Promise

When I look at Promise, I see my own old shitty game, Memories. Sure, the grammar in memories was just a tiny bit better while the art in this game is a thousand times better, but the shitty puzzles, horrible mapping and the non-existant plot pretty much define both games.

Promise has a good premise. The setting is an orphanage. Unique! The art is very good, though sometimes incosistent (more on that later). However, that's about where the good sides of the game end.

On the graphical side of things, I'll just straight off the bat say that the mapping is absolute shite. Maps are large, empty and bland. Not only that, but there are tons of cut offs and incorrectly used tiles. The art is very nice, but when it comes to faces in particular, there is a lot of incosistency, as I mentioned just above. The main character, Mia, has faces that come in all sorts of sizes. When she is in pain, she has a zoomed out worried looking face. But when she looks horrified, her face gains a tiny bit of zoom making it larger than the rest. The other face sets don't exactly match with hers. The red haired girl (''Emi'' I think, the characters were so boring I can't even remember their names that well) has a white outline around her face sprite, and Tawny's face seems is both smaller and more detailed than Mia's. The tilesets on their own aren't horrible, but the developer would've been better off using some shift mapping, considering there are a lot of spots where beds or other objects break floor patterns.



Onto the writing, another horrendous part of the game. The story makes no sense a lot of the time. It could just be the constant grammar errors (the game could've really used a proofreader, by the way) that make it hard to understand, but by the end of it, I had no idea as to what happened. There were tons of plot holes and a lot of things were left unexplained. The main character seems to not remember her childhood. One day, she gets visited by a bunch of ghosts out of nowhere (Why that day of all days? My best assumption would be that that was the point when she completely forgot everything and since the ghost mentions multiple times that it wants her ''delicious memories'' I'd assume that was probably when they were most ripe). She visits her stepmother who tells her that she was adopted from an orphanage on a small island. Again, a great and somewhat unique setting that would have been great, if only most of the orphanage hadn't felt like a generic mansion. So she travels to this orphanage, but sees a ghost and then finds herself unable to leave. Surprise surprise, the place is haunted! Then it basically becomes a hunt for your memories. So here's a spoiler filled in depth review of the full story.



With spoiler plot talk out of the way, let's discuss the characters. Firstly, we have Mia, who is not exactly the brighest tool in the shed. She makes tons of dumb comments. One of them especially made me chuckle. At some point she says ''I've definetly been to this place before!'', which was funny, because the entire reason you came here was because your step mom told you this is where she adopted you from. Of-fucking-course you've been there before girl! Then there's Tawny, the only seemingly friendly person in the orphanage. Emphasis on the ''seemingly''. Some point in the late game, she tells you that you should leave. Ok, she seems to want the best for us! Guess what, right afterwards she sends us on a suicide mission to retrieve her dead sister's scarf. Oh, did I mention she's in a cage for some reason? I'm not even gonna talk about Veronica, Aya and Emi, mainly because they don't even appear for longer than two minutes. You see them once in the game and that's it.



The bad sides of the game are not over quite yet. When it comes to gameplay, the game is filled with ridiculous puzzles and bugs. Before I get into those, though, I want to mention the health system. The game has a health system, which feels unnecessary a lot of the time, considering there are only two enemies in the game that are not insta-kills. One being the dolls after the hide and seek sequence, and the other being the man eating flowers. Oh, speaking of said man eating flowers, they are so stupidly designed. I don't mean visually, they're basically rtp, but rather the way they work. Seemingly, they damage you if you go more that one tile closer to them, but a lot of the time this gets contradicted. For example, sometimes you won't get hurt for standing on a diagonal side of the man eating flowers, but at other times you will. I could never figure out how exactly they worked. I think the developer would have been better off making it so that they only hurt you if you walk into them. The puzzles are ridiculous as afromentioned. A lot of them are basically trial and error based, and you are given very little direction as to how to solve them. Here's a few examples of the horrible ones;
-There's one where there's three doors and you have to go in the correct one or you die.
-There's another at the very end of the game where you get a key and you have to go in the correct room or you die.
-There's a scene where you have to give a monster the correct flowers, but the clues as to which flower to give it are very obscure making it another puzzle that mostly becomes trial and error. (Ex: it says it wants a lousy flower. The answer is the purple flowers. How was I supposed to know that the purple flowers are lousy?)
-You have to place four books in the correct sequence, however just like the monster puzzle, the clues as to how to solve it are very obscure.
The rest of the puzzles aren't anything particularly ground breaking either. There's a sokoban puzzle that is quite buggy. The only puzzle in the entire game that I can praise is probably the ''noise'' puzzle. You basically enter a room and it tells you not to make any sound. The reason this puzzle is good is because there's multiple tricks. There's objects on the ground that you must not step on as they make a sound. And then it starts really tricking you. It puts in save points, items, paintings that tell you to come closer, et cetera.
That being said, another bad aspect of the gameplay is the navigation. There are tons of locked doors, and while you get keys that are titled, you still probably won't remember where half of the doors are, especially considering (especially in the ''wooden'' parts) most maps and doors look almost exactly identical. It would have been so much easier if, say, you got a moon key and the door it unlocked had a moon symbol drawn on it rather than just saying ''moon key required''.
Oh, and oh boy, the bugs. There's a bunch of them, my favorite being the one in the image below. If you enter and then leave the room, a bunch of lights suddenly start flashing inside. Obviously gameplay was not my favorite part of the game.



Edit: Something I forgot to mention when I submitted the review is the deaths. This is another extremely frustrating part of the game. A lot of the deaths are extremely random, and trial and error. There are many scenes where you can die just for interacting with things. There's one you die for checking a doll. There's one where you die for looking in a closet. There's one where you die for entering a room. The deaths feel cheap and unpredictable. I understand the inspiration is probably from the witch's house in that a lot of things can kill you, but at least in that game it's not completely impossible to predict what can kill you.

All in all, Promise could have been so much better, but it was ruined by the gameplay, writing and maps. The only reason I revisited the game was because I had fond memories of it, but seemingly I was wrong. It's true that nostalgia tends to make everything better than it actually is.
All in all, I would give the game two broken looking jeff the killer dolls out of five.