PARANOID

Nice story, gameplay and level design. Poor interaction details. The stated system requirements are underestimated and the game may not start. Low FPS and optitization.

It's a game full of good ideas and relevant game design, but the execution is failed by lack of technique. The immersive horror should work and the gameplay is reactive enough to keep you in, but terrible optimization and poorly executed ideas (tentacle animation, bugs that clearly look artificial, and more...) always prevent proper experiment

bugs in the tutorial madmind has gone down hill

Paranoid makes a horrendous first impression.The game throws you in with barely any guidance on what to do or how to play. There is a combat tutorial, but that’s it. There are healing items in the game AND your health regenerates, but the hard difficulty is still way too much (for me it was unplayable. I would just always get killed), while the easy setting is, well, a bit too easy. The beginning of the game is tedious to navigate with no map and no clear objectives. In that early section of the game you can pick up various non-combat items that seem to serve no purpose and only add to the confusion. Later in the game, when you enter the sewers, the path does become more linear. The story sets up its premise in the introduction, but you can barely figure out what’s going on after that. You go from one hallucination to the next with barely any rhyme or reason. It only becomes more confusing later on; you learn that the whole thing is tied into the Madmind universe, but the information is nowhere near enough to figure out how exactly. By the end, nothing is resolved. The controls feel imprecise, but you get used to them, seeing how it’s mostly about those combat encounters that are either too difficult anyway or negligibly easy. On easy difficulty, where it’s at least playable, Paranoid feels like a dumb waste of time. It does become a little less horrible by the end, but still a far cry from anything decent. I’d just avoid this game altogether. It’s somewhat reminiscent of Agony in its initial state, but much, much shorter (it took me just over 5 hours to finish it). It’s not a good game.