izigame.me

Long story short, it's okay. If you want to "play" a decent episode of Twilight Zone or Beyond Belief with substantial production quality with a couple QTEs here and there this is your game. Since it's about 4 years old as of now, won't be too much to handle for a modern mid-level system but will still look great nonetheless. If you want the long story however, just keep reading and expect minor spoilers.
Let me start with the "Lethal" difficulty which I don't think is designed the best. More than half of it is fine; correct button pressing, button mashing and the stealth "rythm" sections all work. They can get plenty challenging, and that's what I expected and wanted out of the difficulty. But the "aiming" parts where you have to drag a reticule to a certain point on the screen are almost always bullsh*t I have to say. On other difficulties, where you need to aim is highlighted by a circle; with Lethal you only get the reticule and when you aim correctly it turns red. So far so good but when the correct spot to aim doesn't make any common sense, you feel you get ripped off. I mean I have a sledgehammer and I'm expected to hit a monster's hand of all things when its head is even closer to me? To me that's just nonsense. The whole thing just makes me feel like Lethal mode was designed just as a mode to be played when you compelete the game on easier difficulties, with prior knowledge of the QTEs you need to execute. I just would like that to be disclosed in some way on the menus. Don't get me wrong either since I'm not salty or anything because I couldn't save a character (I'm actually completely content with the ending I got), I just think this difficulty and this specific QTE could've been designed better with little context clues to ever so slightly help on the dot rather than having nothing and making it completely nonsensical guesswork because almost every time, that's what decides if a character lives or dies.
And then comes the overall gameplay of the game, which ends up consisting of walking in a very slow speed, interacting with certain objects and trying to make the character you control pointing their goddamn flashlight or light source to where you actually want them towards. I don't get why anyone would hold their flashlight in pure darkness at the side of their body to only illuminate anywhere but where they are headed towards. Don't know for sure if that was an issue with gamepad controls but it sure was weird. Camera was also odd might I add, it just felt it was way too far back from the character that it made looking around a chore sometimes; just one movement of it and a tree branch obscures your view or even another character standing somewhere. And when you add the non-existent level design on top of it all -which turns most of the game into one long corridor where you walk in a painfully slow speed, trying to wrestle with the controls- I was shocked to see my entire playtime was somewhere around 5 to 6 hours, because I swear just walking from point A to B at any given time alone felt like it took hours to me. I would even just take the characters to not have the agility of a fridge at that point and have everything else stay the same, because screw "realism" and give me a character that can at the very least "stroll" dang it!
It's a crying shame too, because I really liked the overall premise and much more than I expected I have to add. The whole "Curator" aspect was pulled off excellently; not too cheesy nor too serious, it just hits that sweet spot, almost to the point that I couldn't even wait to see him again. So props to both mocap, voice acting and writing for that. On the other hand, while not incredibly satisfying, the story is also decent as well. I just think writers play their cards too early with little subtlety to boot and that takes away the mystique of the whole situation away too quickly. If you are even a little observant, you understand where the story is going towards rather early on. But even with all these combined, I don't hate the game, however- I simply couldn't go without mentioning all its issues. Without those, I would play this many more times to see every ending, every secret and detail but as things stand that's not gonna happen anytime soon. It's almost the perfect embodiment of a "6/10" game even though I'm not too fond of that scaling system.
Thanks for reading this entire, unnecessarily long rant.