The Painscreek Killings

Just finished this thing with completionist rating and no help from a walkthrough (ouch), and had an absolute blast. This game has its flaws. It is a bit too spread out for how empty it is, and if you get stuck you have a ways to travel just to try to comb over the locations again. Its has an ending sequence that was a bit forced and wacky. The voice acting a sub par..... Yet this is still a five star game in my heart. You really get to know the interesting cast of characters, and the drama just keeps unfolding and unfolding until the whole world seems mad - which is nice. The puzzles are very solid, they all make complete sense, just be sure to take notes constantly and lots of pictures (they start you off with a nice camera) and everything should go well. All in all if you love this epically underappreciated genre, please give this thing a whirl. I adore Scratches, and this game had me in the same state of bliss. Thank you EQ Studios

Great game! Wouldn't really call it a walking simulator, but a walking puzzle game. It's just you against a murder case, just to make a journalistic story. The game is relatively simple to navigate and if you keep your wits about you it's relatively intuitive. It's a puzzle game made very well, it's very clever. + Story + Litterature + Navigation (sprint button is a God send) + Location + Atmosphere + Puzzles (mostly of the mind in litterature, not in practice) + Open world What deducts a star are a few problems that are hard to miss. - Almost no voice acting, no commitment to the player character - Bad voice acting the few times when present - Puzzles come in few forms, more variation would have been fun, but then again the pace is faster this way. - Graphics, especially "add-on effects" are quite bad. I play the game with all extra effects turned off. They feel old, like 2009 when effects felt like you covered the screen in vaseline. The shadows are not that great, the textures not so great, cars in particular are awful. The game sometimes feels like they have bought a bunch of assets (that are often reused) and other times just used some old engine. The game feels very PS3 to look at, sometimes even worse. I'd say some graphics feel like they're from 2006, or even 2004. WHO CARES? The game is hard to put down in spite of all these flaws. The story is great even though the rough backdrop. It's a game that truly stands for that it's not the graphics that count. The only proper complaint is that a good voice actor and narrator would have given it 5 stars. I bought it on sale for $6.74, I'd recommend it on sale.

Not sure why everyone is giving this game such high ratings. Except for about 30 seconds at the end, the game is boring with no character interaction, repetitive music, alot of backtracking and an annoying interface where you have to focus a super tiny dot on something for interaction. I call this game an example of "Lazy game developer syndrome." How much better this game would have been if the investigation were in real-time, talking to current suspects, with a murder suspect still on the loose. Instead the investigation is 4 years later and we are expected to believe that the whole town left, leaving behind expensive hospital equipment, paintings, wine etc. not to mention that the killer left behind all the evidence to convict him/her. Really? There are also some other things in the game which require suspension of belief and are just plain dumb. I give it two stars because the puzzles weren't impossible and the graphics were acceptable, but other than that, two thumbs down.

I do mean work. From the moment you leave the comforts of your car and greeted by a cold iron gate, you are putting in the effort to findout what happened in this small town. True pen and paper take on a rather formulaic genre. These devs are absolutely brilliant. Pro: No Hand-Holding Eerie Atmosphere Based Story Con: Hard to look at for prolong time; Feels stiff as a game walking/crouching.