Theres been a style of games in recent times ever since probably Heavy Rain released on ps3, where the focus isn't so much on gameplay but its basically just a movie you can sometimes interact with and make multiple choice selections to influence how the story goes. Dark Pictures Anthology is this kind of game. I finished 'Man of Medan' with a buddy and thought it was fun enough so we eventually got the second one called 'Little Hope'
The way this game works is you watch a lot of cutscenes, then you get selected to play as one of the 5 characters seemingly at random, and you can make choices during conversation to the other characters. You frequently do have sections where you can freely walk around, in third person, using keyboard or controller. At first, we were playing with keyboard and mouse, and it plays like a Point and click adventure game, which didn't feel or play that great. Also, there are frequent quicktime events which by themselves have some problems, but its made even worse by choosing to play Keyboard & mouse because the icons arent very clear and its much easier to fail them. However, we quickly switched to Controller and to our surprise no longer do you have the Point & click style of controls, but full analog stick movement like a typical third person game! this feels much better, its mindboggling why the devs chose to default to the shoddy point & click controls when this style is much more immersive and clearly superior. So using the controller you frequently get to walk around the enviornments and interact with things, marked by a sparkling glow, you pick up objects and can turn them over and read things, but thats about all there is to interact with.
The bulk of the 'mechanics' in the game are :
- Making multiple choice decisions, which affects your relationships with order characters, marked by a green UP arrow or red Down arrow when depending on your choices. I'm unsure exactly how the relationship choices affect the game, as I played through the game twice and got basically the Good and Bad ending, but couldn't really tell much of a difference in the relationship choices besides the initial reactions. Not sure if theres any long lasting effects, but it was fun deciding what to say and seeing the reactions, laughing at some of the dialogue, and seeing those Green or red relationship arrows.
-Walking around with traditional third person controls, interacting with objects, sometimes there are even fixed camera style graphics which are pretty cool and immersive.
- Quick time events. Lots of these, and failing a single one can DRASTICALLY alter the game. I'm talking you can easily get one of the characters permanently killed if you screw one of these up. Thats cool, but unfortunately the quicktime icons/interactions are really confusing and not as intuitive as they should be. For example, theres a Heartbeat minigame type QTE where you have to tap a button when it lines up with the heartbeat, but as soon as the meter pops up, it will briefly display "PRESS A!" and if you press it too soon, then it FAILS. But it looks like youre suppose to press A, just like the other non QTE ones. Its very confusing and you can easily screw up, not because you have bad reactions, but just because the graphic for some of the QTE doesn't make much sense. Another example is if youre using keyboard and mouse, this same heartbeat QTE, initially it will be press Left mouse button, but then halfway through it will switch to Right mouse button , but the graphic almost looks exactly the same. Its really hard to tell that its even changed, its not obvious at all. Of course this led to failing. Then we switched to controller and atleast this prompt is more obvious because the buttons are colorful and different looking when it switches.
Another example of the QTE graphics been unintuitive, confusing, and stupid, is this other style of QTE where you have to drag the cursor to the middle of the screen and press right trigger - BUT it doesnt even tell you that you have to press right trigger AND you have to know that its the RIGHT stick, not the left stick. So the first few times this pops up, you have maybe 2 seconds to do it, but your first reaction is to try the Left stick (movement stick) , it wont work, then you have to fumble and realize its the RIGHT stick, then you move the cursor to the middle and think "Ok, I did it!" - NOPE then you fail, because you actually have to put it in the middle and press RT...but it doesn't even display 'press RT" or the 'RT' icon. WTF! How hard is it for them to just show a RT icon once you drag it in the middle? Its especially insane because if you fail one of these, like I said, a character permanently dies for the rest of the game. Severely punishing to fail one of these and theyre designed like shit!
Well we beat the game twice
And on the first time, whatever happened, we just let happen. We ended up finishing the game with basically no one left, and then right at the end of the game they all died anyway cause we made a bad choice even though it seemed obvious (burn the 'evil' kid)
But on the second playthrough, we tried to do as many 'good/right' things as possible, save everyone,get all 'positive' relationship arrows, and get the best possible ending. Thankfully we found out that you can revert a previous chapter so if you accidentally get a character killed, you can reload and try again. So we did that the few times we fucked up on the 2nd playthrough and ended up getting the best possible ending/saving everyone, which was pretty enjoyable, and the 2nd time around the dialogue and game was changed enough to where it was worth playing through again.
There's just enough 'real' gameplay that it doesn't feel like youre just watching a movie, it is pretty immersive and you do get a sense that youre actually in the world playing as one of these guys, not to mention the whole thing is a cooperative horror experience and youre playing random characters so youre trying to work together with your buddy, relaying information to eachother, you frequently get split up and youre always asking eachother "What are you doing now" and telling them what you saw and stuff, its pretty fun.
I notice how I havnt talked much about the actual story, thats intentional cause I'm not about to do like a 'book review' and review the entire story or something, but I'll just say its sort of generic BUT very well done. Theres nothing nessesarily wrong about being unoriginal, as long as its done good enough. The story is almost like something out of Silent Hill where at first you see this young guy accidentally burn his house down, killing his whole family, then later on you see a bus crash and you wake up with a group of people being one of the bus passengers, going around in this really foggy outback/village area that looks like something out of Silent Hill, trying to piece together why you cant leave this place, because the fog keeps returning you making you walk in circles, being chased by really awesome detailed looking monsters and spirits all intertwined with flashbacks of some like 17th century burning witch trial stuff. It's engrossing and the characters have enough individuality and funny/interesting dialogue to where you wanna know what happens next and you dont want any of the characters to die because each of them actually add something to the story and if they die you feel like youre losing out on a lot of interesting writing and dialogue and their backstories. Though I will say that the whole game leads you to believe that the little girl is the main evil villian, giving you a choice to burn her at the end, but in doing so , no matter how many people you saved up to that point, if you burn the little girl, it kills all of the people you save and leaves you by yourself giving you basically the worst ending - All by one single decision right at the end, that felt kinda fucked and unfair. So much so that we played through again. But even so, the ending didn't change all that much, and thats because this game does the cliche thing where "WHAT A TWIST! It's all in your head.. you just were going crazy!" ... right? I'm pretty sure thats what the ending is, the only thing that makes me question it is theres one point where the 'imaginary' characters throw darts at a board, but then the only other real person, some guy at a bar, takes the darts out of the board as if they were actually thrown by a real person. I gotta say its an interesting story despite the cliches and unoriginality.
The graphics and facial animations are really impressive, it feels like a super high budget movie youre watching, so thats really good because if that stuff sucked the game would be a flop, they had to nail this part because the game is basically just a movie, lets be honest. But yeah like the sections where you can walk around freely, you have a flashlight you can swing around with the right stick and youre always in some dark place to where it definitely has that horror atmosphere, theres tons of jumpscares but they arent too bad, everytime you get jumpscared its because it brings you back into a flashback of the witch trial stuff which is really interesting.
Oh yeah and unfortunatley the game is extremely buggy and has no buisness being so. Theres barely any mechanics, how is it so buggy? We frequently lost connection, or when we would try to pickup the game from last session and just load our save, it would just freeze and not work, having to reload previous chapters to fix it, all sorts of bugs. Like the last session we played we had to ALT+f4 quit the game like 10 times just to be able to load successfully and keep playing, it was a mess. Why is it so fucking buggy? The steam forums is full of complaints of people saying they cant load their save and their shit is ruined, crazy. Doesn't seem like the devs gave a shit to fix it, but oh well , it is what it is.
For actual co-op horror games, or interactive experiences, with a full story and ending, its slim pickings. This is one of the only ones out there, most horror cooperative games are stupid deathmatch shit, not actual campaigns. So thats one thing to keep in mind. For what it is, its a good experience, good enough that we played through it two times just to see what was different and because the story was interesting enough we actually cared and wanted to see the other parts we missed out on. Though the Quicktime icons/graphics could be way better, especially with how unforgiving they are, and it needs a lot of bug fixes, its still not a bad choice if you just want to have a casual sit down with a friend and playthrough some cooperative horror experience without having to be good at video games or anything.
7/10
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