Till Death Do Us Part

This game looks good. I like the use of colour, it's nicely stylish with only certain colours showing up at certain places. Occasionally it doesn't work (once), which I may or may not come to in writing this (you see I haven't written it yet so I don't know if I'll mention the problem with the colour or not).

After some writing that I'll excuse throughout because I know the writer doesn't have English as a first language and I know all about not having English as a first language. The point comes across and I'm getting a friendly vibe of dread and despair. Then I'm stuck in a room, being told to sit and wait in a chair.

That's when the first problem of the game comes up. I slap my forehead and think of the evil Plot Driven Door. I interact with the chair and guess what the character says? "I don't want to sit and wait. I want to explore." Fuck that. I was told to sit and wait and there has been no suggestion anywhere that I shouldn't be sitting and waiting.

I'll pause here and explain the Plot Driven Door because it will come up a couple of times. The Plot Driven door is a door that is locked and impossible to get through until a certain (often unrelated) event has happened. It doesn't have to be a door obviously, but that's usually what it is.

So I wander around the room, trying to find what it is the maker of the game wants me to see. There's a plant that is suggested to be poisonous. "Ah!" I think "This must be it. The poison will factor in later!" I try to sit down but nothing happens. I wander around for a bit until I examine a painting (or a window, though I think it was a painting) and then I hear a scream.

The plot driven door opens!

Then shit happens. This game is also filled with instadeath. There's a couple of characters hunting you around and whenever you touch them you die. Of course I didn't realize this at all times and there were at least a couple of times I tried to talk to the instakillers before realizing my mistake.

Upon being hunted in this haunted house there are several plot driven doors tha happen. Things move around and you have to do completely unrelated things in order to get the game going. Here I just remembered a second time the colouring goes all wrong. Let's talk about the colourexample now then. So there's two now.

In a room there's a flame that burns in a bright purple light. "Awesome" I think, "this must be relevant somehow". Yeah. it isn't. that flame is just there for no apparent reason and sticks out like a sore thumb but does nothing. Another time there is a plant that must be moved. except before it has to be moved there's nothing about it that would make you notice it. So when it has been moved the player says "I should move it back to where it was." Except that it was grey and colourless from the start so it's not like you paid special attention to where the hell it's supposed to go.

Poor game design.

So yeah this game has a lot of poor game design going all over it. It has the trial-and-error gameplay (fortunately you can save anywhere and anywhen so I just saved before looking at a bookcase in case it suddenly decided to kill me)

This game does have some nice atmosphere occasionally though. But it hammers in the fact that it's a game so hard that there's never any time to really enjoy that atmosphere. It's one of those things about horror games. Horror games are always supposed to almost kill you, because if you start to die the cracks will become apparent and the game will be more about navigating through a puzzle rather than enjoying the experience.

This game clearly tries to be a horror game. But something isn't scary the fifth time it happens because you decided to "perhaps this'll work... no apparently not".