How do you make a stroll around an empty house scary? You usually don't. At best with a good back story, you might make it creepy, but that's about it. Maybe that's why Layers of Fear seems to forgo a plot of any kind - only insinuations of a plot. Instead it throws every trick in the book at you, hoping that one of them might actually work. Instead, by the end of the game, I had a bad case of motion sickness. Not very fun. Creepy dolls, earthquakes, blurry vision, creepy paintings turning into creepier paintings, poltergeists, ghost manifestations, writings on walls, furniture on the ceiling, the insinuation that the protagonist murdered his entire family, having the player collect body parts throughout the game, weird phone calls, creepy music and even the sound of a heart beating. Layers of Fear has everything the horror genre ever produced, but it accumulates to nothing much. The game is fairly linear, and you can't interact with something unless you need to in order to advance the game. So at times this game can become a boring hunt for hotspots. The more you advance the more you experience more of the story behind the house, but at no time does the game try to get you invested in the story. In fact, all the effects this game throws at you distract from what might have been an interesting story. Layers of Fear is just too over the top, that it never allows you to be scared. You don't get to slowly experience the house before supernatural events start to happen. Instead you're constantly bombarded with supernatural events, that you come to expect them. You can see the jump scares coming a mile away, making it even harder for you to fall for them, no matter how good they might be. Taking my time and slowly exploring this game, it took me about 4-5 hours to finish it, yet it felt twice as long as it ought to be. And once I finished it, I was surprised to see I didn't finish it - you need to complete yet another gameplay portion - luckily a short one this time.
Al-Qadim is one of those games where the setting outweighs the plot. The plot is pretty standard - rescue your family & marry the woman you love, but the setting it takes place in makes it worthwhile. It seems Al-Qadim takes place in a distant past, in a world where genies are real, and if you're lucky enough to ensnare one, your family is guaranteed to thrive. Weirdly enough, it seems like your family's genie went rogue, attacking a rival family's ship who just happened to carry a caliph and your soon-to-be-wife, and it's up to you to discover who is behind it all so you can release your family from prison. It's an interesting enough plot to carry the game a great deal, and the game is extremely humorous, making the experience fun, but the game's mechanic just sucks the life out of this game. The Genie's Curse is one of those games where you have to save and save often. At first you're fairly weak and low on funds, so you can't buy too many health potions, making you die fairly often. It also seems that your presence attracts the various beasts & monsters that appear on the map, so trying to avoid them is fairly difficult. That is, until you encounter your first regeneration spot - a place you can stand on and get full health back. And shortly after that you discover a way of getting as much gold as you can possible want, making you able to buy dozens of health potions, just in case. You also get plenty of projectile weapons, some very powerful, the more you advance. So instead of using your sword, you can stay back and spam enemies until they die. It makes the game extremely easy. But if you didn't stock up on enough health potions, the game can become fairly difficult later on. The game's idea of a challenge is to send a horde of enemies your way, and to force you to constantly go back and forth to solve a puzzle. Wandering around aimlessly all over the map looking for something you missed was never a fun mechanic, especially when it is abused to such extent.
With every new Holmes story a problem arises - how to create a mystery on the same par as the ones in the books. And this game having the first mystery presented here - a botched robbery, being perpetrated by a monkey who was trained in cutting glass using a diamond, it seems the game's creators knew they had no chance to reach Conan Doyle's level, so said why even bother. Hence trying to make us think Holmes is a criminal on the same level as Moriarty. Hardly believable. In fact, the Watson and Holmes of this game are the ones from the TV shows rather than the books. Watson is an imbecile whose sole job is to telegraph to you what you ought to do next, and Holmes is a constant ass who treats Watson as a subordinate. It's a popular depiction of the duo in TV and movies, but a depiction I hate - one that I feel ignores the books completely. But the real problem of this game isn't their depictions, but just how paint by numbers the whole affair is. You go around a room looking for hotspots, find the occasional puzzle, solve it and move on. You do get a few opportunities to use your deduction skills, but information is so lacking, it felt more like guesswork. Hence I couldn't be satisfied with having solved a mystery. There are puzzles to solve throughout the game - most of them superfluous, but some of them seem incredibly hard while some are laughingly easy. Either way they are extremely tedious. The puzzles seem there to beef up the game. Especially one puzzle where you have to collect clothes before being able to solve it. It's a puzzle Watson solves, which isn't surprising. All throughout the game you only control him solely to fetch some item for Holmes. The game also pushes Toby into the plot, and name drops Mrs. Hudson. Maybe the plot redeems itself at the end, but the game having crashed on me three times when I tried to save, forcing me to backtrack a lot, I don't have the patience to complete it. Especially since Testament puts graphics over gameplay.
A.D. 2044 is one of those collect-a-thon, pixel-hunting, brute force puzzle solving games, and that about says it all. You can't freely roam across the levels, instead you move from screen to screen. And in order to solve a puzzle you'll need to search each room for that one screen you missed - the one that you can only reach by clicking a hotspot a few pixels big. And once you reach those hidden areas in a level, you'll find hidden items - items you couldn't see were there in any other screen. And don't expect items to be located in a logical way - they're just thrown around. And don't expect using items to be easy - early on it's obvious what you need to do, but you'll have a hard time finding out how to do it. This game turns something as simple as lighting a cigarette into a drawn out process. Maybe if the puzzles were logical, it'd be bearable - after all, this game has a decent enough interface and an interesting look to it, but puzzles jump between logical, illogical, stupid, and ones you'd need a Phd to solve. At times you need to use the exact key to open a drawer, and another time you use brute force. It becomes even more annoying seeing as you never discard items - items you used to solve a puzzle remain in your inventory, making the game even more confusing. Funnily enough, it seems like the game's creators knew that, so from time to time when you enter a new room the main character tells you exactly what to do. He doesn't even let you try to solve it for yourselves - "I'll need a gas mask", "dismantle this", "don't forget to look under the closet", etc. But what really threw me off about this game is its weird sexuality & juvenile humor. It seems you're surrounded by scantily clad female robots, which you can forcefully kiss. At first you do it to solve a puzzle, and later on just because it worked the first time around. It seems your kiss can make female robots collapse. I tried my best, failed, used a walkthrough and eventually gave up. It's bad.
Not a Hero is yet another paper-thin game that relies solely on a not-very-original mechanic. It's yet another run and gun game, only this time with 2D pixel art. It doesn't really have a plot to speak of, but rather pointless challenges you need to complete to unlock new characters. Sadly, it's so unfun, it's a game purely for completionists. You can complete the levels without doing any of the side challenges, but there's no fun in it, since it's far too easy. And doing the side challenges isn't very fun either - there's no joy in collecting carrots or kittens, or reaching a certain checkpoint in time. But without those side challenges the game is empty. Sadly, trying to complete all challenges is extremely frustrating - not because of the skill required, but because of how easy it is botch a run. Getting everything perfect requires playing the same level over and over again, at first to get familiar with it, and later to find the path the game's creators want you to take to complete it as easily & quickly as possible. Because a great run can be ruined by something as simple as getting too close to an enemy. Enemies can punch you, sometimes sending you flying through a window into a lower floor, with no way to return to the floor you were in. There is some fun in unlocking new characters, but you quickly realize that they're either decent or atrocious, making you stick to the same handful of characters. There's just very little thought put behind this game - it's a hodgepodge of ideas and mechanics done better elsewhere. There is humor to this game, but it's so nonsensical, it rarely comes across as funny.
Shadowgrounds 2 is basically Alien Breed, only with better graphics. So it does nothing new, but what it does I find enjoyable, having rarely come across such games. The story is pretty forgettable, but adds an extra layer to the game - a military base is attacked by a horde of aliens, and you seem to be the only person capable enough to do something about it. It doesn't make much sense, but it adds to the experience. There's also enough attention to detail to make walking around that base a tad creepy, and the music is just good enough to add to the entire experience. It isn't scary, but it's the closest you'll get to it, considering you have a top-down view, and can see things coming from a distance. But as fun as this game is, levels are short enough & enemy behavior is predictable enough for the game to become stale after a while. Just kill horde after horde of enemies & move on. There aren't that many types of enemies (many of them are unoriginal), so after a few levels you get to see them all. And there aren't that many weapons you can use. You are given more characters to play the more you advance, which are interesting, but by the time they're introduced you already invested so much time on the main character that they feel more like an unwanted distraction. And by the end of the game you realize there's no purpose to them being there. You can level them up & level up their weapons, but not in a unique way, so it feels more like a pointless distraction than a bonus. The game also feels rushed - levels are short & sparse of interactable items, there's only one boss battle, and the plot you're trying to advance gets resolved suddenly & unexpectedly. Playing the three characters, you're trying to get them to meet one another, but when that happens it's more of a surprise than a feeling of accomplishment. The odd graphical glitch or slowdown doesn't help either, as well as the ugly character animations & bad unresponsive AI. Also, Normal is almost too easy.
Gomo seems to be a game that relies solely on its visuals, considering each puzzle only takes you at most a minute to solve, and some only a few seconds. Sadly, that visual style isn't very appealing, at least to me, and everything you see in this game feels thrown together. From the type of puzzles you're tasked with solving, to what's on the screen, to the puzzles' lack of difficulty. Everything feels as if not a lot of effort went into it, nor a lot of thought. There is a premise to the game, but most of the puzzles you solve and the screens you're going to visit have nothing to do with that premise. All this game consists of is going to a new screen, picking up the one item you can pick up, using it on the one thing you can use it on, go to the next screen, rinse and repeat. Gomo isn't atrocious by any means, but it's so lacking in effort, that playing it you wonder why you even bother. It does try to be humorous, but the humor is so bad, I didn't even chuckle. The most hard hitting gag this game seems to have, is showing a sheep floating midair, tied to a balloon. Gomo just feels like the type of game one guy makes on his own time, releasing it for free. Not a game a serious studio would ask money for.
