izigame.me

Where to begin... To be quite frank, I bought this game because it was dirt cheap and it looked interesting. Seeing the fact this is an indie game and self-published at that, I have to give credit where it's due. I haven't played any of this developer’s other games at the time of the review.
-DISCLAIMER-
There might be some spoilers. If you care about that, don’t read any further.
This is merely my subjective opinion, so perhaps it might appear far too nitpicky to you, dear reader. Please keep that in mind. I gave this game a go, tried to like it and completed it, but I just couldn't take it seriously or enjoy it.
I won’t talk about the graphics, but the game looks good for what it is. It just kind of suffers from that Unreal game look. There was texture popping here and there, but that might be related to my hardware more than anything else.
*STORY AND WRITING
I won’t say much here. To be quite honest, I found the story very forgettable and a tad convoluted at times. While the overlapping timelines had some grand reveals in mind as their purpose, at the start of a new chapter I’d mostly forgotten what even happened or what I did the chapter before. There are hints as the game progresses towards the true nature of the characters, so I wouldn’t say the reveals were extremely shocking. There are multiple endings, but the game just didn't attract me enough to give it another go. Even the decisive choices made at the very end of the game made me think “eh, it’s whatever at this point so I’ll just pick randomly”. There was no real stake to them and I didn’t care for either the protagonist or the deuteragonist enough to see the other outcomes for myself.
*GAMEPLAY AND MECHANICS
Though this game can be summed up as a walking simulator with puzzles and horror elements, there’s just far too much walking. I can’t give specific examples, but there are bits of the game that look nice. All the same, there are also sections that look like asset flips of sorts. I feel as though the purpose of having such a vast setting was just to artificially extend the length of the game between the important sections, to convey the idea that they’re a fair distance from each other. I like vast worlds where there’s a lot to take in, but when all you’ve got is forest, a river, some rundown cabins and whatnot, it gets uninteresting rather quickly.
The Resident Evil series is nice and all, but horror and inducing tension via quick time events, clicking at certain times or tapping wasn’t the most inspired idea in my opinion.
I didn’t think there was much of a purpose playing on the high difficulties, but I thought resources were far too plentiful even on the lowest one. As a result, I cannot say how scarce matches and kerosene might be on the higher difficulties.
I felt like there's some inspiration from Frictional Games' titles in the way the player interacts with objects, and I consider that a good thing. Sadly, though, it felt incredibly awkward to me. The fact the camera isn't locked into place when rotating a lever was rather annoying. The same applied when opening doors, windows, drawers and interacting with various objects. I couldn't get a proper feel for the weight of what I'm meant to be interacting with. The aforementioned lack of a locked camera didn't do this any favors. In terms of player input, the parts where the player has to use the bolt cutters and knife were fine, but the latter felt a little jank to me. The the fact you can put as much force as you like when throwing an object was nice, which also came into play during parts of the game.
As for a specific SciFi gadget, i.e. the Quantum Localizer, although I initially thought it to be a neat addition at first, turned into something irritating. The fact some vast outdoor sections relied on using it wasn’t very pleasant, especially finding and getting rid of the anomalies. I appreciate that the developers tried something novel and implement it into the story, but that said novelty wore off quickly.
I have to praise the puzzles. They were fine and the way in which you had to find hints for them was nice. The exception for me would be the candle puzzle in the mine. It wasn’t hard per se, but awfully convoluted.
*DIALOGUE AND VOICE ACTING
The voice acting was mostly fine, but I’m not a fan of the performances in the 1979 chapters. While I understand the fact the Adam loves expressing how frustrated he is, he sure needs to tone it down with the swearing. I could not take him seriously at all. Interactions between him and Emma often felt like something written by AI. The flashback sequences featuring Nicolas fared much better. The dialogue between phantoms was good and had variety. Though it would rather fall into the writing section, the attempts to make characters from 1864 sound partially inarticulate in the scattered notes/letters wasn’t great. If that was indeed the intention, miswritten words don’t give the desired effect when the person cares for syntax and knows some complicated words.
*ATMOSPHERE, MUSIC AND SOUND DESIGN
The feeling of tension was almost non-existent. Instead of feeling like there’s something at stake, that I could get done in by something any given moment, I was constantly wondering when the next unnecessary jump scare might pop up. There was an unfunnily high amount of jump scares for my taste, some incredibly predictable. You could almost turn it into a drinking game in some chapters.
The game will often steal control from you when it wants you to see something specific. Did you see that silhouette walking through a door or going somewhere? Well don’t worry! I’ll center your mouse over it so you don’t miss it. Wait, somebody’s knocking at your front door. Open it and notice that there’s nobody there. Now let me put you into this cutscene. In addition, allow me to turn you around so you get scared by the totally unpredictable stranger behind you.
The music was nice to say the least. There wasn’t something incredibly memorable about the soundtrack or any song in particular, but it consolidated the atmosphere just fine at times. I just thought it was awfully off every now and then. There were some audio cues that I’m witnessing something grotesque, but it might not have been very evident because of the lighting or some other things distracting me.
The sound design… Outdoor sound deeply bothered me. As I’d walk in the woods I would hear some loud footsteps from my left side, coming from slightly behind me. I was baffled to realize those are the playable character’s own footsteps, yet it sounded like I was being followed. It didn’t seem as apparent indoors. Speaking of which, it wasn’t entirely obvious from which direction baddies were making noises every now and then. That didn’t make me paranoid or frightened at all seeing that this game has an overly generous checkpoint system, just annoyed.