Kholat

Kholat has you wandering around a largely monotone level, hunting for locations listed on your map. None of the locations are very interesting, and none convey a story. You get snippets of a story from pieces of paper strewn throughout the level, which you can either stumble across, or stumble across co-ordinates scribbled on rocks, which lead to them. There are also camps that serve as both save points and fast travel points, saving you the aggravation of walking the entire map. There's also an attempt at horror by introducing a monster that can chase you down and kill you, but you only encounter it a few times, and being hard to avoid, most of the time it's an insta-death, making the experience less horrifying and more annoying. There is the story to keep you going, but it isn't very good, and you don't need to uncover all of it to finish the game. Which is a shame, since the game is so awkward, it requires a distraction to make it bearable. In the first level you're tasked with reaching the least interesting part of the level in order to advance, and it leads you to a level that's almost completely white, where you stumble around looking for any points of reference. Not being able to interact with the environment and not knowing if I missed some controls, I looked up a walkthrough just to get past the first level. Having reached the second and wandering around it aimlessly for several minutes, I used that walkthrough again, and decided to restart the level. Only then did I advance to the actual game. The ending is awkward as well, since you need to reach a previously reached location to trigger it. Add to that the performance issues, which seem to spring out of nowhere, and Kholat is a fairly frustrating experience. The game seemed to run smoothly most of the time, but on occasion I would experience slowdowns, freezes and several crashes, almost causing me to rage-quit, since I had to redo large sections due to the game only saving at checkpoints. Zero stars.

atmospheric and moody, with 50/50 bad/good mechanics and lore "Fun can be had, even when bad" --bluearcanian

Sometimes a story is best left just as this, a story, which legacy is left as folk lore best captured in books and movies, not a video game. I really do not have too much to say about this game because in honesty there is not much gameplay involved to speak of as such, walk around, follow the coordinates, discover another piece of the story and move on, with the occasional psychological struggle which follows as you go deeper into the mountains during your pursuit to find answers whilst battling prevailing storms. The graphics are good, unfortunately, the game for me doesn't contain enough gameplay to warrant the investment of time to complete it, nor does it have a strong enough and compelling reason to follow the story until conclusion. I did really enjoy the Blair Witch game, which had similar gameplay direction, however, the lore of Blair Witch is what kept things interesting and there was an uneasy tension and atmosphere as you were traversing through the woods with your dog for support, the woods makes for a great traditional horror setting. The mountains unfortunately do not provide that same tension and instead the game relies on cheap scares and effects to capture psychological distress to unease the player, sadly, this is not original and does not favour well against games which already exist in the same category on the market. The game runtime is also short and is really not worth a second playthrough, which equals bad value and therefore not worth the purchase unless you are really interested in the folklore behind this story.

So I bought the game as my yearly Halloween Scare-Fest - lights out, beer in hand. I was hoping for something akin to the EXCELLENT Miasmata - meaningful environmental exploration with a map, compass and a few landmarks. Instead I found a game that annoyed me within the first 5 minutes. It's a bit pretty, sure but other than that it's tough to find a more frustrating game. Maybe I never dug deep enough, but it seems like the game is the epitome of aimless wandering. Sure, you have a map, some coordinates and a compass but who cares. The start is just run in some direction and hope something happens. I was tempted to not write a review but I feel like I had to add my 2 cents to what was already there - the user Roisack really hit the game on the head. Rarely do I quit on a game this soon, but something about this one just irked me. Disappointing all around. Like being railroaded down hallways you don't exist, then killed by a random monster. I often justify a game purchase like this as "It's like buying a coffee." Here, I would have rather had the extra coffee. Go play Miasmata instead.

Summary: i'm negative about this game because it's a totally wasted potential. 100% disappointed. This is literally, they autogenerated a big map in UE4 and spent 1 week adding notes taken from wikipedia pages about paranormal events in Russia. Layer in some TurboSquid models and animations and one voice recording session. Overall this is crap - the developers i think set out to make a Stalker type game and came out with a UE4 tech demo. Positives - artwork is great! the opening part had my full attention and excitement for 5 minutes! - the autosave system is nice Negatives: - if this game had some sort of tutorial scene, some kind of set up, anything... - you are thrown into a huge map with little guidance and the gameplay is walking from hotspot to hotspot to get some piece of paper with some cryptic crap on it. That's the whole game - there are random monsters on the map with AI from 1992