Scanner Sombre

A nice, short experience. I think it would be better value if it was a pound or two cheaper. It has great audio, and a cool visual effect (though after a while it wears off). On the downside it makes some basic errors - the main one being that it doesn't let you define your own control scheme, or tell you what the controls were. At one point I was stuck - it turned out you had to press spacebar to jump (but hadn't been told that!) I'd been happily moving around with the arrow keys, my favoured control system, and never define spacebar as jump ( can hardly reach it while moving forward), so I only found it by randomly bashing the keyboard. Control systems shouldn't be hidden or opaque.

It begins nice, exploring a cave, not knowing anything. "Painting" the walls shows a terrific cave if you crawl on through, making your journey - and looking back you see this cave as a 3d-model lasered out by your actions.... Then it hits you with temples, occultists and nice statues even trees in that cave. An ancient cult? What? This immense cave, these unexplored ruins... Great! And than, my savegame says "40%" in the game, it gets "horror". You make a false step in the water, they scream and come after you. You step out of the water, they lay down to rest. Sorry, it could had been a nice exploring and claustrophobic experience, but why do dev´s always feel the need to put such... childish stuff in a great concept? It´s even not spooky, it just ruins the - til that point - good game. After the undead awakening i could only quit.

For a company who has brought us games like Darwinia and Defcon and recently Prison Architect... They can do better then this. You are pretty much just walking around a cave with a scanner. The problem I'm having is it's not always easy to figure out where to go and making out what things are can be a challenge at times. Also, there's this spot with a bridge with a gaping hole in it that seems to be a show stopper, have yet to figure out where to go and it's mainly because trying to "see" where to go can be very hard as stated before. My abysmal rating is because Introversion puts out a TON of good games and I am a huge fan of the company in general. I really honestly like to see them trying new things, but this "game" if you want to call it that is the worst piece of crap this company has ever put out. I don't see where any effort was made to crank out a decent product that aligns with the quality of past products. I paid 5 bucks for it so no loss on my part but I'm disappointed in Introversion for cranking out something that they should've known wasn't "them". As I stated, their past products are incredibly good and they are one of the best Indie game companies out there, hands down. But I cannot recommend this game to anyone sadly, just stay away.

Interesting game but short