Review time! Contains spoilers
.
.
.
A very solid entry and definitely one of my favourites! The art and presentation was excellent and the story was interesting as well accompanied by lovely music. The gameplay was decent but certainly had some flaws. The canvas back in the beginning looked odd though...
One notable flaw was the whole fetch-quest section in the beginning. Finding all the paints was doable but I got stuck for way too long on finding that tool I needed to remove the painting. It would be nice to have either a visual clue as to where it is in the form of sparkles or a physical item, or at least a hint (which is why the paints was doable: just search all the boxes). Another annoying thing with that fetch quest was all the items you needed for the plants, as there was no direction for what precisely you needed. Having to remember all the keys was a neat idea too, but this wouldn't translate well into a big game you can't complete in a single sitting so keep that in mind. But other puzzles were great! I really like the one where you had to recreate the scene from the picture, however, I would have preferred having to put the correct item down yourself (like in the statue puzzle, however would have liked it if it was not just the one item), or even having to remember the precise location and doing it from the item menu.
As for the horror aspect... It wasn't that scary, but that's okay. It did have some really disturbing moments with the car crash especially, and the monster had an interesting design, but the chase itself wasn't that interesting. The threat of what was behind the door was neat but it didn't really do it for me. The story was integrated neatly by the horror and I think that the monster was only a hallucination due to the past trauma, but this could be wrong. I liked the fact that the appartment broke open at one point and went into a garden, that looked cool.
Other minor complaints:
- Having to wait for the cellphone tune to play out every time.
But I had a great time! Would love to see more of you.
My playthrough: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1121868779
(Might edit it down later to reduce time especially with searching the screwdriver)