Pacify is a first-person co-op Indie horror game on steam. I had never heard of this game but decided to give it a shot since it had good reviews on Steam and well… It’s not great but not bad for an indie game.

Gameplay: The objective of this game is to enter a haunted location and find keys that lead to keys that lead to keys that lead to more keys to unlock a room with evil dolls. The dolls run away, and you have to find them, find firewood and matches and burn them in a furnace in the basement. There is a stereotypical grudge girl with a weird butterfly tattoo thing on her mouth and she kind of does this goofy commander Shepard sidestep walking around the house till she randomly activates her DMC devil trigger and floats towards you making moose growls and jump scaring you to death or until you become doll sized. You then can be revived if a friend finds a good doll and burns that in the incinerator… and that’s it that’s the entire gameplay loop. This game is fun for about 40 minutes so you could play with friends and then get a refund. Supposedly there’s another map but in our 3 games we only ever saw the one. I can say having more maps and maybe different monsters or game modes would have made this better. I think there were too many dolls to find and too much repetitive gameplay.

Graphics, music, voice acting: Well, the graphics aren’t crazy, but the house looks really good for what it is. The objects in the house don’t exactly make sense but whatever and the rain outside is a bit intense. You play as I think paranormal investigators and start outside at a van and kinda explore from there. The only bit of voice acting in the game comes from one guy who tells you about the objective at the beginning of the game and that’s it. He also tells you to enter though the basement crazy late after you are already in there. I don’t think this game had any music, maybe some spooky theme but nothing memorable.

Story: The story in this game seemed convoluted and you only figure that out by reading notes scattered though out the house and I mean the gameplay loop I described was basically the story. You enter the house, find keys and dolls. The house has an uncomfortable amount of birch firewood for some reason? And the ghost girl basically just waddles around like a constipated penguin. Look honestly, I’m being crazy harsh on this game. As someone who’s worked in the industry before I can tell you making games is hard and I appreciate the effort here and honestly did have fun for a few hours it feels like an A+ college project and that’s honestly more than what most people can make. I can’t really give a real scale of 1-10 rating like I usually do because this isn’t on the same level as something like outlast or resident evil and I feel like it would be unfair. This game’s biggest strength is the map and the jump scare actually got me, its biggest weakness is probably the repetitiveness. If you love low budget horror games with unique ideas and want a good laugh, then this is the game for you.