This is another survival horror game from Ashes of Emerald, and it sure hits the right notes. I loved the atmosphere and feeling -- there’s one heck of an aesthetic here -- and unfortunately the download as of this review is very short. I spent about 30 minutes on it, with many deaths and wandering around. It does an excellent job conveying the feel of the game, beginning with Florence stumbling on some weird events and ending with all-out horror shenanigans going on. The transition is slow and subtle, the tension building is wonderful, but there were two major things that made it much more difficult than it needed to be:

The darkness and the save system.



Darkness is almost always trouble for horror RM games, as computers and the people playing on them can differ vastly in their brightness. Implementing something like a brightness setting in 2k* may have been to difficult to get working, so I understand having only one setting for darkness and sticking to it, but this made things harder for me than they needed to be. For you reading this review, you might be able to see the instructions in the above screenshot just fine!

The second big bummer for me was the save system. Like early Resident Evil you have limited saves, but these come in the form of sticky notes rather than typewriter ribbons. I didn’t like it in Resident Evil, and I don’t like it here. In general I prefer games that let me save anywhere, or at least have some sort of checkpoint/temporary quick save feature, but in something like an RPG Maker limited saves suck. Most RM games are held together by the developer’s tears and duck tape in my experience. It can be far too easy to stumble on game-crashing moments.

In this game, one of those came from fiddling around in the menu while trying to learn the controls. When you’re just starting out, don’t use item 4 in the menu. Although it appears empty it’s storing information for Florence’s phone, but until you actually grab her phone using that item slot in the menu will freeze the game. When you only have 3 saves, this sucked to learn the hard way.

I used all 3 of my saves early on, and it was indeed because I was on edge and expecting something dangerous to pop out at any moment. The atmosphere worked! I was interested and invested! But… a good way to kill that tension and investment is having to repeat content over and over. I ran into this a few times while (foolishly) trying to kill the one monster that shows up, as well as during the final chase. Because I had used all my saves...it meant seeing those spoopy moments multiple times, and it wasn’t long before they lost their initial impact.

That kind of dynamic is why I caution again super limited save systems, but hey, some people love the tension they create.

One last minor gripe -- you shouldn’t bother trying to fight the monster (which I loved), but as far as I could tell there’s no visible health. So watch out! When combined with the limited saves this more frustrating than anything else.

Aside from these gripes, I really enjoyed this one. The demo doesn’t tell you too much in terms of story, but it does such a good job setting the overall tone that I didn’t mind.



If you want, you can even listen to what appeared to be a full recording of The Telltale Heart, which seemed very thematically appropriate, so perhaps you’d want to experience that as a radio play within a game. It’d be lovely to see it finished someday, but even if it’s not perhaps playing it can give you some ideas.