Recent reviews by The Don't Look Back Network

Very good second release from the developers of The Midnight Bus. Sound and visuals are amazing, the story is disturbing as all hell. Very well done, highly recommended!

https://youtu.be/dP_29bJa7X4

Very, very creepy. I have no idea what the story actually was but holy god did they ever nail the heavy, oppressive atmosphere perfectly. Even when nothing was actively happening, it never really felt "safe" and I loved that the developer got that right. Can't wait to see future projects from this developer!

Link to playthrough: https://youtu.be/lUTCLeiGQes

I was given the opportunity to play this before it's release and while it definitely needs worked on and refined, there is definitely potential for an amazing horror game here.

PROS
1. The atmosphere/vibe of the forest is absolutely sinister. Even when nothing is happening, it feels heavy and oppressive. This is helped by the black and white aesthetic that the entire game is cast in.
2. Sound design is very good. I saw other people reviewing and saying that there weren't enough sounds, specifically pointing out the almost complete lack of bird sounds, but I found the amount and the quality of all the ambient/forest sounds to be spot on
3. The protagonist actually speaks rather than simply being subtitles on a screen.

CONS
1. Difficulty needs tuned a little bit. The Wendigo spawns completely randomly and, IMO, too frequently. On top of that, if you die then any anomalies that you found and marked are reset back to zero and must be found and marked again, which I found frustrating. The game is hard enough without resetting progress to zero after the player is killed, especially considering how easy it is to get lost and die given the speed, frequency and randomness of the monster.
2. The game tells you to light candles while the Wendigo is actively chasing you to temporarily get it off your ass, but I did that several times and was still killed so unless I missed something somewhere, that system has a flaw in it somewhere.

Again, the foundation is definitely there for something amazing, it simply needs worked on and refined. Still looking forward to the completed release!

Dinner Schedule:
Night 1- Dog Food
Night 2- Laundry Detergent
Night 3- Batteries

10/10 for letting me eat whatever random nonsense I wanted for dinner each night

EMIKA quality strikes again. This game is the prequel to another EMIKA game called Find Yourself, and it works very, very well to make that game even more uncomfortable and creepy than it already was. Very well done, 10/10

https://youtu.be/O1b5eQEe1M8

Really enjoyed this one. It has a few issues, it's a hair too heavy on the use of it's jumpscares and there really aren't all that many moments where you'll be in actual, legitimate danger but it does what it does well enough to be enjoyable for what it is. 8/10

https://youtu.be/GmcpwpAIrlI

What a wonderful treat this game this. Total love letter to the 80's/90/s slasher movies that were a big of part of my childhood/early teen years. The 2D pixel art is great, the story is perfect. The only thing wrong is the price..... IT'S TOO LOW, this is worth far more than the measly $8 the developers are asking for it. I'd go $15 for this easy. Hope it gets a sequel in the future because I want more of it!

https://youtu.be/X5vZzw-_cVw

What a wonderfully terrifying experience this was. Listening to the monster wander around in the dark off screen while it's asking me to come out and babbling about wanting skin was absolutely chilling. The sound design, visuals and atmosphere are spot on. If there's even one single thing that I could suggest be improved it would only be "take out the jumpscares because you don't need them at all, the monster is plenty terrifying enough" but I won't even say that because you included an option to turn them off. Overall, loved the entire experience, very well done!

https://youtu.be/pvlzx7PuGco

This game falls into the category where I wish there was a neutral option instead of just Yes or No, however since the negatives outweigh the positives, I'm going to have to fall on the No side. On one hand, the sound design and atmosphere of the house is effectively creepy. The story is..just okay, a man returns home from a business trip, finds his daughter missing and blood everywhere and hires a private investigator (you) to either find her or find out what happened....and that's pretty much where the positives stop. The jumpscares are disturbing....until they happen 5,874,395 times in the space of an hour until eventually they just become almost comical. The game starts with the detective wandering the house looking at evidence, which he comments on in a voice that's almost certainly an AI...and then none of the clues you found are ever mentioned, heard from, brought up, or made relevant in any way ever again. The main selling point for the game seems to be the voice recognition system for communicating with the ghost in the house, except it barely works, if ever. The ending is nonsense and both further abuses using mental illness as a lazy ending trope AND throws a giant plot hole into the story at the same time. There is a second ending, which seems to be tied to reaching the endpoint without ever being caught by the ghost, but good luck getting it because the game has a gamebreaking bug tied to restarting the game once it's been completed where a key event (the first phone call) at the beginning of the game that leads to another thing (the laptop/camera system) required to progress....just never happens at all. There are multiple threads of people asking the developer to fix it, in some of which he claims to have done so, but clearly didn't. Lastly, the "gameplay", if you can call it that with a straight face, is literally nothing deeper than wandering the house and hitting light switches. There are no puzzles beyond finding the login name and password for the email account on the laptop...which the ghost spells out for you a couple letters at a time in the correct order. So your entire involvement in this game is as follows: Look at the cameras until the ghost appears, go to that spot, turn the lights off/on, find the next letter, go back to laptop, wait for the ghost to show up somewhere else and point at that spot on the wall....rinse and repeat until snoring. Could have been an amazing game, but it wound up just being extremely mediocre and forgettable.

Easily one of the most terrifying games to come down the pipeline in the last 5 years at least.

https://youtu.be/I03G5Sec_Mc