The Beast Inside Review (The Prince of Pog)
Oof...this game. It has left so much of an impact that I'll actually be making my first Steam review because of it. Let me just get it out of the way: the game is not good. I was lured in by the very positive reviews and a sale, but honestly, it wasn't even worth the time I put into it. The only fun I had in this game was streaming it to a friend to roast it together.
The game actually starts on a promising note and is legitimately interesting for the first two chapters! It's building an atmosphere, the story is pretty good, and even the first puzzles are pretty good. Very convenient to be honest, since that's what you get to play with the demo. But it starts freefalling after that. From then on, the game is loaded with a bunch of forced in new mechanics every chapter. What starts as a walking simulator turns into a FPS, a stealth game, an exploration game, and so on. None of the new mechanics build onto each other either; they pop up for a single chapter and then they're gone again for the rest of the game. What's more, it's clear that the "inspiration" they took from other big name horror games was shallow at best. Hope you liked the Amnesia water segments, because they copy pasted them right into this game!
None of this would be so bad if the execution was actually good on half the stuff forced in, but it really isn't. Every new quirky thing that is added is shallow at best and dominates its chapter to such a degree that it drags on. The FPS chapter, for instance, is -only- that, so have fun slogging through endless enemies for 20+ minutes while dealing with some of the worst FPS mechanics I've seen! Or as another example: stealth is added into the game and you're told to pickpocket an enemy...but good luck, cause that enemy is moving at the speed of a kindergartner dosed up on cocaine. Have fun with the trial and error deaths!
I could get past that, but the core gameplay is similarly flawed. For instance, your light sources are limited, such as needing kerosene to fuel your lamp. But you find so goddamn much of it that you can leave it burning for literal hours. So what's even the point? It gives the illusion of resource management, but there seriously isn't any. Poorly implemented and thought out mechanics are a theme for this game, honestly.
But wait, there's more! The story might redeem the game, right? After all, it seems to have a high focus on it?
Nope. The story sucks. The game is split into two separate stories: one in the past and one in the present. Which could be pretty cool, actually! But what we got was, again, poorly executed. The constant jumps between the two protagonists with every chapter seriously kills the flow. So even if you're interested in one of the protagonist's story, prepare to get constantly blueballed as it's ripped away from you.
What's more, the two separate plots don't mesh together at all and the attempts to make them do so by the end of the game are laughable. It's just a nonsensical mess that vomits out the same horror tropes that we've seen over and over and over again in the genre. Honestly, the devs would have been much better served by having a game dedicated to just one protagonist instead of getting over-ambitious with the story telling.
The final cherry on top? It's not scary, which is the most damning thing you can say for a horror game like this. It's nothing but cheap jumpscares that are spammed without restraint.
I could honestly keep going on, but this review is getting long enough. Overall, the game isn't -completely- horrible. It's playable and works, I guess. And it's not outright -bad-. It's just so offensively mediocre that I'd honestly rather it be bad. At least that way I would've had a reason to drop it earlier, or maybe get some more laughs out of it. But as it is, I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone at all. There is plenty of other fantastic horror games to play -both high and low budget- that this game flat out isn't worth your time, not at $3 and sure as hell not at $25.