If your idea of horror is cheap jump scares, gratuitous gore, and slimy monsters trying to eat you around every turn, then you will be disappointed in this game. I’m a horror junkie, and, personally, I don’t think that stuff is scary; I think that stuff is just cheap, tacky, lazy writing and boring, overused, tired nonsense.
The horror in this is a slow burn conceptual story element and it’s a fantastic piece of writing. I mean, yeah the monsters are scary-ish (I don’t scare easily) but the story is the true horror element. If there were ever a good game to turn into a limited run TV series, this would be it. The story is about a woman, who, after preparing her recently deceased adoptive father for his funeral, gets a phone call from some guy who tells her he knows what she is (a medium) and that he needs her to come meet him because the light is almost gone, which is just vague enough to be intriguing. That’s all the story I’m going to give you.
Mechanics wise, sometimes I found the puzzles a bit tedious, but said tedium was offset by the awesome dual world mechanic. I found navigating a little tricky, because the camera angles are entirely out of your control. I get why the camera was fixed though, because having the user swinging their camera all around would have been hell on processing power because the game is literally rendering the world twice in dual world mode. Also, the camera angles gave the whole thing a more cinematic feeling, so I’ll take a little clunkiness if it adds to the overall feel. I appreciated that tutorial hell actually moved the story along instead of just being “push A to do this, push X to do that”. I could have done without the insight mode making the controller vibrate constantly; my hands got a little numb after a while.
From a technical perspective, the graphics were pretty damned good, especially considering the fact that it was rendering the game twice in dual mode. Sometimes my frame rate dragged, but somehow the lowered frame rate ADDED to the overall feel instead detracting from it. It felt like she was having trouble existing in both spaces and her mind was stuttering. I liked that the amount of power your character had was just shown by the fungus looking thing on her arm, instead of some UI thing. I loved the LACK of UI, actually.
From an aesthetics perspective? This may well be one of my favourite games ever. Period. I feel like this game was made for me specifically.
I ADORE urban decay and spend an inordinate amount of time looking at real-life urban decay/exploration photographs, and the real world half of the game hit all the right buttons. It was beautiful and dark and lonely. You can see what kind of place it was, and you can see how it fell into disrepair after being abandoned. It felt realistically abandoned instead of just generic destruction and graffiti that passes for abandonment in most video games.
The spirit world half of the game was beautiful horror with the dark, desaturated, moody warm tones and the oft literal bones of the buildings. With a few exceptions it also felt very still and quiet and a place outside of time, and the few characters you encounter there were like weightless figments, because of how their clothes didn’t move like normal clothing. I definitely played with the clock more than was necessary just to watch the burnt paper textures flying away to stone in the spirit world. I don’t know if it was intentional, but it also felt like the spirit worlds were different depending on whose demons we were dealing with.
The characters were beautiful in both worlds. I loved how dude spirit and girl spirit (names redacted) seemed like they’d been decaying in the spirit world for aeons due to how they were falling apart, whereas Marianne’s spirit was more or less whole. I covet Marianne’s coat from the real world, and I LOVED how she was the same person, just in different colours in the spirit world. I also liked that a bit of the colour of her spirit’s iris bled into the iris of her real-world counterpart.
From an overall standpoint I loved that the game was set in Eastern Europe. The spirit of a person being portrayed as a mask instead of a ball of light was awesome. I loved that, though the game dealt with a LOT of death and spirits and stuff, there were ZERO religious references.
All in all 11/10. I want more of this story.
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