I knew going into this that this wouldn't be a pleasant experience based off of other reviews but I still went in open-minded having played it a full year after it's release. The bar was low man, but holy shit. What happened between House of Ashes and this?
Something about this entire premise just did not hit right with me. They already went with the whole "saw trap serial killer" concept with Until Dawn, but this one just full sent it to death, with no believable reasoning behind it. The backstory twist was predictable and completely undermines it's own villain, just turning him into a teleporting superhuman who shows up whenever it's convenient. The game suggests that he's in 3 or 4 locations at the same time while never hinting that there are some supernatural elements at play. It just made the whole 8 hour runtime feel weird and pointless.
This isn't helped by the pacing at all. The first half is outrageously boring, setting up some of the worst characters in the series who all seem to hate each other. The 2nd half is where all the "action" takes place, but it's more like scenes where character A or sometimes B run/hide from discount Mikie Myers interspersed with the most annoying investigation settings in the series. They introduced the most useless collectible ever in this game, on top of the usual lore clues sprinkled about. It basically gave them an excuse to go hog wild with these bland and almost pitch black empty spaces that just exist for you to fumble around in for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the game intends for you to go. If there was any tension at all that you achieved from running away from the killer, these walking around bits usually nuked that feeling every time they showed up. These are usually the worst parts of the other games but they've never been this annoying to deal with until now.
They implemented a new inventory item system where each character has their own light source and bonus "power" they can individually use, such as Charlie being able to open locked drawers. I'm open to this series trying new things, but this one was a bit of a flop. I kept forgetting that it was even a thing you could do because some characters just use their abilities much more often than others. I found myself locked in a room as Kate for 30 minutes because she's supposed to use this super cool investigative journalist trick with a pencil that the game gave no indication that she even fucking had in the first place. She used it literally once in that moment, and then never again, so what was the point?
Trying to dabble into this part without spoiling, but if the game wants me to utilize what we know about the character's and their individual personalities to our advantage, then they need to really consider writing better characters? This series isn't well known for having the most stellar casts and I'm usually able to swallow it fine, but this one in particular has some of the most one-note, insufferable barbarians at it's helm. You learn almost nothing about them and yet the Curator's smug ass treats you like a dickhead for not picking up on what you're supposed to do with the little information that's thrown at you. This, coupled up with the fact that the villain is basically Homelander, made the deaths and failures feel extremely cheap.
The optimization itself is also still pretty stinky a year after release. I almost refunded it because it was doing some weird audio de-syncing and displaying extreme desaturation that I never turned on. Opening the game itself was like opening malware; it just death gripped my whole system and refused to exit fullscreen mode no matter how hard I struggled to change it. Subtitles were written incorrectly and had words spelled wrong sometimes. The first fuse box mini-game had the wrong inputs listed. I thought for sure that the game was just broken, but it turned out that you're supposed to use your keyboard to do them even though the UI tells you to use the mouse. Just straight up forehead mechanics.
Please just be a fluke, Supermassive. I really like their games but they need to slow down the release times if they're gonna try to make longer, bigger games like this. Not every story they put out can be golden, but there's some formulas they refuse to change and it's starting to ruin the experiences. Each game has worse looking models with zero souls behind their eyes. I would love if the next one has a cast of characters who are actual friends that don't snipe each other with every line of dialogue, but it's set in space so who the fuck knows. They're probably miserable co-workers, again, who all have a previous past of dating each other, again. At least that one looks like it has a monster.
Something about this entire premise just did not hit right with me. They already went with the whole "saw trap serial killer" concept with Until Dawn, but this one just full sent it to death, with no believable reasoning behind it. The backstory twist was predictable and completely undermines it's own villain, just turning him into a teleporting superhuman who shows up whenever it's convenient. The game suggests that he's in 3 or 4 locations at the same time while never hinting that there are some supernatural elements at play. It just made the whole 8 hour runtime feel weird and pointless.
This isn't helped by the pacing at all. The first half is outrageously boring, setting up some of the worst characters in the series who all seem to hate each other. The 2nd half is where all the "action" takes place, but it's more like scenes where character A or sometimes B run/hide from discount Mikie Myers interspersed with the most annoying investigation settings in the series. They introduced the most useless collectible ever in this game, on top of the usual lore clues sprinkled about. It basically gave them an excuse to go hog wild with these bland and almost pitch black empty spaces that just exist for you to fumble around in for 20 minutes trying to figure out where the game intends for you to go. If there was any tension at all that you achieved from running away from the killer, these walking around bits usually nuked that feeling every time they showed up. These are usually the worst parts of the other games but they've never been this annoying to deal with until now.
They implemented a new inventory item system where each character has their own light source and bonus "power" they can individually use, such as Charlie being able to open locked drawers. I'm open to this series trying new things, but this one was a bit of a flop. I kept forgetting that it was even a thing you could do because some characters just use their abilities much more often than others. I found myself locked in a room as Kate for 30 minutes because she's supposed to use this super cool investigative journalist trick with a pencil that the game gave no indication that she even fucking had in the first place. She used it literally once in that moment, and then never again, so what was the point?
Trying to dabble into this part without spoiling, but if the game wants me to utilize what we know about the character's and their individual personalities to our advantage, then they need to really consider writing better characters? This series isn't well known for having the most stellar casts and I'm usually able to swallow it fine, but this one in particular has some of the most one-note, insufferable barbarians at it's helm. You learn almost nothing about them and yet the Curator's smug ass treats you like a dickhead for not picking up on what you're supposed to do with the little information that's thrown at you. This, coupled up with the fact that the villain is basically Homelander, made the deaths and failures feel extremely cheap.
The optimization itself is also still pretty stinky a year after release. I almost refunded it because it was doing some weird audio de-syncing and displaying extreme desaturation that I never turned on. Opening the game itself was like opening malware; it just death gripped my whole system and refused to exit fullscreen mode no matter how hard I struggled to change it. Subtitles were written incorrectly and had words spelled wrong sometimes. The first fuse box mini-game had the wrong inputs listed. I thought for sure that the game was just broken, but it turned out that you're supposed to use your keyboard to do them even though the UI tells you to use the mouse. Just straight up forehead mechanics.
Please just be a fluke, Supermassive. I really like their games but they need to slow down the release times if they're gonna try to make longer, bigger games like this. Not every story they put out can be golden, but there's some formulas they refuse to change and it's starting to ruin the experiences. Each game has worse looking models with zero souls behind their eyes. I would love if the next one has a cast of characters who are actual friends that don't snipe each other with every line of dialogue, but it's set in space so who the fuck knows. They're probably miserable co-workers, again, who all have a previous past of dating each other, again. At least that one looks like it has a monster.
2 Comments
@feeshie I think it's implied that the Curator is actively writing the story when it shows at the end that he supposedly brings the killer back to life by crossing out the line that says he dies. It's really brief and it didn't click for me at first. So, maybe he's just teleporting the killer around in the writing or he wrote in 2 killers. They didn't make it super clear lmao.
feeshie
4 months ago