CAYNE

Since I already praised The Brotherhood for their work on Beautiful Desolation, I was interested to see how they started and that is how I got to Cayne. And I must say that I hated the whole experience, I know that it can be heart breaking to a game developer to see and read something like this, but it's for the best. Story: You are pregnant woman named Hadley and you are thrust into a unknown facility and are trying to save your life and of the unborn baby. I found it irritating that her "character" had a defense mechanism by telling stupid jokes. Voice acting was alright, the screams are great. Had zero chemistry and due to no charisma of her own and very bizzare dialogue I didn't enjoy the protagonist at all. There aren't a lot of characters here, and basically most of the story is thrust upon you by reading PDF notepads, and it doesn't work especially that you can see that they are based in a advanced future, there could have been audio logs but I gotta say that they also couldn't save the game from being bad. Gameplay isn't fun here. There I said it. Basically you also go around collecting items and are trying to solve puzzles. Like with Beautiful Desolation which had several puzzles which could be sorted out, and then some that had minor hick ups with the signs and how to solve them, here you are left like a naked babe into the woods and they don't make any sense. You will be clicking everything and anything on every possible to get a solution. That is just bad game design. Now to give them some credit here, some designs of the interiors are interesting and it really shows that when they are willing, they can get that part of job done very well. I wouldn't recommend this game to somebody to check The Brotherhoods work, definitely start with Beautiful Desolation but Cayne can be skipped it will save you a lot of time. Now I feel trepidation to play Stasis at one point.

I do not mind hard riddles, where you have to even use RL sheets paper to solve them. But here they simply make no sense. You have to randomly try everything on everything, and I have no interest in a mindless time-wasting. You will see what I mean, when you have to figure out the "Cayne-Fuse" Everything else seems ok, as far as I played the game. Wasted potential.

I liked it. Very good atmosphere, good story. Worldbuilding really gives the feeling of bigger world in the background. Dark humor of the backstory was a good touch. Sometimes animations can be a bit slow though - some shortcut mechanism to pass between areas would be helpful - quick area passage with double-click for example.

A couple of hours to get through. A couple of the puzzles I thought were a little bit odd to solve. Some items hard to find onscreen. I mainly finished it just to see how the story ended.

CAYNE starts off with a bang. Your character Hadley visits a doctor in a nice medical facility for her pregnancy, goes under general anaesthesia for a procedure, [I won't spoil the best and only scary part of the game.] And your anaesthesia has worn off. The game goes downhill from there. Notice that inane joke I inserted near the end there? Hadley makes constant snide remarks like that throughout this very short (couple of hours) experience. The rest of the support cast fare no better. Even in their text logs, everyone is preoccupied with their gross fetishes, usually sexual in some way. Hadles sometimes talks seriously about her lifes with... a disemobied voice. Yeah. This game is more Sanitarium than Alien. And even less scary but twice as annoying to navigate. There is no genuine horror, environmental or unknown or otherwise. A bit of grotesquery, yes, but more comical than horrific. I guess that's why everyone including Hadley is taking the situation in strides. I was, however, horrified everytime I had to traverse this giant lobby that connects all the other locations in the game. Hadley takes many seconds to traverse it, has to do it often, and you can't shorten the process. I don't remember another horror game where I am put off by the one thing that's as far from horror as I can get. Fortunately, the inventory puzzles are still mostly sensible. Though with many fewer puzzles than STASIS, even a couple obtuse ones seem a little much. There are also easter egg puzzles that are much tougher to crack. They don't bear on the plot but could provide a distraction for those so inclined. Maybe I am too hard on CAYNE, having finished STASIS only yesterday. The drop in the quality of the world building and the horror atmosphere was shocking. I can't help but feel CAYNE should have ended the way Sanitarium ended. Alas, the nightmare was real.