I've completed the game, and Asylum proves that a talented and hard-working team can deliver a chilling and disturbing story regardless of the technology used. The gameplay is nearly identical to Scratches, Senscape's first game, which is also a must-play game. The graphics in Asylum are circa early 2000's. But they are very good. The characters and the story are what make this a 5-star game, and the audio and soundtrack pull it all together into an immersive and memorable experience. The puzzles are logical and not too hard. The journal is well-done and very useful. Rarely was I stuck. If I couldn't determine what to do next if I spent time reviewing the journal and thinking things through, then I could figure out the next step. Fantastic job Senscape!! Keep 'em coming!!!
Pros: - Great story - Memorable characters with distinct personalities - Replayability - Clearly indicates when a decision will impact the story - Fantastic voice acting - Beautiful graphics - Exceptional motion capture of facial expressions and body movements - Great sound effects, ambient sound, and music - There's no difference in quality and realism between cutscenes and gameplay - Configuration option to set how long you have to react to QTE's with no time limit being an option - QTE settings can be changed at any time - Easy to use and intuitive controls when using a controller - Good balance of cutscenes, exploration, puzzles, and QTE's - Clearly communicated objectives with compass pointer to make clear where you need to go - Puzzles are logical and are easy enough that they don't slow down the pace - Stable. No crashes or bugs - Consistent 60 fps @ 1920x1200 resolution on max graphic settings - Runs smoothly on modest hardware. My hardware specs are the following: > Intel i5-8400 2.8 GHz > 16GB RAM > 2TB solid state drive (SSD) > NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER Cons: - A little short for the price, but the kind of quality listed above doesn't come cheap - Keyboard controls are not good
Before getting into my review, I believe that many of the bad reviews are due to GOG incorrectly classifying this game as an RPG. It's not. It's a visual novel. Here's Gemini's explanation of a visual novel: "A visual novel (often abbreviated as VN) on computers is a form of interactive digital fiction that primarily tells a story through text, static or animated illustrations, and accompanying audio (music, sound effects, and sometimes voice acting)" In other words, a visual novel is like a multimedia book where you have some choices on what you say, what actions you take and how you react to NPCs. But these choices do not radically change the storyline. Having said that, the basis of my 5-star review is my experience with playing other visual novels. This game stands head-and-shoulders over its competitors. Here's why. The Great: - Beautiful, detailed hand drawn characters and locations - Immersive ambient sound, sound effects and music - Good story with unique NPCs each with distinct personalities and agendas - Memorable main character who comes across believable like a real person - Your decisions have a good impact on how the story goes - You can't fundamentally change the story, but you can get different endings - And how you get there is changed somewhat based on your decisions - No punctuation, grammar or spelling errors - Perfect English translation - Good translation of Vampire: The Masquerade into a PC game - Continuity with the previous game, Vampire: The Masquerade Coteries of New York - Many NPCs from the first game are in this game - Events from the first game are mentioned in this game - But you don't have to play the first game to follow and enjoy this game - Although I highly recommend you play them in order Good and Not So Good: - None - Codex to explain terms and concepts unique to Vampire: The Masquerade - Save and Exit available any time. Not Save Anywhere but WAAY better than infrequent checkpoints.
Before getting into my review, I believe a big reason for many of the bad reviews is that GOG has incorrectly classified this game as an RPG. It is not an RPG. It's a visual novel. Here's Gemini's explanation: "In games, a visual novel is a genre of interactive fiction that primarily focuses on storytelling through text, static or animated images, and sound. They are essentially digital, interactive books with visual and auditory elements." In other words, a visual novel is like reading a multimedia book where you have some choices as to what you say or how you respond to NPCs, and those choices have some effect on the story, but your decisions usually do not radically alter the storyline. So, having said that, my 4-star review is based on my experience playing other visual novels. Compared to its peers, this game stands head-and-shoulders above its competitors. The Great: - Beautiful, detailed hand drawn characters and locations - Immersive ambient sound, sound effects, and music - Memorable story with distinct NPCs having different personalities and agendas - Great adaptation of Vampire Masquerade world - Excellent writing including no grammar, punctuation or spelling errors - Perfect translation into English - Codex for terms and concepts unique to Vampire Masquerade - Save and Exit anytime. Not quite Save Anywhere but WAAAY better than infrequent checkpoints The Good: - Some control over how the storyline branches, but you can't significantly affect the main storyline - Three distinct characters you can play, each with their own backgrounds and personalities - The ending is good but not great The Not So Good: I deducted 1 star because of these - The impact your choices have on the storyline is minor - Essentially, the path you take to get to the end varies, but overall story and conclusion are the same The following game, Vampire Masquerade Shadows of New York is a 5-star visual novel.
I've played this game through three times, and I still don't get what it's supposed to be about. It randomly wanders from scene to scene, abruptly changing from one scene to the next. There's no dialogue. No audio logs to listen to. No letters or journals to read. There's just a single predetermined path through each scene. I think there's supposed to be some type of symbolism in the scenes since there's no spoken work or dialogue in the whole game. The graphics are okay. The music is decent. But I have no idea what the story is other than disconnected fragments thrown while following the predetermined uni-path of the game. Don't waste your hard-earned money.
The gameplay ruins this game. The gameplay is limited to reconstructing crime scenes to find clues or connecting clues from crime scenes to make deductions. I've played many games that are narrative-heavy and light on the gameplay and loved them. So, I was very excited to buy the game. The problem with this game is the gameplay is boring and frustrating. If you don't do things exactly the right way in the right order, you can become stuck with no way to progress other than loading the last checkpoint. For example, after the first crime scene, which was pretty straightforward, in your apartment you need to connect the clues from the first crime scene to make some deductions. During this process there were multiple instances where clues seemed to me to be logically related, but the game wouldn't let me connect them. And some clues that the game let me connect didn't really make sense to me. Essentially, I had to resort to brute force and try every clue with every other clue to see what the game would let me connect. Not much fun and very aggravating. Another example, on the second crime scene I found several hotspots and reconstructed parts of the crime scene. But then there were no other active hotspots. So, I carefully searched every inch of the crime scene and found no additional hotspots. I spent a good 30 minutes going over the entire crime scene inch by inch. Finally, out of frustration I went to YouTube for a walkthrough. I saw that I'd discovered the hotspots in a different order from the order shown in the YouTube walkthrough. Once I loaded the checkpoint and did things in the same order as the YouTube video, I was able to complete the second crime scene. So, proceeded until the third crime scene. Same thing as the second crime scene. I didn't process hotspots in the right order and couldn't proceed. So, I gave up, uninstalled the game, and contacted GOG for a refund. Thank goodness for GOG's refund policy!!
I would rate this game 4.5 to 5 stars if it wasn't for the ridiculously hard QTE's. I've played many games with QTE's like Telltale Games and others. Those games had challenging but not frustrating QTE's. By that I mean it may take multiple tries to get through the QTE's, but they weren't nearly (or completely) unbeatable like the ones in Fahrenheit. I put up with the frustration of the QTE's in this game until I got the scene in the office where you have to escape from the bugs. I've tried literally over 75 times to beat this set of QTE's and failed. After this I uninstalled the game and accepted that I'll never be able to finish this game. If you can get through the QTE's, this game is a great game. It has a great story, top notch voice acting, good audio, decent graphics and flawless controller support. It's a shame the unfairly hard QTE's ruin the game.
I agree with all the 4- and 5-star reviews, so I'm not going to repeat all the good points they've made. Rather my review will be on how the game performs. The specs for my PC are Intel Core i5-8400 6-cores 2.8GHz, 16GB RAM, nVIDIA GTX 1660 Super 6GB, Samsung SSD 980 Pro and Windows 10. The Samsung SSD is lightning fast. My PC boots and completes login in 30-40 seconds. I've played all the way through four times. I tried all the settings from Low to Epic and experimented with lots of Custom settings too. I'm able to get 60+ fps most of the time, even on Epic settings. But there are micro stutters and significant frame rate drops throughout the entire game. And the significant drops in frame rate always occur at exactly the same spots regardless of the graphics settings. I would assume that other players also see frame rate drops at the same places I do. So, I'm hoping the developers can over time find and fix these through patches. But, even if the game stays as-is, I highly recommend this game!! Intriguing story, top notch voice acting, fantastic graphics and sound, excellent atmosphere, replay value with 11 different endings and no chance of dying. One question though: Why does Yasna randomly hum that silly song at odd places throughout the game??? ;-)
