Posted on: July 23, 2023
loewenheim
Verified ownerGames: 391 Reviews: 2
Unfortunately not very good
I played through this in one evening. My intial enthusiasm was fairly quickly replaced with boredom and annoyance, for several reasons. What stuck out most to me is that the writing is quite bad. Constant grammatical errors, anachronisms ("gene", "serial killer", "post-traumatic stress"), and redundancy ("the requirements that are required to enter this institution") culminate in a children's book that is barely recognizable as being written in English. It may be the case that the developers aren't native English speakers—I didn't manage to find out after a brief search—so it's possible I'm being overly harsh. But the writing quality immediately gave me a bad impression. The puzzles themselves are also fairly uninspired. You find a text saying how some masks on the wall should be arranged, you arrange them. You get a description of a chess position, you go to the chessboard and recreate it. Your reward for solving these puzzles is usually a key which you can then use to unlock a door at the other end of the mansion, behind which you will find more puzzles and more keys. The whole thing has the feel of a very elaborate escape room, which are definitely more fun if you do them in a physical space with other people. Oh, and some puzzles straight-up require trial and error. Lastly, there are some bugs, especially with the hint system. I would constantly be given hints referring to things I hadn't found yet. For example, I got the hint "According to the XXX I should look behind the painting in YYY". I had not found the XXX and consequently had no earthly ideal what that was about. You will also sometimes interact with things through walls or closed drawers. Overall I found the experience flat and uninspiring.
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