My Eyes Deceive is quite an interesting little indie horror game, it only runs about 30 minutes, yet packs a lot of punches, that I did see coming, but were done well.

The game takes place in a basement, the outer world has been ravaged, and is a wasteland. Someone takes care of you, and occasionally checks on you. The gameplay loop is waking up, doing activities, and chatting with your protector. He often brings up creatures, and monsters that are in the outside world, and that we must stay where we are, or we will die.

He brings us medicine, food, and water, everything we need to survive. The game has many dream sequences that are very ''artistic'' in nature, with how they depict things. There is a massive twist at the end, and I will admit, I did see it coming a few minutes into the game. Though that should not discredit just how well they pull off the twist. It is unnerving, depending on what ending you get.

This is a really good game, that is mainly concerned with its story then gameplay.

Overall: 8/10

The Quiet Man is a unique approach in storytelling using a protagonist that does not have the ability to hear the world around him. You, as the player, are also subject to piecing together the story without the use of dialogue during the first playthrough of the game. Theoretically, this could have been a great game that stands out from the rest by giving the player a small glimpse into the life of someone processing trauma while also living with a disability, but it was quite apparent that not much effort was put into the game as a whole.

Most of the game is spent watching live action cutscenes in silence. This, by itself, isn’t that bad but the constant switching between live action and mediocre looking 3D models gives it a very sloppy feel. This would be better if the story was something to be enjoyed but because the player is deprived of dialogue, the cutscenes are hard to understand and most of the time straight up nonsensical. Not to mention, while engaged in combat, story related content flashes on the screen, which, presumably, is important but it’s very hard to pay attention to what it is while repeatedly mashing the punch button.

On that note, the combat in this game is genuinely terrible. The grabs do not work, neither do the kicks for that matter. It wasn’t until two or three chapters in the game I was made aware of a special turbo-like button that changes the protag’s normal moves into all finishing moves that deal much more damage than usual. Only from being told by other people and spamming every button during fights out of sheer boredom would someone ever find out about it. The game genuinely feels like you stare into space for 20 minutes at a time then spam the punch button until someone dies.

In conclusion, someone definitely had an idea for a game and people really did code, test, and release it. The question of why someone on the team didn’t raise concerns about the overall quality of the game before it was greenlighted for release is honestly beyond me. It should be a complete embarrassment to SquareEnix to be associated with a lazy, half-assed project such as this. Amazing they have the gall to charge people $15 for three hours of pure garbage. I want the $3 I paid for this game on sale back.

bioware exec: inquisition has to be like... an open world loot crafting rpg. like skyrim. with a lot of random shitty pointless material fetch quests. like skyrim.

bioware programmer: what? but that's nothing like the previous games.

bioware exec, twirling his hair: do you think todd howard would let me suck his toes