, but not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

EDEN: GARDEN OF THE FAULTLESS:
Have you ever wanted to play the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2 but instead of raising Chao you’re raising biblically accurate angels? Well, be not afraid, EDEN: Garden of the Faultless might just be the game for you. The gameplay loop is simple: you get gifted a biblically accurate angel from above, you ram them into trees to collect fruit, and then you send them off to the races. Winning a race makes all the angels you have obsolete due to stat caps, but that’s fine, all you have to do is get God to give you a new angels, then command all your previous angels to kill themselves at the altar so that your new pet can be even stronger! It’s simple… if rather finicky. Getting your angels to go where you want them to is this whole process where you gotta click on the angel you want, go to the place you want them to go, then watch them slowly move over from where they randomly drifted off. Not to mention how buggy the game is: angels randomly switching names, angels ramming into you and throwing you into the bottomless pit below you, angels randomly despawning and making you think they’ve just disappeared forever… even despite this, though, there’s a fun, if maybe a slightly tedious core. I like that the game… doesn’t actually go full horror with its concept. It’s morbid, sure, but it always makes sure to be a little cute about it, never suggesting a particular tone around anything you’re doing, which then makes the point where it tries to sneak something past you feel much more potent. Perhaps not a favourite — having to grind up an angel’s stats became a bit tedious after a bit — but it was cute, a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Chip's Tips > SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store > Bete Grise > Disparity of the Dead > Soul Waste > Submission > Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island > Sato Wonderland > EDEN: Garden of the Faultless > Reactor > Matter OVER Mind > Nice Screams at Funfair

Well this, uh, mostly consisted of me just, like, walking around a mansion and delivering a letter. I get that this is meant to be a loose remake of Jack in the Dark — a quick ten-minute tech demo starring one Grace Saunders, meant to show the game’s engine in action — though I think the difference here is scale: while Jack in the Dark used all-new assets and locations, telling its own self-contained story, Grace in the Dark is in its entirety things that would go on to be in the full game: the mansion, the monster models, even one of the hallucinations you get where the mansion changes shape is one you get in the full game. Evidently, this is meant to give a sneak peek of the story, do a dramatic cast reveal of JODIE COMER and DAVID HARBOUR as the lead roles, and give an idea of what the full game is going to do… which means it loses a lot of its potential impact if you’ve already gone ahead and played the full game. I do like the little glimpse of a not-quite-on-kilter narrator in Grace, and I do like how certain things are utilized differently here than they are in the full game (the enemy models, specifically, and there’s a cool thing you can do on the stairs that you can’t in the main game), but as a whole… it would probably have been capable as a demo, as a little preview of what was to come. On its own, it’s a bit too short and a bit too straightforward to really be... much of anything. It’s no Jack in the Dark, that’s for sure.