Leave

What is this?
Leave is a small horror game where you wander around a house and do stuff. Its storyline is delivered via the scares, and its scares are delivered via large frights and screams. Really. This game will scream at you. Not that that's an entirely bad thing, because I believe that elements of a story shouldn't be rendered useless to use by themselves, but horror can rely on things other than jump scares to be good.

Jump scares
It's a good thing that the jump scares in this are actually genuinely scary and arise from a place of true suspense. When you're walking around the house and hearing the creaks and noises (or maybe this was in my mind?) you really feel a sense of unease and wondering what's going to happen next. Certain scenes like staring into a mirror will leave you breathless. However, I'm not entirely sure this is always a good thing. I don't always want to have the living daylights screamed out of me by some monster.



Misc
The pacing was good. The controls were really iffy. Things felt clunky almost non-stop. You climb on top of benches and try to find keys, but it all feels so counter-intuitive and... just not right. You usually don't have to climb on top of cupboards to get keys, and obstacles like the height of cupboards to climb and such aren't always portrayed well. Sometimes I feel like the gameplay aspect of collecting an item to get past an obstacle is only useful if you use your problem solving skills to select the right item or find where it is. If you're constantly SPACEBARR'ing it out, spamming interact with everything you see to get the next item, it's not a good thing.

What it teaches you
Luckily, this game also has warning signs. Look into the mirror, or don't look into the mirror? That is the question. You might have a slight apprehension, but there is a certain amount of prediction that you can do based on horror tropes. So this game does test your skill of knowledge "don't look into a mirror if it's at night-time" tests. However, things are just too chancey so you better hold your finger on the save button otherwise things are going to get real hair-pully-outy, real fasty.



Running
It is short and to the point, though, which means pacing is quick and ramps up very nicely. The creator says not to expect a heavy backstory, and there isn't. The scares are the story. Which is completely fine for a short game. And somehow I like the idea of creating a short scare story with a single protagonist amongst a mansion of monsters. It's been done before so many times, but it still seems fresh somehow. Perhaps it's just like zombie flicks - they don't age. Overall, Leave is a good game to waste time with, and that time wasted is not much time at all.



Final Judgement
Graphics: 6.5/10 -- The graphics are serviceable but nothing amazing. The lighting is used well to create horror.
Gameplay: 6/10 -- Generally very standard horror gameplay mechanics. Don't get killed.
Uniqueness: 6/10 -- It's been done before many times, but it's still fun. So I don't really mind if it's all that unoriginal.
Story: 6/10 -- Not much to comment on except to say it was sparingly done but only in a satisfactory way. Nothing more, nothing less.
Presentation: 6/10 -- The game wasn't exceptionally polished, but it was satisfactory. Mechanics felt somewhat clunky at times, but given the context of the mansion and the confined space, it was somewhat unavoidable.

Overall: 6.1/10 -- It's a nice average horror game for some cheap thrills. The atmosphere is not bad, and it will scare you if you do the wrong move. I wouldn't call it a good horror game, but it's an OK one. It's short as well, so you might as well play it anyway.

Loser out.