Recent reviews by SkullPirateMike

I liked this one a lot. Story pulled me in pretty fast, and the game looks pretty great for a small-team indie horror. I know people will be comparing it to other similar horror games, but the gameplay made me think of Luigi's Mansion and Maniac Mansion, but as a serious horror instead of a parody one. It's set in 1998, but other than a single reference to X-Files at the very start, I couldn't tell. All the tech we see, the phones, the cameras, the computers... felt more like 1988. Everyone has record players, even the kids' rooms are full of vinyls. Not a CD in sight.

I love the permadeath, it makes the game more interesting and unique. You can turn it off if it's not your jam, which is nice. Personally I found it frustrating to have to replay the entire chapter if I lost all my characters, so in the end I played through most of the last episode on regular difficulty, but dropped it down to no permadeaths when I found myself down to one character.

The game definitely suffers from some difficulty issues in the last two episodes. In the first three, every time I lost a character it felt like my fault. In episode 4 it felt like if I got too far with one character, the game would punish me by throwing an insurmountable minigame at me. Every abyss (button-mashing minigame) I had done up to that point was over in moments, but in episode 4 it threw me one that was so intense and went on so long that my arm hurt for two days afterwards, and I still couldn't get out of it. Then I lost another to a Requiem (basically an FPS minigame) with two monsters both spawning so close behind my character that it was impossible to take them both out before they caught him.

The puzzles are mostly great, with just a handful that're a little too esoteric. I still don't know how I was supposed to have figured out what to do for a few, but one in particular in episode 5 had me totally stumped. I looked up a walkthrough for it, and even the writer of the walkthrough had basically just said "I have no idea how you're supposed to work this out, but here's the solution."

None of that stuff ever made me want to quit though, and now that I've beaten it once, I feel like I'll be going back in to try to beat it with more characters surviving.