Seriously. The narrative is perfectly fine, with some neat ideas, but the gameplay side of things just isn't engaging. Even as walking sims go, letting the player get lost or make deductions doesn't really add much.
Do you like lots of soft-focus walking from place to place as your framerate chugs and barely anything scary happens? Then boy do I have the game for you! It's not like I don't appreciate a good slow-burn horror, but Martha is Dead refuses to decide what genre it wants to be. Is it historical fiction? Psychological horror? Supernatural horror? Is it a series of brief minigames or a few dedicated mechanics? Why is there so much effort put into photography but actual worldbuilding is a scattered mess? Is it not supposed to be obvious that no characters are shown on-screen so that the developers can get around lacking lip sync for the NPCs? Every hour you spend with Martha is Dead is an exercise in tedious frustration. It also has some pretty poor accessibility options, particularly with the Morse Code minigame that can be hard to see if you're playing at any distance from the TV. There are better slow-burn horror games. Don't force this slog on yourself.
(Originally played on Steam) Do you want a gripping first-person journey with amazing atmosphere, brutal combat, and immersive world design? Then go play Inner Chains, which released years earlier with less bugs, far more intuitive puzzle design, and an at least somewhat coherent narrative. Eight years and this game struggles to achieve baseline quality of life standards. Sure, some of the animations are great, and the art direction is well done, but it's all in service of an absolutely, dreadfully dull game. That's the real kicker - it's not just bad, it's boring. A game with a penal-bone gun should not be easily described as "boring" but here we are. It requires a ton of investment on your part to get anything out of SCORN, far more than anyone should need to in order to have fun. What's absurd is that many of these basic issues, like optimized area loading, level sign posting, basic player agency, UI/UX cohesion, etc. are the sort of things you should already know when releasing a game. It's profound to think that this project took nearly a decade and has seemingly learned nothing from half of the games industry's existence. So yeah, you want grim horror in a first-person world with shooting and/or puzzles? Inner Chains. Chronicles of Riddick. Penumbra. Alien: Isolation. Hell, you'd still get a stronger sense of otherworldly dread from Black Ops 1, because at least there the gameplay isn't a poorly executed mess that constantly pulls you out of the experience. This just isn't worth the price of entry, and leaves me wondering what the devs spent all their time and money on after all these years.
I can think of few other games that got as bad a rep because of raging fanboys than The Bureau: XCOM Declassified. Despite a hellish dev-cycle that's been detailed in full by Polygon, this game came out and was just AMAZING... but it wasn't a turn-based strategy game so everyone dismissed it out of hand. Nevermind that it has one of the best endings in gaming, or that the gameplay blows the likes of Mass Effect out of the water, or that it perfectly captures the tone and aesthetic of the 1950's sci-fi thrillers that inspired XCOM in the first place, OR that its DLC offered even greater tactical challenges (and that DLC is included in this version pure gratis). Ignore the people who couldn't get past the fact that XCOM: Enforcer was bad over a decade ago (and who for some reason forgot that XCOM was always spread across multiple genres); 2K Marin did a beautifully job polishing this game into one of the best cult-classic games of the 7th console generation. It plays great with a controller or KB & Mouse, and even though I have it on PS3 and Steam, I'm grabbing it again.
