CAYNE

There's a lot of stuff going on with Cayne, but it's not everything that it promises to be. Puzzles are obtuse, getting around is a pain, writing overall fine, but some of the text logs get overly complicated with names and whatnot. Ending wasn't surprising, can see it coming for more than halfway through the game, really feels like it should have been obvious to the main character as well. Because I assume she reads the same logs as I did, because every time I pocked up a new one, she has something to say about it before I even had a chance to read, sometimes not even understanding what she's talking about. At the end I had more questions than answers, for example, why what who Samantha? I liked the atmosphere but unfortunately all the moving parts in this game don't fit well together. At the end I just wanted it to be over, it being short almost helps the game.

The BROTHERHOOD have some amazingly talented people. A great game with a great story. It's somewhat short, but very rich in detail. Play this, then get Stasis. Oh... and play them with the lights off and the sound WAY up. You're welcome.

Sadly, the level design is a massive step down from Stasis, making 80% of the game running and looking at screen transitions (both of which are quite slow), as well as puzzle design get even more illogical, and the pixel hunting got even tighter margins (I'm talking about room transitions). The tone of the writing changed considerably as well. Felt more like a comedy than horror. While I understand comedic relief in horrors, it shouldn't amount to 90% of main heroine dialogue. There's also one big design mishap that won't allow you to check on one of the terminals to check the IDs of the rooms after certain event in the game, making finding the the necessary clue to a puzzle a huge chore. The art quality and how the game runs became better though, so that's a plus I guess. VA is as good as Stasis. Don' treat this as a Demo to Stasis because Stasis is considerably better in my opinon.

Disregarding the fact it is free... Looks beautiful, but like many point and click adventures before it, it suffers from the same awful bad designs: Clunky UI, illogical tasks or puzzles, sluggish movement, unskippable scenes, along with solutions to things that wouldn't happen in real life, or that few would think to do or put together in a month of Sundays. And the beginning? The room has no door! What room has no door?

Cayne has a strong start, a clean main menu leads into a promising first couple of scenes of pretty isometric room renders and clear audio. A slow start as the main character, the pregnant Hadley, lays on a series of beds listening to and delivering dialogue and exposition. The problems begin as it dawns on me that neither Hadley or the other characters will ever stop pausing the interactivity for dialogue. The problems continue as the dialogue rapidly switches back and forth in tone, rarely proving relevant, much of it being a thoughtless collection of random cliche, entirely out of place. Little else in the game seems to have recieved as much attention as the mindless jaw wagging aside from the pre-rendered scenery. Cayne's major selling point seems to be the visual display, the entire game is presented with high resolution 3D renders peppered with a fair amount of fluid animation. The shine of detailed grey corridors and the liberal amount of gore sadly ends up as wasted window dressing around senseless puzzles, doing little to communicate anything but the results of successful brute force clicking attempts. Aside from the two instances of literal floating holographic 'put this item here' indicators I spotted. Poor dialogue and badly utilised visuals are forgiveable errors, but the claim that the game's puzzles are 'intuitive' are borderline deception. Often physically impossible item and object combinations are the solution to puzzles with much more straightforward common-knowledge answers. The levels of thought required are shadowed by the levels of patience needed to navigate to-and-fro between the limited number of rooms, while being constantly interrupted by unskippable narration, while you scavenge for items and attempt solutions. The whole slipshod assembly ends with a shocker ending that's born flat on its face. The team has ideas with potential, but seemed to expect a collage of nice ideas to stand on their own with a dramatic delivery. Didn't work.