𝟐𝟎𝟐𝟑 𝐒𝐩𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐞𝐲 𝐒𝐞𝐚𝐬𝐨𝐧 𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐨𝐧
𝟏𝟐# 𝐆𝐫𝐞𝐲𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐝𝐞𝐧𝐭

I always try being nice to indie games since most of the time what people perceive a crappy looking game can be rather an artistic choice due to low funds compared to the big AAA games, there have only been a handful of times where I’ve had to agree with the general consensus that an indie game looked and played bad but even with the shittest indie games I could always find something. Looks like I’m gonna have to add this game to that list.

I think the idea of a horror game taking place in rural america where you need to escape from the Grey Aliens is a premiseI haven’t seen done before and after hearing this game tried to do that premise I got really interested in it. I sat on the game for a while and finally got around to playing it only to find a barely functional ugly game that’s boring as hell and a waste of its potential. When I mean the game looks ugly I mean that in the literal sense, everything is casted in barely visible gray and most of the houses and cars look like pre-bought assets from the unity store and all of the NPCs look really rough. The voice acting is also really bad and not in the same RE1 “so bad it’s funny” kind of bad, it just straight up sounds like the va’s were given zero direction from the voice director so most of their lines sound monotony and fake.
The worst part of the game to me however is the beat for beat gameplay, it’s fucking boring as hell. Now I know calling something boring is like the worst possible way to word an issue but I’m not joking when I say that for 90% of the game I was bored out of my mind. The game tries to do the Amnesia approach to stealth horror but where Amnesia’s levels and areas all felt really well thought out both in a gameplay and story perspective, Greyhills however just plops down houses and cornfields and just expects you to maneuver through them without any real satisfying gameplay loop. Along with the progression being boring the stealth the main thing you’ll be doing through the whole game is busted as hell. Since a majority of your time will be spent roaming the rural streets filled with empty cornfields and maybe one or two houses it’s very easy to get spotted by the Aliens roaming around the area, the problem is how inconsistent the detection rate is for the Aliens AI.
Sometimes they can’t see jack shit even if you're right next to them or right in front of them, but so help me if you turn on your flashlight for even a second when an Aliens around they’ll know right where you are at all times, sometimes even cross nearly half the map to get you. On top of the flashlight being a deathtrap most of the time sometimes Aliens will be able to spot you from far distances even without using the flashlight so if you ever have to travel to another house or a new area you’re always going to be dealing with the Aliens regardless on how stealthy you are, oh and the combat yeah it sucks. The guns feel pathetic to use and the melee bat you’re given has almost now impact and it’s windup takes way too long to be resourceful, I’d be ok with this since the game isn’t really combat focused but when the stealth systems don’t work the way their supposed to and the Aliens are ten times faster than your sprint, having to rely on the combat that was never meant to be used all the time makes the overall experience ten times worse than it already was.

I couldn’t find much about the development or the developers at all so I don’t know if this was a small 3 person team or a semi-large team but man I just didn’t like this game at all. I don’t really don’t like shitting on indies and I genuinely think the devs tried to make a quirky homage to 60's B-movies, but instead what we got was a poorly put together mess of a game that feels more like an unorganized idea made into a game.