"5 stars? Are you being ironic?"

No, I'm not, this game put me in a trancelike state for 9.7 hours according to Steam. And that was just my first session, I still need to finish it.

If you see the title of this game and think "wow that sounds cathartic" then you should just get this without thinking about it.

Everything's covered in grime, and only you and your pressure washer have what it takes to clean up these streets. The ultimate power fantasy. Put on a podcast you've been meaning to catch up on, and just go to town.

EDIT: i gave it that extra half-star, this is a near-flawless experience. i have dozens of hours in it and i still haven't reached the end of what's in this game so far. this legitimately might end up as my game of the year.

I wish I'd made this. I think it's cool that someone made this, it is short but exhausting, and I'm glad it exists.

This game ends on day 78, and I played it on day 472.

I was wondering when it would end as I was playing it, and I have to assume the creator imagined exactly my experience as a player happening.

"I wonder what day they'll be on, 78 seems like a big number, I wonder if it will feel small to them."

Not to put words in someone's mouth, but I just figure that would've been a thought they had. I was certainly thinking about it in reverse the whole time.

I think you should either play this game right now while this is still going on, or play it 5 years after things have gone back to normal as a period piece to take you back down shitty memory lane.

some spoilers below, which im not tagging because i don't care about them and neither should you, but if having the game spoiled will turn you away from playing it, then i have done you a favor, and you're very welcome.

here's the positive stuff: willem dafoe does a pretty good job here, and the other actors are overall decent. their talents are utterly wasted here, and there are many line reads that land awkwardly, but overall it's fine. that's the absolute best thing i have to say about this mess.

playing this game is a slog. there are a lot of frustrating moments where you know what you need to do, you've uncovered the information, but it turns out you needed to click on an item three more times for your character to piece it together properly (literally), and then go use the info elsewhere.

i could forgive some of that frustration if the story was interesting, but aside from going "ah, that's fucked up" when you figure out the main twist, the rest of it falls flat, and it only goes downhill afterwards. and no, i wouldn't call it ambitious. it's cliche-ridden, masturbatory, and derivative.

none of it is given any sense of metaphorical gravity, and the story told is pretty heinous, not because the unnecessary trauma porn simply exists, but because the trauma porn serves no purpose that justifies its presence, nor is the quality of writing enough to redeem the experience in general.

drugging your pregnant sister/wife repeatedly is a critical path requirement. watching her get killed while you hide in a closet is a critical path requirement. torturing a man is a critical path requirement. gruesomely murdering your pregnant sister/wife with a kitchen knife is optional, but available if you feel like doing that for no reason (and you might be likely to try it if you don't yield to a walkthrough and go into "use everything on everything else" mode).

all of this could be used effectively by a more skilled writer. i'm not the kind of person to say story beats are inherently off-limits in art. but if you're gonna come packing, you better be able to justify going there. this clearly isn't a shock value trolling game, they're trying to make film major/psych minor bullshit, but you don't get a pass just because you threw a Kubrick reference on the carpet. you know why we still watch Kubrick films even knowing he was a huge piece of shit? because they're good movies. you gotta earn it. oh, the fucking paintings change over time? ooooh, does that get used anywhere? no? fuck off.

the gameplay and design are bad, the story and writing are bad, this is just a failure on all fronts.

i bought it on steam, but i know its also on gamepass, if you have that. that said, i'd skip this mess entirely, even if you can play it for free. if you want compelling and profound art from a small team in which you know a man is coming to kill you, go play adios instead. if you want a time loop game where the time loop is a worthwhile mechanic, go play outer wilds or majora's mask instead. all three of those games are masterpieces, especially compared to this garbage.

This game hit me super duper hard.

You ever stare at a famous painting, and you get why people like it, you get the vibe it's going for, but it's just not doing anything for you, and then suddenly after a few solid minutes of staring at it you start to break into tears as the weight of what you're viewing hits you all at once? This game gave me a moment like that.

What's here is an incredibly artistic, incredibly tense and atmospheric, puzzle-platformer with a grim theme and a crazy fucking final stretch that never fails to shock.

It's probably a 3.5 or 4.0 for most people, it's a 5.0 for me personally. I hope you like it!

Look,

I am the target demographic for this game. I love this game, I love Heaven Will Be Mine, I am among my people when I'm immersed in these stories.

This feels very much like a rough low-budget debut game, yes. I love that about it. I love the character interactions, the weird alluded-to lore, the horrifying (and effective) sound design, the intentionally uneven delivery, the tonal shifts. I think there are excellent moments sprinkled throughout, and I love this weird setup and all the emotional allegories.

Play this game, and then give yourself permission to be the Worst Girl.

first, i want to get this out of the way: the art is great, the music is perfect. most of the writing is good, and i appreciate that the dialogue options were often pretty varied in terms of what type of howard you're going to be. most of the real-world themes it tackles are handled with care, if not always gracefully, and i think all the concepts for its worldbuilding are cool, if not entirely unique. the blend of concepts, i feel, is pretty unique. there's a lot going on in the background.

this is a tricky one to rate, because there are sections of it that feel so at odds with each other. i respect the ambition in terms of how many topics and tones they touched on. i'm not sure it gels into a cohesive experience for me, but i really want to talk about all the sections. i'll keep spoilers to a minimum, but there's obviously structural spoilers since that's most of what i'm thinking about.

it opens as a detective adventure game, has two or three very short stealth sections (which are so easy you'd be hard-pressed to fail them on your first try). i like this section, it's very classic noir, and the mystery it sets up is pretty compelling. it takes you to some beautiful settings

after some time, probably halfway through my playthrough, it completely changes tone and gameplay. i think this starts out as an interesting change, but doesn't stick the landing toward the end. i really like the section in the camp, aside from having a popular twitter/streamer personality hanging out which kind of broke my immersion and felt a little out of place. not a huge deal. i really liked the focus on participating in a found community, and it treated the subject matter in a way i thought was humanizing without being patronizing necessarily. it's not perfect, but i appreciate that it went there and didn't fuck up.

after that, however, you go to a lab, where the scenes mostly take place in a single tiny room. by now the tone has shifted so drastically from where we started that i wonder where it's going, and if i'm playing the same game at all. not necessarily in a good way.

then there's the epilogue, which sets up what *i think could be a really interesting sequel. but is this game*, on its own, a satisfying and complete package? i can forgive a cliffhanger (and i am looking forward to a sequel, if they make one), but i feel like a lot of the plot threads lacked the closure they were owed.

i think my biggest issue here is that it feels pretty rushed toward the end. i only encountered bugs at the end, i found that the gameplay and setting were monotonous and sparse for the last couple hours, and it feels like the focus on setting up a sequel was to distract from not knowing how to wrap up the other plot points. the ending sequence, while beautiful, didn't really punch me in the gut like i think it wanted to.

do i recommend this game? yes, i think this is worth your time, just know it's an uneven experience and writes some checks that end up bouncing. i think there are sections that i'd rate 2/5 and sections i'd rate 4/5, so make of that what you will, but don't let a lukewarm review scare you away, this game has ambition and heart, and i really want to play a sequel someday.

among my backloggd friends, this game has the most pronounced spread of like, 0.5 stars to 4.0 stars. i like this game, but the more i play it the more i kind of cool on it. it's fun in short bursts, but i can't really sink hours into it anymore. all my runs end up looking pretty similar, regardless of starting character. i can tell 5 minutes in whether or not i'm making it through the full 30. i know which powerups work better than others, etc. etc. like, learning the game made it less fun. it's still a nice little timewaster - something to do with my hands while i zone out with a podcast on, something to play in bed on my steam deck until i fall asleep and wake up to a game over screen. but i can't really play it "actively" as much anymore

you know what it is? when you've figured out "ah, this is an unstoppable build. i've already won," you then still have to play the other 20 minutes of a run. and that can feel really good in games like binding of isaac or whatever! it even feels good in this game the first 50 times it happens. but after that, it just gets so predictable and tedious

maybe this is another plateau before i find some other level of enjoyment and progression, but for now it's just a "i can't think of anything else to play" diversion

edit: man, i've flip-flopped on this game so many times. every time i start getting bored, it adds some wild secret level and a bunch of items and a whole other progression thing to do. and then i'm enthralled yet again, this being my "steam deck in bed right before passing out" game of choice. and then it plateaus, gets boring, and then boom- another layer gets added. this game is either 2 stars or 4 stars depending on when in the cycle you ask me

i'm still working on my first playthrough, but i fell in love with this game at first sight. i booted it up, got through the intro sequence, and it's been a whirlwind romance ever since. i tried to type an "early impressions" thing here, and it ended up being a 5-paragraph essay, so i'll just leave it at that. this game rules, i can't wait to finish it so i can write a review that breaks backloggd's character limit (idk if there is one, but i will inevitably find out). there's so much to talk about here.