Imaginary Friends

Story 1/5
Your old imaginary friend is jealous, so you go into some warped world that reflects your childhood… I think.

I did not find the story engaging whatsoever. A game about imaginary friends can be really interesting, but this story did nothing with it I couldn’t see coming. It felt neither original nor imaginative. After maybe the first thirty minutes I already knew how it was going to go down.

The story becomes a dead horse so beaten it no longer resembles an animal by the end. The main character Hailey is lonely, she had trouble making friends, so she made an imaginary friend, yadda yadda, it’s hammered in so hard I just wanted to skip any of the little story clips because I already knew what was happening. It especially bothered me when the little play in the gymnasium was just word for word something I had already read. There couldn’t have been anything more interesting there?

The writing wasn’t bad, but I felt zero investment in these characters. Possibly because of the lifelessness of Hailey. I know she’s supposed to be a sort of dry, sarcastic hermit, but she’s not even humorous to counteract the blandness. She does change to be a better person, I guess, but that is at the very end. There’s no witnessing her development, her thought process, any sort of emotion. It’s just boom suddenly she gets home and is nicer to her mom and wants to make more friends or something. At least that’s the ending I got. I did not care enough about the game to play it again for more endings.


Graphics 3/5
Just like the writing, the graphics aren’t… bad. However, they are underwhelming. I won’t go into specific critiques on the style. Personally, I just really don’t like mixing smooth graphics with pixels unless it’s used as something that’s meant to be out of place.

A big problem I had with the graphics was the facial expressions. There is not much variety. Most of the time I was just left with Hailey’s resting bitch face, even in times where it was not appropriate, such as immediately after screaming in fear for her friend. I did really like the facial expressions of child Oliver, but I would have expected more from the lead rather than the support.


Audio 4/5
The music was good, and so were the sound effects. Not really anything to critique, except that some tracks seemed either very short or too repetitive. I muted it a few times because the repetition was driving me insane.


Gameplay 2/5
Fetch quests and scavenger hunts. I can’t stand those. Sometimes a game will do them well, but this one does not. How many times do I have to walk back and forth across the whole map till I can get the story to progress? I never really felt fulfilled when I finished a puzzle or a fetch quest. I just felt like my time was wasted. The elementary school? That was a nightmare. And making it so that the player has to check every single bookcase in a library to find vague clues and one of the pieces of the puzzle is not “exploration,” it’s tedium.

Granted, I did really like the gymnasium. Having the trigger to push things around be player touch rather than action button would have been nice, but that’s a nitpick. It was an interesting idea that I felt was original, and I could quickly pick it up. If only the pay-off wasn’t so disappointing.


Worlds 4/5
I’m a little confused by the choices made for the different areas you visit. There’s a crayon-drawn barn and forest, dollhouse, some fantasy cloud world, and an elementary school.

The forest and barn I’m not sure what they’re for, but the crayon is obviously for the childhood theme. Same thing for the creepy dollhouse. The cloud world I’m going to guess is a make-believe place in Hailey’s mind. And the elementary school is her memories. But all together they don’t make any sense. If they were all memories that would be cohesive, but it’s not ever made clear. Why was Hailey taken there? What was Oliver’s plan? I suppose you could say it’s “left to interpretation” but I was just confused.

Oh, another point that I will mention that I did like was the side scroller movement on the dollhouse. Nice touch.


Technicals 4/5
I’m only adding this bit here because I have a couple of grievances. There was a proof reader in the credits, yet seeing the word “scarp” just takes me out of the immersion (at least what little there was of it). There are also doors or transfer tiles that don’t work right. Such as, exiting the door of the hangman room transfers you a tile below the door on the outside. And in the south west part of the cloud world, you can be walking in the middle of a path, and end up on the far left on the next map. The game had a good amount of testers, and no one found those issues? Making transfer tiles work correctly is one of the absolute essentials and it's easy to test and fix. I know it’s small and nitpicking, but details like that I think are inexcusable for an officially released game. Test it more thoroughly next time, and have these fixed in the next update please.


Atmosphere & Themes 1/5
This game simply tries too hard. After the first hour I couldn’t stop saying to myself, “This is Ib but not scary.” I think I had a teensy bit of a scare once or twice, but I can’t even remember what they were about. Instead I remember the parts that I felt were so damn forced. Such as, the bloody heart room, or the doll being killed. When I saw those I just thought, “Welp, that’s unfortunate. Moving on.”

To go back to Ib, at first I thought “Yeah they must have had a lot of inspiration from it” but eventually I just thought “Okay now they’re just ripping off.” Maybe the creator has never even heard of Ib, I don’t know, but there were just too many similarities. The beginning, you’re in a large busy place with your family then things get a little creepy and suddenly everyone’s gone—just like the beginning of Ib. Then there’s the scribbly crayon drawings becoming the environment—just like the ending of Ib. Creepy doll head in a room filled with boxes? Wonder where I’ve seen that before. And blonde-haired, blue-eyed, innocent-looking kid coming up to you, saying that they’re also alone and have been trying to find people, but turn out to be not what they seem? I mean come on. I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

What makes a good psychological horror game is subtlety. And this game is anything but subtle. It throws its story in your face when it really doesn’t need to; it has such a contrived and predictable plot if I had skipped through half of the dialogue I wouldn’t have missed anything; the characters were never engaging enough for me to care about them, and they didn’t have any real development either.

I know a lot of people love this game, but I just can’t see why.