This review contains spoilers
Worst game I've played in a while, which is shocking to say about a game that features Willem DaFoe so strongly.
It's hard to even start with this game, so I'll just begin with what its like to play it:
On a technical level, this game feels like crap to play. There's just this ever slight delay in your characters actions when you click on something, and often if say, your wife is in the middle of an animation, you have to just wait until the animation finishes before you can interact in the way you want to. These two things combined make doing certain things you have to do really wonky. Especially when you have to repeat them over, and over, and over.
I had a friend watching my playthrough who had already beaten the game and thank goodness I did because if I had to playthrough doing the same shit monotonously for like the 8-10 hour average playtime length this game has without his occasional input to speed things up I'd probably be giving this game a half star less. Even in the 4 hours of my playthrough setting up the situation to drug my wife for like 2 hours of that wore thin after 30 minutes and if I didn't get that guidance, I could easily have needed to do that for another 2 or 3 hours; all the while, unaware that I needed to progress the story differently, trial and erroring my way through the game. There was one point my friend was watching me play, and I did the correct thing, but due to the aforementioned weirdness in character action timing, I just barely missed the window to complete the action, the cop left, loop ended, and I had to restart. The fucked up thing is this I knew to do without his guidance, but when he saw it happen he felt like he had to tell me that I did actually do the right thing but the timing was wrong. If he was not there to tell me that, I wouldn't have known to try again.
The gameplay itself is normal time loop rigmarole at this point. The loop starts fresh each time with the only differences being knowledge that your PC has obtained from previous loops, played out point and click adventure style. The apartment is actually interesting and well designed and there's a shockingly large number of interactable items or things that your character will comment on. Honestly the apartment is the most interesting character in the game, and certainly the only good one. The problem with the gameplay however is that while occasionally, it will drop hints about what you need to do with your character's monologuing, is that often how to advance the story is just extremely unclear at points. Once you do figure out how to continue after repeating the same set of actions ad nauseum via, as previously mentioned, trial and erroring your way through, you are rewarded with a story not only surreal, but confusing, pretentious, and one that has left me with more questions than answers, and I mean that in the pejorative sense. This story is harder to follow than my run on sentences and meandering writing style.
To begin with, no characters in this story have names, there's you (the husband), there's your wife (Wife), there's Willem Dafoe (Cop), and then there's the Cop's daughter, who you only know by the nickname Bumblebee. There's a reason for why there are no names. But to be frank, I think there's only one good explanation for why, yet I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around this bizarre choice in the writing. I hate these characters. To even call these nameless husks characters seems to beget what they actually are in the context of the ending, which is facsimile in both the literary sense and the actual narrative sense.
Heavy spoilers start here, so if you want to play this pile of dogshit before reading this review stop now. As far as I can tell, this game actually takes place in 10+2 minutes. Basically the first 10 minutes take place in an imaginary world dreamt up by your character followed by two minutes in a study room being scolded by the person that the cop is in reality, your father. Indeed, everything that actually happens over the course of the game is really just your character having a wild and violent fantasy of the future (?) dependent upon the outcome of the conversation that takes place in the 2 minutes of the ending with your father.
The way the story plays is so convoluted that it almost leaves me with the feeling that the author of said story just had a weird concept that they really wanted to implement, but didn't have any better ideas to tell in an actually engaging way besides just creating some shocking Cagian or Shyamalanian twist. I'm not really sure what feeling the author wanted to leave me with especially when I, (and a third spectator with me who had NOT played the game) predicted the truth of the relationship between the husband and the wife - one so stupid that I couldn't possibly suspend my disbelief for the events taking place in the apartment. When the truly terrible detail that the husband has been shagging his sister (wife) this whole time unbeknownst to her, as plot hole after plot hole dots every part of the complete insanity driving the first 10 minutes of the loop, my jaw dropped in awe as I realized the game expected me to accept this crap as a troubled man's looney internal reflection.
The ending is so bad. Mind-numbingly bad. First off, in the context of what your character is doing to your wife - which is primarily being psychopathic and inarguably evil - throughout the game, the curtain being peeled back on what was actually occurring is one of the most offensive hand waves I've seen in any medium. If you've seen it, the ending to The Happening where some news caster on tv basically just says "something happened lol" was easier to swallow. There are so many holes and inconsistencies in the story fabricated for the first ten minutes that I feel like the author wants me to say to myself "ohhhhh that's why there's a hole there because its all in the mind whoooooaaaaaa." It falls flat on its face.
In the last two hours or so the most fun I had was killing my wife in stupid ways to really just see how far the game would let me go, and also seeing how ridiculous the character responses were to these situations. I love when the cop busts in and grabs your wife and she just can't stop making the same AWAWAWA noise over and over again. Really the highlight of the game for me.
Anyways I want my money back but unfortunately steam refunds end at 2 hours and I didn't realize it was on gamepass. I didn't feel comfortable after finishing this game till I passed my first load the next morning. What a shame for an Annapurna title that I was highly anticipating.
It's hard to even start with this game, so I'll just begin with what its like to play it:
On a technical level, this game feels like crap to play. There's just this ever slight delay in your characters actions when you click on something, and often if say, your wife is in the middle of an animation, you have to just wait until the animation finishes before you can interact in the way you want to. These two things combined make doing certain things you have to do really wonky. Especially when you have to repeat them over, and over, and over.
I had a friend watching my playthrough who had already beaten the game and thank goodness I did because if I had to playthrough doing the same shit monotonously for like the 8-10 hour average playtime length this game has without his occasional input to speed things up I'd probably be giving this game a half star less. Even in the 4 hours of my playthrough setting up the situation to drug my wife for like 2 hours of that wore thin after 30 minutes and if I didn't get that guidance, I could easily have needed to do that for another 2 or 3 hours; all the while, unaware that I needed to progress the story differently, trial and erroring my way through the game. There was one point my friend was watching me play, and I did the correct thing, but due to the aforementioned weirdness in character action timing, I just barely missed the window to complete the action, the cop left, loop ended, and I had to restart. The fucked up thing is this I knew to do without his guidance, but when he saw it happen he felt like he had to tell me that I did actually do the right thing but the timing was wrong. If he was not there to tell me that, I wouldn't have known to try again.
The gameplay itself is normal time loop rigmarole at this point. The loop starts fresh each time with the only differences being knowledge that your PC has obtained from previous loops, played out point and click adventure style. The apartment is actually interesting and well designed and there's a shockingly large number of interactable items or things that your character will comment on. Honestly the apartment is the most interesting character in the game, and certainly the only good one. The problem with the gameplay however is that while occasionally, it will drop hints about what you need to do with your character's monologuing, is that often how to advance the story is just extremely unclear at points. Once you do figure out how to continue after repeating the same set of actions ad nauseum via, as previously mentioned, trial and erroring your way through, you are rewarded with a story not only surreal, but confusing, pretentious, and one that has left me with more questions than answers, and I mean that in the pejorative sense. This story is harder to follow than my run on sentences and meandering writing style.
To begin with, no characters in this story have names, there's you (the husband), there's your wife (Wife), there's Willem Dafoe (Cop), and then there's the Cop's daughter, who you only know by the nickname Bumblebee. There's a reason for why there are no names. But to be frank, I think there's only one good explanation for why, yet I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around this bizarre choice in the writing. I hate these characters. To even call these nameless husks characters seems to beget what they actually are in the context of the ending, which is facsimile in both the literary sense and the actual narrative sense.
Heavy spoilers start here, so if you want to play this pile of dogshit before reading this review stop now. As far as I can tell, this game actually takes place in 10+2 minutes. Basically the first 10 minutes take place in an imaginary world dreamt up by your character followed by two minutes in a study room being scolded by the person that the cop is in reality, your father. Indeed, everything that actually happens over the course of the game is really just your character having a wild and violent fantasy of the future (?) dependent upon the outcome of the conversation that takes place in the 2 minutes of the ending with your father.
The way the story plays is so convoluted that it almost leaves me with the feeling that the author of said story just had a weird concept that they really wanted to implement, but didn't have any better ideas to tell in an actually engaging way besides just creating some shocking Cagian or Shyamalanian twist. I'm not really sure what feeling the author wanted to leave me with especially when I, (and a third spectator with me who had NOT played the game) predicted the truth of the relationship between the husband and the wife - one so stupid that I couldn't possibly suspend my disbelief for the events taking place in the apartment. When the truly terrible detail that the husband has been shagging his sister (wife) this whole time unbeknownst to her, as plot hole after plot hole dots every part of the complete insanity driving the first 10 minutes of the loop, my jaw dropped in awe as I realized the game expected me to accept this crap as a troubled man's looney internal reflection.
The ending is so bad. Mind-numbingly bad. First off, in the context of what your character is doing to your wife - which is primarily being psychopathic and inarguably evil - throughout the game, the curtain being peeled back on what was actually occurring is one of the most offensive hand waves I've seen in any medium. If you've seen it, the ending to The Happening where some news caster on tv basically just says "something happened lol" was easier to swallow. There are so many holes and inconsistencies in the story fabricated for the first ten minutes that I feel like the author wants me to say to myself "ohhhhh that's why there's a hole there because its all in the mind whoooooaaaaaa." It falls flat on its face.
In the last two hours or so the most fun I had was killing my wife in stupid ways to really just see how far the game would let me go, and also seeing how ridiculous the character responses were to these situations. I love when the cop busts in and grabs your wife and she just can't stop making the same AWAWAWA noise over and over again. Really the highlight of the game for me.
Anyways I want my money back but unfortunately steam refunds end at 2 hours and I didn't realize it was on gamepass. I didn't feel comfortable after finishing this game till I passed my first load the next morning. What a shame for an Annapurna title that I was highly anticipating.