Posted on: February 16, 2022

skybluerob

Games: 687 Reviews: 2

Average, but worth a play.

I'm a big fan of adventure games, and in the adventure game genre, this is what you would consider a blockbuster, so I had to play it. The graphics are top notch. There may be some optimisation issues here and there, but it's an adventure game, so not much of a big deal, I locked my framerates in game to 30fps, which was a perfectly adequate gaming experience for this type of game (i7 10th gen, RTX 3060 laptop). The gameplay was average for this type of game, but it was very simple, probably too simple really, I don't like games to be hard, I prefer medium, but this really was a breeze to play. Only one puzzle had me stumped and that's because I forgot to use the 'sixth sense' type feature. *MINOR SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE* The other part I didn't like gameplay wise was the existence of 'The Maw'. I relaise they may have wanted to add a bit of a threat, but when I play adventure games I want puzzles rather than sneaking around. There weren't too many appearances of him though thankfully. The story was also average, but I didn't get into it much. I got the various mens names mixed up as they were all pretty generic, and at some points didn't completely know (or care) what was going on or who was who. Story was probably a bit below average for me, but I could see that some people would like it. I like more character interactions in adventure games. *END OF SPOILERS* So overall, I'd say it's a good looking, but below average adventure game. However I like to support developers of these types of games as I do enjoy them, and developers like this are keeping them alive in the mainstream and giving them the 'blockbuster' treatment that adventure games deserve.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: February 3, 2021

HalogenMarvel

Games: 12 Reviews: 1

A better title: "The Mediocre"

No aspect of this game lives up to it's inspirations... Bloober's signature slow-but-trippy "horror" gameplay (which I really liked in both Layers games and Blair Witch) is here but made less effective by the move to third person and loss of environmental detail that comes with that kind of change. The story just plods along, told through notes and voice over that forces you to stare at an object while the audio clip plays. Gameplay is incredibly barebones... think a 90s point and click game in 3D. I have a hard time believing Yamaoka had anything more to do with the soundtrack than letting Bloober's in-house composer use his sample library... the music here is just boring. You won't remember a single melody from this game like you do the music from Silent Hill. Voice acting is all over the place, sometimes cringe-worthy and sometimes decent enough. They waste their one big name voice actor by hiding him behind too much distortion. When it comes to the game's big gimmick, the "dual world" split-screen gameplay sounds interesting on paper. Problem is, in practice it boils down to a needlessly flashy drain on resources that adds nothing more than a visual gimmick. Expect the game to drop to half resolution whenever the screen splits. Thankfully it doesn't try to do this all that often... you'll usually be in one world or the other, for better or for worse. Puzzles are never deeper than finding an item and using it in an obvious spot. I was looking forward to this one a lot and I usually have a lot of patience for this kind of game, but in no world is this worth twice the price of Layers of Fear or Blair Witch. I'm writing this review about 4 hours in, and while I'll probably finish it (even though I've heard the ending is awful), I wish I had bought Hitman 3 instead.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: November 7, 2022

Madmonkeman

Games: 2 Reviews: 3

Amazing Game

Some concerns I initially had was that the entire game would be split-screen where both worlds are rendered at the same time. The main concern was that it would be hard to look at, performance would tank, and it would make running from the monster unnecessarily difficult. However, most of the time you're either in one world or the other and the only times both are rendered at once is for some puzzle sections where there's no monster. The dual world level design is actually really well designed and it definitely feels like you have to interact with both worlds to solve puzzles. The story is actually really unnerving at times where it made me feel unsettled even when there wasn't a monster, which not many games have done for me. Although keep in mind it does cover themes of abuse so it might be triggering. I was actually surprised at how well optimized this game is. I was playing this on a GTX 1060 3GB and to be honest I was worried that I bought a game that my PC couldn't run. For the most part I was able to run the game very smoothly at 1440p with medium to high graphics, which was a lot higher than I thought I could run it at. The performance definitely did tank at times during the split-screen segments but it wasn't that bad since the split-screen parts were just puzzles. What also surprised me was that there was one chase segment in the gameplay where the world kept switching every few seconds and I didn't run into any framerate issues and only some very mild texture popping. So if you have a better graphics card than what I have then performance probably isn't going to be an issue. Overall this game had a great story, great dual world mechanic, and ran much better than I thought it would with the specs I was using. It's not the best, but I enjoyed it a lot and would definitely recommend it!

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: March 5, 2023

lailaann

Verified owner

Games: 13 Reviews: 14

Successfully carrying the legacy of SH

Well worth playing for any fan of the Silent Hill series -- which the game is obviously inspired by. Very good overall story and atmosphere, backed by a soundtrack created by none other than Akira & Co. (sadly, Joe Romersa was not on the team). Unfortunately, the game suffers from a couple of not-so-minor flaws: - The biggest issue to me is the fixed camera angles. In trying to bring back the spirit of SH the Bloober team resurrects what everyone always hated (any RS / SH / Dino Crisis fan actually being nostalgic about that aspect of gameplay?! - just a rhetorical question;)) - I'm finding the protagonist's voice acting mediocre. Many other characters in the game are acted much better... (my opinion, not sure if people would agree). - Character movements feel very... outdated. And controls rather clumsy -- again something not to be nostalgic about. - The game is particularly hardware-demanding. Unoptimized, apparently, because my computer can handle better-looking games much more fluently. Overall, it's a game I did enjoy, and am looking forward to replaying it -- mostly for the story.

Is this helpful to you?

Posted on: March 1, 2021

Lucky_n00b

Verified owner

Games: 149 Reviews: 2

Interesting, but need more polish

I bought the game with the plan of testing some PC hardwares with it, so here's my take on it : On the visuals aspect, pretty impressive graphics, and some of the ray tracing effects like reflections are nice, but mostly it is located on the beginning of the game (on the Material world, not so much in the Spirit World), and I feel it rather lacking impact. The game is mostly dark, so sometimes it's quite hard to see the difference between RT ON and OFF. As for performance, even without RT the game would crush last-gen midrange GPU especially during the dual reality scene, with 1080p Medium setting, a GTX 1060 would drop its framerates to sub 25 FPS, while getting around 35-40 FPS on the single viewport scene. On the ex-flagship RTX 2080 Ti, running the game on 1080p High + RT ON + DLSS Quality, you'll get around 50 FPS range on some of the dual viewport scene - very heavy. There's really weird issue with RT Ultra setting that will drop the framerate to around 10 FPS, not really sure what went wrong. The graphics load is really variable, that you will likely see big swings in framerate across multiple scene - framerate limiter is recommended. I find it acceptable to limit FPS to 30 using Nvidia control panel. When traversing across certain area, there's some noticeable stutter as well, not really sure how to fix that. There's also noticeable texture pop-in and some textures only loaded after a delay of 3-5 seconds, even though I'm using nvme gen3 x4 ssd - so texture loading/streaming will probably need improvement. Finally, as a game, I like the idea of a visually immersive, slow-paced horror game. The action is rather minimal, and the puzzle is quite shallow. That said, I wish some of the old classic game being remastered with upgraded graphics like this.

Is this helpful to you?

Discover CD PROJEKT RED games

Highlights

Featured

Close, but not an exact hit

The Medium

Other ratings

Add a review

Edit a review

Delete this review?

Report this review

Additional Details (required):

Report this review