Draugen

When you think about what separates a game from other forms of media, what comes to mind? Well... There's a very good chance that everything you just imagined is lacking from Draugen, which to be clear, doesn't need to be a bad thing. Unfortunately however, the game constantly attempts to fake these missing aspects in ways that actively harm the experience. For example, there are points where you are able to ask questions or choose responses in conversations but these make little to no difference as all options are either required or are simply not important. You spend most of the game walking from place to place in order to progress the story but this often requires a lot of backtracking. I have nothing against so called "Walking Simulators", if anything I would say that I normally enjoy them. Draugen on the other hand just fails to keep the pacing required to hold my interest. What's worse is the fact that the story is highly predictable! Within half an hour of booting the game I'd already figured out what was going on and I'm confident that most other players would do the same. On a technical level the game runs terribly! Sub 60fps at 1080p on a 1080ti in sections. The game's options are also lacking as barring the volumetric lighting there was very little performance to claw back by dropping the settings. This would not be such an issue if it was not for the fact that the game really does not look all that good visually. There seems to be issues with the lighting where some objects don't cast shadows and the character models have this really dated look about them. Voice acting is OK but can be a little harsh on the ears from time to time with talks often sounding more like narration than a conversation. Overall this is not a very good game and I would serious look to avoid it if you have a very low tolerance to video game jank.

Draugen is very nice visually, but the story is rather disappointing and the game only takes three hours to complete, so it has a length of a demo, or a short DLC to some game; definitely not appropriate for a full game.

It just is very... linear. It's more like an interactive movie than a game with choices and consequences. There also seems to be a lot of things that just flat-out don't matter. Like, for example, your journal: There's a map in there, and you can add drawings, but you can also never open it once in the game and it wouldn't matter at all; seriously, I opened it at the end and saw that it had changed, but not in any meaningful way. I have to be honest, I'm a little disappointed, given that this is a Red Thread game. The story in TLJ/Dreamfall games is one of the greatest I've ever experienced across any series of games, and I had high hopes for this, but it was just short and quite predictable. I mean, it's still a good game and worth the playthrough, it's just not great (a sentiment that is echoed a lot in other reviews. The environment is beautiful but also small, so you see all of its beautiful-ness pretty quickly and then it doesn't change much. Also, there are a few bugs that seem to have slipped through, like rain inside the house and I had a prompt of "press R to read" that stayed on my screen for the entire game. Yeah... not quite what I expected. So I wonder what Edward and Alice's next adventure will be?

Draugen starts very slowly and for the first hour it feels like you're still in the intro since you're strictly forced to follow a certain path. Given I finished the whole game in 3h, that means about a third of the game is some kind of introduction. While the general visual impression is quite good, neither the polygon detail nor texture quality is top notch. Same is true for things like water shaders or world design. Actually, the "world" is just a very (!) small area around a Norwegian fjord. Indeed, this includes only a few houses and some paths in-between. You can't really roam around freely and there are very few objects to interact with. There are couple of game-like elements like collecting some missing pages or using a key on a lock but there are only very few of these interactions. Everything else just triggers some monolog/dialog. So it's a walking simulator - no doubt about that. The best part of the game is your companion Alice of course even though it's somewhat clear from the first second that something's wrong there. There's quite a lot of dialog and Alice is animated, but she is not really following you or interacting with the environment. She just appears at certain trigger points, does some animation loops and her main purpose is talking to you. Still, this is more than most other walking simulators can offer and certainly a plus. Now, while the story starts somewhat interesting about the protagonist Edward searching his sister Elizabeth in a Norwegian village just to find all inhabitants missing and a sinister story about an ancient curse unfolding, all of this ends somewhat prosaic and disappointing. There is a twist at the end which is pretty much predictable but with a bizarre detail ("the entity") that I found totally silly and uncalled-for. So while it's certainly not a bad game and a lot of love went into the character design etc., the disappointing end and short playtime make it hard to justify more than three stars.

Ignore any "horror" descriptors. There are a few scary moments, but for the most part, this game is about two characters you can love, and their journey through an important moment of growth and change in their lives. The "twist" really does become obvious long before it is revealed, but...that's not the important part. And perhaps isn't really the surprise at all. Very much worth the price, and I hope the sequel comes out soon.