For a while I was debating with myself whether or not a game that finds itself in Gamepass day one should qualify for Indie Fest… once that had been decided, would I actually play this game at all… and then the walkthrough guides appeared on YouTube and they clocked in at under 40 minutes.
Now the guides skip past as much of the dialogue as they can, hammered the A button to skip, which I didn’t do… if I’m playing what is essentially a walking simulator with a story bolted on you may as well follow the story.
It’s not a long game, even following the story it’s only around 70 minutes start to finish… and the story isn’t that good either, with the game being less than a week old as I write this, I’ll refrain from posting any spoilers, but the game ended up annoying me to hell.
The background graphics are pretty good, there’s a high level of detail that you’d expect to see of a modern-day game, although you move very slowly around it… but what really bugged me was the characters.
There are 2 and they appear as cartoon character models… and no effort has been made at all to synch their mouths up with the conversation… and by “no effort” what I mean is… for large portions of the conversation they don’t even open their mouths at all.
They stand there, lips pursed tightly together, while their voice actor reads the lines out.
And after an hour that really, really bugged me.
Horrible, bordering on the unforgivable!
Sound wise it was generic fair, gameplay is the usual walking simulator, first person at a snails pace looking and examining everything to find the item needed (usually a key) or the object required to trigger the next mini scene… it’s very predictable and very… sort of… meh!
Had this not been on Gamepass I wouldn’t have touched it, the review scores are hoovering around the 6/10 mark and I can see why… what it does, it does reasonably well… but what it does is really bland.
It has enough polish to look the part, there are a couple of nice Achievements to unlock that make you have to do something different than the norm… but the blandness of the story, and the characters being ventriloquists cost it when it comes to scoring.
In line with the reviews I’ve seen this ends up with an Indie Fest score of 65% which, quite aptly. Have this as this 4th ranked game of the 7 that I’ve played to date… so it’s average… in every way.