So I got this game for really cheap during some sale around the time I aws into a lot of horror games. It seemed like it had a slight horror vibe but also detective sort of adventure game so I picked it up.
It's a really heavily narrative driven, cutscene kind of game. It starts off where you watch yourself get shot to death by some unknown assailent, then you play as a ghost trying to figure out who killed you and why. The actual gameplay consists of barely anything really, the main mechanics here is it takes place in third person, usually the mechanics are like you're in this room that acts as a main investigation, and you just walk around the room spamming E to pickup/look at clues. Each investigation has a set amount of clues, it says on the bottom left #/# how many clues there are left, so you kinda just walk around picking up stuff in the enviornment. But the thing is, theres no penalty or choices or weight behind any decisions you make. Theres no downside to anything you do. Sometimes it pulls up a menu screen asking you what choice to make, but if you get it wrong, it dosent matter, you just bring the screen up and try again and it even crosses out the previous wrong answer for you. The main thing that kinda makes the game overall boring is that theres no penalty for any of your actions. Nothing has meaning. It really is kind of just a movie game. Theres no real gameplay.
Well, thats not entirely true. Besides the instances where you pickup clues in investigations, you also have segments where you run to the next main location and its like a semi-open world where you walk around all these different NPC's and I guess you can talk to them to do side-objectives but I never bothered to do any of that stuff because I just didn't really care enough because the game doesn't have any meaningful mechanics to warrant caring about anything extra. So besides all that stuff, you sometimes find yourself in these psuedo-stealth sections with these demons walking around, if they spot you, you kinda just have a timer to where you instantly die if you dont find one of these premade Hide sections, I hated all this shit, its so annoying and awful. If you get up behind the AI demon thing, you can hold R to kill it, then it makes you do a quicktime event. The controls are pretty shit it makes you juggle between holding R and also doing these mini-quicktime events and its just annoying and clunky and shitty. The "stealth' sections are just annoying, they hardly add anything to the game, its just a waste of time and frustration. It's not like I want to sit there and wait for the AI to make its rounds, its not challenging or immersive or fun, its just annoying, because the mechanic isn't fun, you just have to do some stupid quicktime event that mixes between pressing Left and Right mouse and some key, and if you fail it then you reload checkpoint. So yeah, the psuedo-stealth sections are just a pain in the ass and thats basically the only real "gameplay" sections you have here. The other gameplay sections consist of just walking around in a circle spamming E to pickup "clues" to "solve" investigations, but it has no meaning because you cant actually fail, its more just padding until the next cutscene.
So what you really get here is like 40 seconds of gameplay, then a 3 minute cutscene, then 40 seconds of gameplay. Rinse repeat.
The graphics are pretty standard fare for the time, theres no impressive lighting or shadows or anything like that, it all kinda comes across as generic and flat to be frank. The whole game is muted and dull, night time and grey. I guess it makes sense you're a ghost, but yeah its not all that interesting, the locations are stuff like city streets, churches, a Mental hospital which I guess was the most interesting part of the game.
Well then, hows the story and narrative? Yeah Im not gonna sit here and review the whole plot, I moreso care about gameplay, but the plot here is slightly engaging enough in a corny, campy way, the main character is this gruff badass Fedora wearing, constantly chainsmoking non-chalant dickhead thats funny enough to listen to, hes trying to figure out who killed him, he meets this teenage girl on his travels and they work together in this whimsical narrative to uncover whats happening. Its not awful, its slightly entertainng and the kind of dumb cliche story to sitdown and watch over the weekend, it ends up turning into this weird 18th century Witch trial thing with little ghost girls and all sorts of shit. It's not awful, but yeah its just average. The voice acting and characters are memorable and decent enough, but when the actual gameplay is meaningless and theres no weight to any of your actions, its kinda just a very average Boring dull game. Thats the main word, the game is kinda just...boring. Well, luckily I beat the entire thing in only 4 hours despite howlongtobeat.com saying the average is 7 hours, so I guess i flew right through it. It wasn't a terrible experience, but I was kinda half asleep the whole time. The developer that made this game seemed to completely disband and go out of buisness after this game so I guess it wasn't really a home run for them either...
5/10
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