I’ll start with the positives. The game looks good and has a fairly high degree of ambiance to it, there are some fairly tense moments to be had while wandering around the house. The sound adds to this as well, having some well-timed moments where the audio rises at the peak of a scare. All of this combined creates some pretty creepy moments that work very well in a horror game. The lack of overdone ‘jump-scares’ is also a nice touch. It’s also impressive that the assets were made by the devs and they definitely deserve recognition for that, as it’s easy to just rip the same old royalty free assets that other indie game devs on here have been notorious for.
Now I’ll go over some gripes I had with the game. It’s another collectathon, while this might not be an issue to some, it is to me, it’s a trope that has been beaten to death, and I feel it just doesn’t do the games environments and excellent ambiance justice. There seems to be a somewhat lack of a story, while it can be argued that it’s told through the environment and the notes, even then there really isn’t much meat there.
I discovered one bug while doing my second run through, so it’s not captured on the video linked above, but if the player doesn’t interact with the door first and instead gets the key first, the game seems to go through the script of “the door is locked, where’s the key?” when the player already has the key and is trying to escape. It’s not a major bug, but it does sort of suck you out of the moment.
At the end of the day I found this to be fairly average; however, I did find some enjoyment in it. The game looks good, sounds good and feels good for a horror game, but it’s wasted on an overdone game-play concept. I know this was a student project, and when that’s taken into consideration it’s quite an impressive feat, especially when you factor in that many of the assets are made by the devs themselves, but that doesn’t stop me from being critical about a game, especially one that is now (at the time of writing) in the number one position on itch.
Cheers and best wishes,
Killjoy