Bad games are a whole lot better so long as the gameplay is bearable. That sounds… like a bit of an obvious statement, I know, but there’s a fairly core difference between, say, combat that’s kind of broken and/or mindless and combat that’s just brutal and awful and a slog. Even if they’re otherwise comparable, even if I otherwise wouldn’t call the gameplay good, I still feel like a lot of what defines my feelings is ‘how fun is this to play?’ It’s not the be-all-end-all, of course — if something is very obviously more of a narrative experience I’m not gonna be like ‘but where’s the part where i shoot the enemy combatants...’ — but even if I like or even love a lot of the other moving parts my overall feelings can be absolutely tanked if the part of the experience I’m directly controlling feels painful to interface with. And sometimes, even when… nothing really works the way it should, having gameplay feel more like you’re going through the motions rather than slogging through whichever unintentional, awful challenge the developers cooked up can be the difference between disliking something and hating it.

What I’m saying is that Afterfall: InSanity is fairly abjectly not a good game. It’s at least, however, the type of not-good game where it's mostly just… mindless and unable to stand up against the player, as opposed to something where you’re fighting against it every step of the way. Which, after having gone through a good amount of games recently with absolutely awful combat, is refreshing! Even as entertaining as the other experiences were, I’m definitely happy to go through something like this. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to earn your victories.

The game takes place in an alternate universe from our own, where after Germany developed nukes, the resulting nuclear apocalypse resulted in… Poland, of all places, holding the last remnants of humanity in an underground bunker. Fast forward 90 years, and you play as Albert Tokaj, a psychologist, who after being sent on a routine mission to help some scientists finds that the shelter has been overrun by confinement syndrome, a contagious mental illness with zombie-like symptoms that also just… mutates you? and turns you into this weird fishman muscle freak thing? not sure of the definition there. Albert soon starts to find that a great conspiracy is afoot in the now-infested shelter, he must now figure out who is friend and foe as he fights through the shelter, up through the tunnels, and onto the ravaged world above, all the while pursuing the one who caused the syndrome to leak: a man of mysterious motives, who seemingly knows everything about Albert and who has big plans for him and if you can guess what the big plot twist is already then great job. It’s not subtle.

And I think the ‘plot’ — or, well, the game’s attempts at making this a deep psychological thriller — is by far the most entertaining thing about this. Not even the fact that this is attempting to be Fight Club but also you’re fighting weird fishman zombie things, but the dissonance of it all: you, as the player, spending five minutes travelling through a low saturation hallway, hacking up every monster that comes for you without hesitation, only for Albert to take out his PDA and insist that these are only people with mental health problems and how it’s so tragic that the mysterious saboteur released the contagious mental illness that also mutates your body. You beat down enemies by the horde and then the moment a cutscene all it takes is a guy waving his arm vaguely in your direction for your body to be splayed on the ground. There’s an early segment where you must flee the complex after being accused of crimes you insist you’re innocent of, and then the very first combat sequence has you grab a fire axe, chop both a guard’s arms off before smashing his head in. The plot doesn’t even need to be all that dissonant with the game to be absolutely wild, it manages to achieve that on its own. From little things, like the goofy animations and a main voice actor who has trouble feeling any more than mild irritation to everything around him, to the big things, like just… how many twists and turns there, how many times seemingly important characters drop out of the plot while in the same breath trying to give reverence to characters/plot beats that don’t mean anything at all, and how little sense anything makes. There are these action setpieces that the game tries to let you play through and they’re amazing: all the animations look so slow and stilted, its attempts to be cool feel so comical, it’s great. The story’s great. Real so-bad-it’s-incredible vibes.

And, unlike most other games of that ilk, it’s at least bearable to play. Not good, certainly, but in a way that benefits the player than makes the experience frustrating and unbearable to go through. At the beginning of the game, when you get the combat tutorial, you’re told you can press the left mouse button to attack and the right mouse button to block. You never, ever actually need to block: you have enough health (and enough health regen) that most encounters can’t really whittle you down even if they land a hit, and it takes you being overwhelmed, without the resources to really fight back to actually die, in which case trying to block doesn’t really help your case. The core combat effectively comes down to walking up to enemies and attacking them hard and fast enough to hitstun them to death, and while most weapons are kinda pathetic and do nothing, the game is generous enough with the actually good weapons that you just constantly receive copies of them, almost as if it's compensating for a weapon durability system that isn’t there. What this basically means is that you have a gun or a fire axe, you can walk up to an enemy and slapfight them to death with rigid, clunky movesets and animations. It’s not good, by any means, but it’s at least a little fun in how mindless it is to unga bunga people to death.

It gets rouuuuuugh in the last stretch, though. The game decides that it’s going to be combat combat combat, instead of interspersing puzzles in-between, and also, for some reason, to really restrict the weapons and resources you get: melee weapons completely disappearing and ammo for your larger weapons becoming rather scarce. There now exists this new mechanic where Albert cannot step into direct sunlight without ghost bat harpies spawning en masse and swooping on you constantly, wasting your already scarce ammo because they’re hard to hit and completely disabling your health regeneration, as you’re still technically in combat while they do barely any damage to you and you don’t have the means to damage them. This meshes badly with how enemies now badly pack a punch, and dying often sends you super far back checkpoint-wise, forcing you to do the same sections over and over again just for a chance to make it past the one actually hard section fifteen minutes of gameplay in the future. The game also decides that it wants to do boss fights, and they’re even more clunky than regular combat is, combining a lot of the above factors with clunky mechanics and rather large health pools to create… not quite the big, memorable climactic setpiece that was intended. Quite the opposite, actually.

At least, though, it’s not quite a sheer drop from ‘bad but funny’ into ‘genuinely kind of awful’ as, say, an Alone in the Dark 2008: while it’s certainly rougher, and maybe doesn’t quite contain the same stupid charm the combat did initially, it never truly becomes a slog, and the story at least keeps up the entertainment value even if the last stretch of gameplay shows signs of falling apart. Ultimately, would I call Afterfall: InSanity a good ga- oh almost certainly not. It’s a mess and a half, not even counting how it can’t even be played anymore due to its unlicensed use of Unreal Engine, but as far as bad games go, it’s one of the ones that manages to provide an entertaining experience because of how silly it feels, and, as far as games like that goes, it’s at least a good deal easier and more… “fun” to play than quite a lot of its ilk. 3/10.