Screenlife

Short game review warning: As with most short game reviews, the story spoilers are pretty rampant so it might pay to invest a few minutes of your life to play through this game and then read this analysis after. SPOILER: It's worth your precious (or not so precious) time.

Screenlife is an interactive horror story where you are a man tasked to monitor a computer that can either approve or deny souls. Either you help the soul and get killed by your boss, or you can deny the soul, let them be killed, and continue living yourself. The game's fairly short and features a few decisions that either end in obvious gameovers, or progress the linear story.

This game is obviously a horror, and boy is it scary - or at least near the start. There are a lot of scare tactics used here - old-looking videos with skulls, scary-looking faces and warped audio - but sometimes if they're slathered on so heavy, they lose their bite. Here, the presentation and visuals are phenomenal, and the pacing is taut. One thing the game nailed is that its general atmosphere is nail-biting! This will leave you on the edge of your seat.

The momentum kind of ebbs and flows very unpredictably. There are sudden endings where you don't know how it ended, you just have some vague idea it happened from hiding from your boss. I assume it's because you disobey him, and he torments you for it. The idea that the only way to continue the story is to behave evilly and kill everything you wish in order to find your one true love is kind of sickening, but it's purposefully sickening so as to provide a horrorful reaction.

The main plot point I had issue with was this whole business that this all was about a woman. So many indie games are vague tales about some long-lost woman who you are trying to reach, but can't quite find, and to be fair, this game does that quite adroitly, but I was so invested in the story until I sensed that it was entirely about a girl, and then everything crashed down for me. Now don't get me wrong, I love romance in games, especially tragic ones, but this game was so short that this romance was nothing more than a short idyllic fantasy, but with nothing more to populate her personality with than a general picture and a vague smell, therefore reducing her to a MacGuffin. To have a woman as a MacGuffin in a vague short story is not an interesting story, in my books.

The glitches and the overall atmosphere are executed on-point. The cool top-down graphics, interesting moody music, and exceptionally horrifying imagery are pin-point perfect. There are jump scares, and perhaps too many of them, but to be honest they didn't detract from my experience of the game too much because they were executed so well. When the boss lurks around the corner, or when you're caught in the hallway when you should not be, these are moments of true suspense that had me on the edge of my seat. I haven't felt that way in many horror games.

This game is quite linear. There is always one object you must interact with otherwise you cannot advance the story, and thus there isn't much puzzle solving to be done - just trial and error until you finish. There's definitely some talent being displayed in how this is being presented, but it's put to lesser effect because there's no room for the story to take shape or to have momentum. In the hands of a writer who could push this story to a longer length and build up an arc of these themes, this could really take off, but alas there is no momentum to be found.

This game may make you feel a little queasy. It's a short horror where I didn't feel like I fully understood the ending, but at least it was an interesting story. I just wish it amounted to a more satisfying payoff, which would have required a bit more build up. Utilizing real life imagery and interesting visual techniques - the voice work is incredible, the effects are incredible, and there is a general sense of unease to be found in the concept of being forced to do unconscionable things for reasons unknown. It's scary.

I give this scary short story a 3/5.