izigame.me

I've waited 16 years for this, since the very first announcement, and I finished this game in one sitting. It was undeniably a very impressive ride, and it had a lot of things going for it. In my opinion, the game was also SORELY let down by its ending, to the point where I'm now tempted to give a thumbs down to the experience as a whole. I won’t, of course - up until the final credits rolled, I was very excited about it.
This situation is incredibly annoying. This ziggurat was clearly built by a very small team entirely out of their own blood, sweat and a deep love for horror and the adventure game genre. And it is a very well-directed experience. It’s *fun* and *interesting* to play, and being in the middle of this sinister mystery feels great. The asylum is pretty big, with a lot of different rooms and corridors. The game does a very good job of strategically introducing parts of the building so as to not overwhelm you, but the interface also ensures that you won't need to hunt for pixels, and makes it so it's a lot harder to miss important things as you explore.
The same goes for the story. The game makes you ask questions, and when new bits of information get strategically revealed, they recontextualize the facts that you already have, making your existing assumptions slide into new places, and when it happens, it feels very satisfying.
The adventure game medium works both for and against the game. For example, Yes, I've seen the interaction prompts on the water taps and some close ups of the drain covers, I wonder if anything will happen as I finally hold this small metal object that I obtained with great effort during a very sensitive interaction right over one such drain , but also early in the game you come across a book with detailed instructions on how to use a machine to conduct an invasive medical procedure, and how you definitely need someone else to supervise it in order to ensure safety, and you think, "F@%&, I'll have to do it alone on myself later, won't I," and it colors your expectations accordingly.
Unfortunately, this is also where my main issue lies. I get the idea behind the ending and can appreciate why it is made this way. It stays true to its inspirations, even if the intended effect belongs to a calmer timeline, and not the one where you get assaulted by a barrage of news about evil running unchecked every time you decide to see what’s going on in the world. However, being a part of a game, and not a movie or a book, actively works against it. When I first saw the ending, I thought, wait, what the hell did I do wrong? Was it the door puzzle? Let me try again. An hour later I went to check the discussions on Discord and saw a confirmation that what I got was the *only* ending. And it honestly felt like a slap in the face out of nowhere.
It does make sense in retrospect – the Great Old Ones as Lovecraft envisioned them aren’t just big scary animals that you can send to R’lyeh with a blast from a shotgun, good ol’ ‘merican way, like. You can’t run with that crowd and emerge unscathed. I heard this specific tale many times before, and I even don’t mind hearing it again, but not when the intended result of all my efforts feels as sudden and carries as much weight as a death screen in a Sierra game.
Besides, the clues that lead up to the ending aren’t exactly *prominent*, not until you consider them all after the fact. When you are playing the game, you see other possibilities, and honestly, I would have found a lot of them more exciting than the current explanation. My expectations were also colored by Scratches, where the ending was ambiguous enough to be interpreted from two different angles. I fully expected at least a “Could this be a mushroom?” ending here as well, especially since it was hinted at.
My other issue with the ending is that it doesn’t feel personal in any way, and doesn’t offer any emotional payoff. If one important detail wasn’t kept till the very end to serve as a SUDDEN PLOT TWIST, it could have been avoided, but we have what we have.
On paper, the events are tragic, but the game doesn’t develop the personalities of anyone involved to a sufficient degree. While playing, it sometimes feels like some things happen in a strange parallel reality, but not in a good (unsettling) way. The issues that should be addressed get sidelined, you don’t get a lot of information in general, and what you get has a very specific focus. While you are busy with your current objective and also keep making guesses about the possible solution to the mystery, this doesn’t feel jarring, but when you look back after reaching the ending, the aftertaste is not great.
The game definitely looks, and it also sounds. A lot of effort undeniably went into the first, and it shows. The building is sprawling, decrepit and oppressive. It’s also a giant mess – which was absolutely intentional. Some music tracks are pretty cool, and I wouldn’t mind listening to them again. Others are nice, and they enhance several specific events a great deal. Others still are serviceable, but it’s not bad overall.
The atmosphere is definitely there, and I’ve found myself being startled by the shapes of mundane objects a number of times. On the other hand, I didn’t feel really scared at any point – but I was definitely darkly intrigued, and this is the feeling I value the most.
So it's worth it overall, but the game could have been so much better with a few possibly even minor alterations, and it's really sad. Perhaps, this was the real horror that we've found along the way.