This review reflects my thoughts on an early alpha gameplay demo--really more like a "tech demo"--of Stricken and should not be considered representative of any later or final build of the game.

Stricken goes for some of the lowest hanging fruit of atmospheric horror: the abandoned hospital. It's immediately clear what the game is going for: a spooky, immersive environment for the player to explore while a frightening tale of terror unfolds before them. In many ways, this early alpha build is not there yet.

The writing in Stricken needs work, as numerous grammatical errors, including many tense and conjugation errors, appeared throughout the game's text. It is unclear if this is because the creator is not a native English speaker or merely due to a combination of laziness and slipshod editing.



In this game, grammar problems aside, descriptions of objects and the protagonist's thoughts are not terribly interesting to read. Occasionally, descriptions of objects and the protagonist's thoughts upon examining them use language that feels stilted, awkward, and distinctly non-naturalistic. The exception was the single diary entry I found, where the writing was decent if unremarkable.

My time with the game was not sufficient to really get a good picture of the game's story, but from what I saw I was neither particularly interested nor particularly curious to learn more.

Gameplay is quite representative of an alpha, which is to say that bugs and typos abound. One memorable one was where some rather obtrusive placeholder text was left in place for the second and third pages of a diary entry. Another was an empty tile near what looked like a large discarded sword on the left side of the hospital's second floor hallway. The first couple of time I examined the tile, Pyramid Head came out and killed me. The third time I examined the tile, Pyramid Head came out and I ran like hell to the right of the screen and got away. Subsequent times I stood on the tile and pressed enter, there was a sound effect, the screen faded out and then faded back in, and pyramid head failed to appear. To be honest, I am not sure which of these events were the game's logic working as intended and which were bugs. None of these things made a lot of sense in the game's narrative. Finally, a third bug was a mysteriously impassable empty tile in the room where I found the security footage. When I pressed enter against that tile, the game crashed with a missing resource error, the error message saying that it was unable to find a movie file called IIRC 'vignette1'. A few pass-ability errors (i.e. being able to walk on top of counters I shouldn't have) interfered with my immersion into the game's world, and I think that's it for the listing of the bugs.

The game page boasts that most objects in the game are interact-able and have interesting descriptions, but sadly I did not find this to be the case. Such a feature would definitely have played to the game's strength. I'd definitely like to see more objects be interactive and have descriptions, and also the awkward pause and the "..." before Void describes an object the player interacted with should really be cut. It invoked nothing but impatience.

The game's page describes it as an 'Action' game, but no Action sequences were present in the build I played. Neither were any puzzles, besides rudimentary "puzzles" of the 'find key to open door' type. There is nothing wrong with this in and of itself, it just means this is what is called an adventure game, but this exacerbates the problems described above and below.

Mapping and tilesets in the game are quite good and very good use is made of lighting effects. I feel that the large puddles of blood were somewhat overused--while I really like the large blood puddles, bloody footprint, and bloody handprint graphics (where did you get those? are they custom? will you share?)--I was starting to feel desensitized to them over time.

Also the fact that the game's antagonist is literally just Pyramid Head is rather jarring. While Pyramid Head is certainly an effective character designed well to evoke fear...he is also an established and well known character from Silent Hill 2 so this is not a case of being derivative being bad in and of itself, but a case of being derivative actually hurting your game.

Because when I saw him, I couldn't think much but...yeah, that sure is Pyramid Head. Welp. Your audience, when you are making a horror game in RPG Maker, is going to know who Pyramid Head is. They are going to recognize Pyramid Head and they are going to be like...welp, that's Pyramid Head.

I don't think "welp" is the emotion you want your antagonist to evoke in a horror game.

The game makes some interesting use of silence combined with droning and menacing ambience in certain areas. I just got an awesome new pair of speakers for Christmas and they are much more powerful than my last speakers, with really remarkably awesome bass. While this was certainly a point biased in favor of my enjoyment of this game, it also made me think a lot more about the audio in general. I think there is a lot that Anorak can do in terms of sound design to tease out more immersion, more suspense, and more fear from this game.

Certainly, a game of this sort should have footstep sound effects. Different surfaces should sound off differently when your character steps on them. When you step in those large puddles of blood there should be a sticky splashing noise. When you step out of them, you should leave bloody footprints. I actually know of a script that can accomplish some of these effects if the creator is interested. And lastly towards the end, while hiding in the closet, rather than having text telling us that our character is sweating and hyperventilating, the sound of his ragged breathing in an enclosed space would be much more effective. I think that the game relies on text too much when it can rely on sound and visuals instead. Text is not inherently scary. Sounds and sights can be.

As a final thought, I think that Stricken in its current state is not an effective horror game. The reason for this is that horror is tricky. It hinges more upon immersion and upon a continued suspension of disbelief than other genres. The bugs and grammar errors present right now pulled me right out of the experience and made it impossible for me to feel suspense, become tense, and then get scared. But these bugs and errors are rather typical of an alpha build. With some more work and polish, and some of the suggestions in this review, I think that this flawed gem of a game could be made to really shine.