If you look at the behind the scenes and see how the game was made you ask yourself "why couldn't they just 3D model everything?" And I continue to ask myself that. The game looks extremely 3D rendered, not made with practical effects. The characters are all ugly af. That said, the overall presentation is unique and worth seeing. The story and gameplay on the other hand are rubbish. The way the story is told (or not told) drags it out and reveals interesting story parts too far out. So you instead of motivation and character building you're finding coasters to put under a table leg of some grandpa you don't know and then getting his cat out of the tree because the cat is in the tree not because there's a reason for it. The cliche guy with a tape recorder mechanic takes away from the gameplay with slow unstoppable dialog and animation. In Summary: beautiful game but everything else is amateur/mediocre especially the writing.
My game time on this game is 4hours and I looked at most rooms in detail. TLDR: this is Gone Home with amazing graphics and none of the spark. This is an exploration game inside a beautifully detailed hotel. With a sort of spooky but not really story. I'm happy that someone is spending money on this genre. PROS: - Probably nicest looking game I've played in 2020 - Lots of details, I like that when you look at something there's a small description - There's a moment in the story that had my heart racing and very spooky CONS: - SUPER SHORT - World is very detailed but not interactive - Hotel is huge and 50%+ of it isn't used for anything. - Underwhelming story - The gameplay mechanics are fairly weak overall - Amateur game design in the first few chapters. Find a tin of food and microwave it. come on! Comments to developers for their next game: - Amazing what a small team made this huge world. The texture work on these props is top notch! - It's much cheaper to write text descriptions of everything. If you have money, add a VO so the world isn't so sterile. e.g. "Murder Eyes" portrait in the hallway... why not have Nicole. This would extend gameplay - If budget allows create secondary plots that do not use the game's "To Do" system. They are just there in the background but create more stuff to do. You sort of had this with "vandals" and all the crawl spaces.
If you've played the GDC demo you haven't seen or felt 75% of the game. PROs --- - Original take on exploration genre - Art and presentation are AAA quality from a small studio - Story is polished, clever, but also simple and easy to follow - More on art: the renderer the developer created FLAWLESSLY creates a 3D Pixel Art world. Its incredible - Sound Design is nearly as impressive as the art. The voice talent is great - The game relies on the player having some intelligence to complete the game e.g. at times a character's accent is important to the story. CONs --- - The biggest CON is navigating between scenes once they have already been openned. I wonder why the developer didn't allow a shortcut through the journal and instead requires player to run around through the map to find corpses. Minor detail cons- - There are too many crew members to identify through elimination; if there was a shortcut to go between stories, it would have been fine - The epilogue is a little short - While the game puts a lot of attention on the crew and their duties, I didn't get the sense that character A and character F were actually "mates" in some very important cases. I wonder if using a different set up for identifying visually how everyone looked would make it easier to understand their professional relationships.
This is a great game. Overall its a must buy - even if you've never played adventure games. MUST BUY This literally feels like an adventure game from the 90's or maybe it feels like what those games felt like. PLUSES: - Great artwork; exceptional actually - great sound and voice work - excellent music - Great interface - Probably my highest praise is that the pacing is PERFECT. They stretched a lot of stuff with walking, dialogue, etc, but its done perfectly not to annoy. - Puzzle design is MOSTLY very logical and good - Lots of excellent fan-service, but not like ROGUE ONE. Everything was meaningful MINUES: - Sadly the ending is terrible - I actually hate the way they drew the characters. Big heads just don't work :( - Voice acting for Reyes is terrible. Poor character overall. Not sure why they had two identical characters
I know this is a low budget, kick starter funded game. The story is the only strenght of this title, and at some points even that's not enough. Besides the story the voice acting for the leads is quite good and I found myself repeating the old school music in my head. Nearly everything else should have been developed differently. The animations are so poor that they distract from the story, with the main character appearing physically disabled. It almost seems like he was meant to be a skinny hunchback. Every character has crazy eyes. Textures are of mixed resolution. The UI isn't optimized for high resolutions. Visually it's just a mess. It didn't crash on me on my playthrough and I experienced limited gameplay bugs. Not sure if its even worth trying.
