Admittedly this is the only horror game I've ever played, so I have nothing to compare this game to. But easily the best thing the game does in my opinion is setting up a sense of mystery so consistently throughout the game. From very early on in the game the feeling that something is wrong at the company you're working at is present, and the way that with each answer you find or each milestone you achieve so many more questions arise keeps the game consistently interesting. On top of that with many interesting characters that you can't always tell if you can trust or not and the game's humorous moments, it's a game that I enjoyed quite a bit. This game has bosses too that are all defeated with puzzles and while some of the puzzles in general, even outside of the bosses, can be a bit cryptic, I wouldn't say there's any puzzles that straight up don't make sense, and all of the bosses use the game's mechanics in unique ways. As for the horror parts of this horror game, while they aren't nearly as scary the second time you play the game because a lot of the time they follow a specific buildup and surprise payoff that works best when you don't know what's coming up, I will say that some parts were a bit scary on the first play through. I wouldn't recommend this to someone looking for an extremely horror heavy experience, but the horror does work great for adding tension to some scenes.

One of the places where the game falls a bit short is the graphics. I'm almost never the type of person to complain about bad graphics, but in this game I think it's different because they clearly had a vision I think would've worked much better with more pixels on screen. There's a lot of parts of the game where they try to give characters expressive animations, and it somewhat works, but you can't see the emotions and such of the characters very well anywhere aside from their character dialogue portraits. For what the graphics are though, they are very functional. They're good enough that you can tell what everything is, like a file cabinet or a desk or whatnot. There's also some detail put into a lot of parts of the game to add to the dirtiness of each floor, like nothing has been cleaned in years, which really adds to the atmosphere of the game that this company is not right. I was also a bit disappointed with the ending the first time I played the game, at least the base game endings that weren't in the Executive Edition update. I was still confused about things like what happened to the monsters in the building as well as some other things that are too specific to talk about without spoiling the game.

Thankfully, any confusions I had with the endings were solved with one of the additional endings from the Executive Edition update. Solved isn't exactly the right word because the other endings still exist, and you still might be confused if you don't do the DLC content, but the new content cleared up most of the confusion I had originally. Even aside from that the Executive Edition update adds all of the best content in the game. The surveillance boss segment is amazing and the house section is one of the few sections that were still scary to me even on a second play through. The best parts of the game all being part of an update added a year after the game originally released makes me think that Baroque Decay is growing. While Yuppie Psycho isn't the most famous indie game out there, I'm confident that they have the ability to make something spectacular that'll get a lot of deserved attention.

Reviewed on Jun 16, 2022


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