ASYLUM

Oh my god... I was first heard about this game in 2010 I think. Can't believe it's here. It's so funny but the same time I'm glad it's here

This is a straight-forward point-and-click adventure. I am about half-way through and, so far, all has progressed smoothly and without incident.

Scratches was a great game and Asylum is a perfect continuation of that. This game has been in develpment for decades and it's great to finally see it being released. The visuals are fairly retro and fit the old school point-and-click gameplay really well. It received a lot of polish over the years, which is apparent in the amazing intro. The layout of the asylum is handled quite well. You never get to bring a map with you but somehow you manage to know where you are most of the time due to subtle differences in the the design of the corridors and hallways. The puzzles aren't too hard, only occasionally I had to look up few I couldn't figure out. They still sorta made sense once you figured out what needed to be achieved. Some minor points of critisism: yes, there are too many empty drawers and cabinets you can open up. It bogs down the game considerably as you feel you need to check everything in case you're missing out on a clue to proceed later on. Too many written paper/documents to read through. It's fun finding clues but not so much anymore if it's pages after pages of written documents that don't really add much info. Other than that, very good game, ran smooth. Recommended for players who love oldschool point & click horror games :)

Visually enjoyed. Atmosphere was great. Too much wasted time having to blindly trek through long halls and rooms to find actual puzzles and clues that fit together. Story was intriguing up until near the end when they threw down the eldritch aspects, which was sudden, brief, and wholey unsatisfying. During the conclusion of the game, the very ending actions of the character make no sense what-so-ever given what has taken place. This ending feels like a cop-out of writing a great complete story. Some achievements also make little sense how to earn them, like doing things in a specific order where you don't need to do this within the game to progress. The first 3/4 of this game had so much going for it...

It's a throwback Lovecraftian horror point-and-click adventure, which sounds great, right? But it's mediocre by its own standards. The atmosphere is excellent, but unfortunately that's the game's only strong point. The story is at once full of holes and predictable and the gameplay is clunky and frustrating. The first issue has to do traversing the building. In order to force the story progression, you are barred from moving around freely. The rationale is so silly that it breaks whatever sense of immersion is created by the rest of the design. There are various other events that happen in the game that also make no sense. Not Lovecraftian weird, just plain ridiculous. Worse, perhaps, the silliness creeps into the puzzles. They feel so arbitrary, solvable by just backtracking and clicking on everything with every item you find. But this is tedious rather than satisyfing, because of the incredibly poor affordances offered. For example, those areas that are initially barred from you will "open" later on. But that change is very poorly indicated (there's a document you find that hints at some of it) and it's basically an annoying experience of running around and finding out what has opened up. In one case a door that was previously described as a "dead end" was suddenly open-able. Ridiculous. Likewise, you better have some patience for pixel hunting. Often the area on the screen on which you can click is extremely tiny. This completely threw me off for one puzzle, to the extent that I wasted an hour looking for an alternative solution. Giving up, I looked up a walkthrough and realized that I just didn't move my mouse over the right pixel. Yay. There are much better horror point-and-click adventures out there. Play them instead.