Recent reviews by Violette

The game starts with the urban legend of Tsun, a little boy who died in hospital whilst waiting for his friends to visit him. We(Ai) visit the abandoned hospital with a group of "friends" who dare each other to summon Tsun who would then in accordance to the legend, challenge them to a game of "Hide and seek". Over the course of the next few days we experience spirited away episodes at the will of Tsun and his apparent new spirit world friends. Your goal is to go from A to B, sometimes collecting keys along the way to open up avenues to reach the doll at the end and then make your way back in time to destroy it.

• Story is pretty solid so far.
  
• Good lighting and colour choice goes a long way.
  
• Different types of enemies to evade based on sight and sound.
  
• I like the door peeping/push through mechanic tbf.

• Big chunks of reading early game that kinda kill the tension, especially when voice acting is used later on.
  
• Tells you to press E, R to hold breath but there's a really annoying bug in my game where there's no visual or sound indication that we are actually holding our breath.
  
• The maps are just a mismatch of School, hospital and traditional house rooms. Which normally would be fine (school setting for Ai, Hospital for Tsun, etc), but they were too alike making it seem very lazy and boring.
  
• bit repetitive in general.

I'd only buy on sale if you enjoy quite forgiving, fun little cat and mouse game-esque stuff.

Appears to be a dumbed-down, knock off of "Inside the Backrooms". I'd recommend getting that over this one.
https://v1.steam.hlxgame.cc/app/1987080

🎩 Visuals - The look of the game was nothing special and was typical of this genre. The locations were fairly solid and there were some cool little atmospheric pockets throughout that I enjoyed as we got deeper.
🎩 Multiple Endings - You get to decide and see different outcomes.


🎩 Boss fights didn’t fit in with this style of game.
🎩 The localizer - we crack codes for the CIA in 1979, and we just casually have this piece of futuristic equipment. Wasn’t a fan of chasing signals around the forest and shooting anomalies.
🎩 Multiple Endings - You have to play the whole game again for decisions that only appear right at the end. Probably a 6 hour game if you know what you’re doing.
🎩 The game is mostly reskinned scenarios where you interact with mouse tracking

• peel back wooden board
  
• Throw grappling hook and pull down ladder
  
• Jump through hole in roof
  
• Falling over (A LOT)
  
• Near death misses grabbing onto ledges and looking back
  
• Throwing rocks to get things down
  
• Running away from an enemy whilst things jump out at you forcing your route.

🎩 Story - Don’t get me wrong, I liked the approach of the two different timelines but it was done so badly. Nicolas’ story of coming to grips with his past relationship with his father and its effects on his mental health was more interesting than Adam’s paranoia and soviet goose chase. However there was no real reveal with Nicolas since the devs decided to mention his last name was Hyde.
I think the story is up for interpretation but from what I understand, Adam was suffering a mental break and upon reading Nicolas diary began to obsess and embody him. What I can’t figure out is if the note in the police car was a figment of his imagination or if Adam was experiencing mental health problems because he was in fact, as the note suggested, related to nicolas and it was hereditary. (after all, they both had the same family home).



🎩 Puzzles - My dumb ass struggled with some of the puzzles or just couldn’t be arsed because they were too long. I get the puzzles complemented our character being a cryptanalyst but the one in Adams office was just too long and boring. I did however like the one in the cabin with the hidden clues.
🎩 Locked doors in the house - I know some of those doors opened later on, but there were so many that when I wasn’t sure of my objective I wasted ages trying to remember which doors I’d checked.

☸ Lore material/cultural referencing
☸ Photo Mode
☸ Really liked the mise en scène and art style
☸ “Glancing” to see how the ghosts died
☸ Picking up the controls was a breeze, beginner friendly
☸ It’s on PC

☸ ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ Ghost hands wasting my time
☸ Storytelling was a bit of a mess
☸ Acting was bad for the most part
☸ Doubles of ghosts & their animations
☸ Felt like it threw ghosts at you for the fun of it
☸ Doing the 5 nights at freddy’s gimmick more than once
☸ Repetitive mission structure, too many fetch quests
☸ Lack of puzzles
☸ Miku’s story
☸ Couldn’t explore freely, game would actively stop you going down paths.
☸ I thought the final boss fight and resolve was kinda boring
☸ Final bosses villain origin story was weak

☸ No one sleeps with a blanket/duvet
☸ That half the fanbase is thirsty (why are the boobs on springs?)
☸ Before the ghosts would haunt the shop, they made sure to enter through the front door first as a group.
☸ Going out exclusively at night, we could have done some missions where we went out during the day, and it grew dark fast.
☸ The ghost list saying Haruka became a ghost and then was human again, translation error? She was possessed.
☸ Not a fan of buying inventory, grading chapters and getting recaps on the title cards. I miss the old lantern save feature, and the items you found in the game were all you had.