Finished the game!

I just submitted my review. In case gog's shitty code eats it up (wouldn't be the first time), here it is in its full, undiluded 2686 character glory:

** A boring, frustrating, unappealing exercise in K-Horror

A Korean student finds himself in a weird parallel world version of his school, where your actions will have consequences on the real world. Sounds like a cool premise, BUT...

For a game that boasts about providing a "glimpse into the life of Korea's overworked high school students", the writing is disappointingly subpar, with collectable notes that neither tell an interesting backstory nor do they manage to creep you out and dialogues oozing cringey colloquialisms. All the characters are cardboard cutouts: the unpopular kid (i.e.: you), the fat nerd, the bully, the cool girl, the hot teacher. They‘re all so one-dimensional I have to wonder why they were even given names, they'd be much easier to remember if they were just named after their respective stereotype.

Say what you will about the art style, but the quality of the animations make this look more like a browser game than anything else. You'll make ample use of your map, since there isn't really any other way to tell where you are, due to all the areas looking nearly identical. Same goes for the minimalist soundscape, that consists of the same 4-5 tracks being stuck in an endless loop. Controls are fairly unintuitive and you‘re unable to rebind them.

What's worse: There is no tutorial or any sort of written explanations of the various gameplay elements. Instead, they‘re introduced via diagram drawings that are so hard to decipher they put the average IKEA assembly instructions to shame - you‘ll just have to learn by doing.

Worst of all: the supposed horror elements. First up, we have the chase scenes: they‘re not scary, they‘re not startling, they're just lame distractions at best or (more often than not) lead to your early demise. Save points are scarce, so you‘ll have to perform menial tasks over and over again. Same goes for the deadly traps strewn about everywhere, the devs seem to take special delight in hiding those behind tables or other objects, so you won't even know what hit you until it's too late.

Even if you‘re willing to take the frustration, you‘ll have nothing to look forward to but an unsatisfying, aprupt ending. There is no climax to the story whatsoever and it made me feel cheated, like I was being punished for making some terrible mistake during the game. Turns out, there are a number of endings, but those are just different flavors of the same thing and the one true ending might just be the worst one of all.

What are we left with? A game with a promising premise that evokes little sense of dread or mysters and tries to make up for the lack of proper scares with trial&error gameplay of the most excruciating kind.

tl;dr: The Linux users who got a refund are the lucky ones :P



edit: The game has a bunch of typos as well.

edit2: In case anyone is wondering: Here are some of those diagrams I was referring to. See attached. Any would-be egyptologists here who would care to tell us what we're looking at here?