Posted on: December 16, 2018
stevemartinizing
Verified ownerGames: 255 Reviews: 7
i guess
Great pixel art depicting a really wretched narrative. Don't get me wrong, the dialogue and writing are all fine and amusing, but I could not stand the plot at all. The player is railroaded into a hallucination-based narrative that doesn't really do much with itself besides insinuate that what you're doing doesn't matter, because the game is on rails and you're just the cowcatcher shoving errant bovine puzzles out of the plot's way. Another game based in Silent Hill 2's lineage that has trouble riding the line between putting the player in another's shoes and bamboozling them with some dingdong's ill-defined, science-fiction-influenced mental breakdown. I mean, what is it about mental illness that attracts young writers? Truly one of the most difficult things to address in a way that doesn't make an audience wonder why they are still listening to the crazy guy at the bus stop. What is anyone supposed to get out of any of this besides 1) being crazy sucks, and 2) scientists can get up to the darndest things. It's a game that dares to ask: what if there was a science machine that made people lose their god damn MINDS??? And it pretty much plays out like you would expect it to. But hey, it's ok for a first effort. It's aesthetically tight, and there are interesting threads buried under all of the cruft; threads that I think a writer (or team) less distracted by gimmicks and more comfortable with exploring themes could do a lot with. It's a game that has something to say about America, or technology, or the ethical boundaries of research vis-a-vis military funding, or something; just not a lot. The team is from Dnipro, Ukraine, so maybe it's all an allegory for what's going on over there, but then...do that instead. Why set it in New Hampshire? That's not even where Boston is, where a company like this would actually exist. Augh. I have to stop thinking about this.
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