Eerie and unnerving, "Mundaun" offers beautiful landscapes and memorable characters. Its puzzles are pretty good and quite intuitive. Besides, the game's always there to help you if you missed a clue. And even if the fighting system can be a bit clunky, you can absolutely beat the game without confronting a single creature. Its retro style makes it look like a lost classic. And now that our screens are packed with new folk horror films, it was about time to see a proper game in this style. This game, and by extension this studio, show a lot of promise. It's a yes.
I'm incredibily delighted with this game. While others attempt to mix genres with irregular and contrived results (hiorror and drama in "Outlast 2" or "The Medium", science-ficition and horror in "Amnesia:Rebirth") "The Beast Inside" succeeds in mixing everything that thrills and excites about horror & adventure & spy stories. Exciting and endlessly surprising, it ticks so many boxes, and it ticks them sooo right, that as a player you can happily ignore a couple of bugs and some physical clunkiness that in other cases would be unforgivable. Besides, loading screens may last a bit too long. And, hey, a better, more imaginative "You Are Dead" screen or transition wouldn't hurt. But, all in all, it's a well written, well designed, entertaining and suspenseful game, packed with interesting puzzles and many plot twists. Literally, you don't know what's going to happen in the next episode. One of the best horror games I've played in a while, an amazing mix of "The Evil Within", "Outlast", "Sherlock Holmes" among others.
If you liked the first Amnesia: The Dark Descent installment, but most of all if you liked its DLC, "Justine", you'll be incredibly delighted with this little game. It's very entertaining, and has that hallucinatory quality that only some Polish game developers (Bloober, I'm looking at you!) can create. A very satisfying little game from a company who shows plenty of potential. It's gorey, it's imaginative, it looks kinda cheap, it surprises you.... I say YES.
If "Tormented fathers" was bizarre but kind of linear, "Broken porcelain" is all over the place in terms of plot structure, weapons, gaming options and superpowers. You can feel that behind every artístic decision there's ambition and a willingness to make a bigger and better game than "Tormented fathers" was, but at the end you just feel that the game is changing (not necessarily evolving) every 5 minutes just because. What works in a novel or a movie (multiple storylines, multiple points of view, going back and forth) not necessarily translates well into a videogame, and unfortunately this is the case with "Broken porcelain". The plot is ambitious and ambiguous, but that makes your experience as a player fluctuate, interrupting your game and your progress with ever changing and unexpected twists. First you dont have any superpowers, then you do have them, then you cannot use them, then they force you to use them, and you keep wondering: what the hell is going on? There's some bugs and the game is not polished (yet). Despite all these flaws, the game is emtertaining and, sometimes, successful too. It broadens "Tormented father" plot and goes in deep into some serious issues. Recommended only if you like to play with shattered glass: you never get the full picture, and you can cut yourself, but there's good ideas and an addictive plot in all this madness.
The game looks great, sounds great, feels great. But it isn't fun to play. I'm tired of walking on cornices and ledges pretending to be either scared or thrilled. Where's the sense of agency? Where's the feeling of discovery? Or wonder? I've got the same complains with regard to the plot. There's many plot twists, many monsters, many revelations... but I feel a spectator, one that's not particularly amused. And it's a shame cause the story could have been great if the dialogue wasn't so cliché and the main character wasn't so gray, so invisible. And why does she have to EXPLAIN everything, as if the audience were unadept at understanding "language"? The whole thing is marketed as a horror game but it looks like a dark cliché fantasy with superheroes and monsters, who happen to be traumatized people battling their own monsters. Really entertaining... but only in theory. Bloober, you've got the visual and audio designers! Now you need to work on better gameplay and storytelling. I understand the need to upgrade the whole technical package to sell the game to bigger and wider audiences, but it shouldn't come to the detriment of the intelligence and complexity of your game.
