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Insert Obligatory Porn Joke Here
Frogge- 08/10/2018 03:42 PM
- 630 views
She Comes by DooMAGE
Length: ~20 minutes
She Comes is a very short rpg horror game. Just like my last two reviews, it's a game I played a loooong time ago and went back to so I could drop a review. That being said, despite the rating, I definetly do not think She Comes is a bad game. The nostalgia makes it very memorable to me for the most part, but there's still stuff here to enjoy.
So let's take a look at what the game does well and other things not as well, starting off with the visuals. She Comes is very, very clearly inspired by The Witch's House as most if not all of the graphics are from that game with similar mapping to accompany that. The developer either straight up ripped the graphics or looked in the credits and went to the exact sites it used to use the same resources. Either way, this is a good thing because the game looks really good for the most part. It has a good share of great maps here and there. Sadly, some of them do have weird tile usage like walls that bend in ways that shouldn't and ceiling tiles with no walls below them.
Why is this wall bending like that?
The sound track is ambiance for the most part and doesn't really have much to it that is memorable. There is good usage of sound effects for almost all interactions which is pretty cool.
The game's story is about Alex, a boy who's home alone one night. He gets a call from Lisa, his non-biological mother to look after his brother Josh while she's stuck in a traffic jam. Eventually, weird things go down like a room appearing on its own on the second floor. Then, Josh comes home and asks to summon Bloody Mary for shits and giggles. And they do. This causes them to find themselves in a distorted version of their home where a spooky woman is stalking them. It's a good setup, very different from what you see in most rpg horror games. I love the idea of the children being adopted and how the story takes place in their own house and not some haunted mansion they sneak into.
Eventually, over time, you uncover more of the truth of what's going on and find out there's more to the situation than meets the eye. This is where I kind of disliked the story but also found one of the best parts of it.
It's revealed that Maya and Alex are in a coma after being in an accident. Josh caused the accident, and now that they are in a coma, he summons ''she'' to... kill them in the coma, or something, because he thinks they don't belong in the family. For one, it's a dumb motive. Also it's so cliche. Also it contradicts some earlier events like how Lisa calls Alex at the beginning of the game.
Oh by the way, it's later revealed that he originally called and said those to Josh. This would have been a great twist had it not been inaccurate, considering you see Alex's face sprite at the intro when they're having the phone conversation. If you didn't see his face sprite, this twist would have legit gotten me surprised.
But one thing I can praise here is the foreshadowing. At the start of the game, you easily notice that Maya's room isn't anywhere to be found in the house (also Josh's but they don't explain that one). You later find out it's because she's also in a coma and when her room appears Alex is surprised because he never saw a door there before. It feels like Alex somehow forgot about his sister, maybe through Josh's spell of sorts and I honestly want to believe this was intentional and not a plot hole.
Speaking of plot holes, though, there's... a few. The game page says the story is meant to be up to the player's interpretation but it never feels like that. The story is pretty clear and I would assume the player is meant to fill in the blanks on their own, but more often than that the story just feels like it didn't think many things through. I already mentioned the phone scene at the intro and how weird Josh's motives were and how he doesn't have a room. Why is Maya a ghost when Alex seems to be perfectly physical as far as coma standards go? Also why does the horror start after they summon bloody mary when Josh summoned her in the real world before the events of the game anyway? I mean I guess that one can be sort of justified if we say Josh didn't summon bloody mary but rather used the spell to go into Alex's mind to summon her instead.
Oh by the way, it's later revealed that he originally called and said those to Josh. This would have been a great twist had it not been inaccurate, considering you see Alex's face sprite at the intro when they're having the phone conversation. If you didn't see his face sprite, this twist would have legit gotten me surprised.
But one thing I can praise here is the foreshadowing. At the start of the game, you easily notice that Maya's room isn't anywhere to be found in the house (also Josh's but they don't explain that one). You later find out it's because she's also in a coma and when her room appears Alex is surprised because he never saw a door there before. It feels like Alex somehow forgot about his sister, maybe through Josh's spell of sorts and I honestly want to believe this was intentional and not a plot hole.
Speaking of plot holes, though, there's... a few. The game page says the story is meant to be up to the player's interpretation but it never feels like that. The story is pretty clear and I would assume the player is meant to fill in the blanks on their own, but more often than that the story just feels like it didn't think many things through. I already mentioned the phone scene at the intro and how weird Josh's motives were and how he doesn't have a room. Why is Maya a ghost when Alex seems to be perfectly physical as far as coma standards go? Also why does the horror start after they summon bloody mary when Josh summoned her in the real world before the events of the game anyway? I mean I guess that one can be sort of justified if we say Josh didn't summon bloody mary but rather used the spell to go into Alex's mind to summon her instead.
Spelling and grammar errors are seen all throughout the game, and while you can easily understand the story despite this, some of it is still pretty funny and sort of ruins the immersion.
Oh no, MY scoliosis makes her unable to conceive?!
The game is an adventure game, meaning you won't find a whole lot of gameplay here beyond interacting with things. You'll spend the first half of the game item searching and solving one or two puzzles in the second half as well as one chase scene. Said puzzles themselves are really easy and you can solve them by trial and error if you're lazy. You know those puzzles you see on the internet that are meant to be trick questions like ''HOW MANY TRIANGLES ARE IN THIS IMAGE'' and then it's like 3 triangles inside a bigger triangle? Yeah the puzzles are basically those.
The only real issue here was the lack of polish. The menu is edited from the default ace menu, but for some reason its height is greater than needed for the commands, so there's a bunch of empty space? Also, a lot of the tile passabilities are really weird. I found myself particularly frustrated when I died during the chase section because I couldn't walk behind a bookshelf. There are one or two sudden cuts or screen tints too. I managed to interact with a few objects without facing them. It's not very buggy, but the production value still does not feel all that high.
All in all, She Comes is decent for a 20 minute game but deserves much better writing and polish. It's worth a go if you've got half an hour to spare but you likely won't find yourself falling in love with anything here. I give it two and a half mirrors out of five.
