izigame.me

This game is so ass it's almost astonishing. It barely feels worth it at 80% off. I expected it to be bad.. but not.. boring-bad.
The game is very poorly optimised
- Freezes during certain cutscenes to load in the rest of the area
- Crashes if you press the windows key. Actually, crashes in general
- Climbing/crawling/squeezing through tight areas is wonky
- Hard to see regardless of brightness. The flashlight is awful, the light follows the camera and it ends up looking like the character is holding the flashlight opposite of where the light actually comes from. They applied a white filter over it, which makes it even harder to see. In some cutscenes, the characters will shove the bright ass light right in your face.
- Collectibles are highlighted in white because the areas are so bloated you wouldn't see them otherwise
- Moving has momentum, which makes it incredibly annoying and hard to walk
- If, god forbid, you wanna find collectibles, and you go into an area that doesn't progress the story, the characters following you will block the path and the only way to move them out of the way is to reload the game. One time i reloaded in the same area with the door blocked. I was lucky another character bugged out and pushed the others out of the way.
- Sometimes the characters will continue to yap even when you're on the character change screen
- The animations are really stiff
- Couch co-op is... something. It gives one person 3 characters: Chris, Jaime and Sam and the other 2: Linda and Madi. That makes Chris and Jaime's relationship depend on one single person. Same for Linda and Madi. Sam is barely playable so he may as well not even be there
The choices of the choice-based game
They hardly matter. In my playthrough, it didn't matter this person didn't like that one at all. The only important choices are the QTEs. Miss one, you die, in a lot of cases. Which is annoying, especially when the game tells you to press a button, but it actually means you should hold that button. Now, because you pressed it, like a moron, you are dead. I'm lucky i got the deluxe edition because it unlocks the feature to rewind choices from your first playthrough and i cannot imagine going through the entire game without it. Even rewinding choices entails reloading to buttfuck far back not to the literal choice itself and there's no skip button for the cutscenes you've already seen. All of your choices lead to the same singular ending. They actively shoot themselves in the foot, since the game takes place across multiple years, you would think what you do in the past affects the future, right? Well, no. Because the game presents the future one way, which then limits the choices you have in the past but then over-complicates itself by giving a reason why you can technically still mess with the past because... alternate universes.
The characters
The biggest offender is, of course, Frank Stone, who dies immediately. I wish I was joking. He does come back by the end of the game, but he looks nothing as advertised and is just significantly lamer. Were the writers on crack? Everything you learn about Frank Stone, you learn from long ass documents I didn't bother to read because the game summarises their contents anyway by writing the conclusion right there or having a character react to the important bits. Not only that, but the game then regurgitates the same revelations over and over as if you're incapable of understanding them. That's right. The titular character Frank Stone, barely appears in the game. Because why would he, when we have a cast of such interesting characters?
Linda is basically the protagonist. She's the most important one. That's it. She doesn't really have a personality except for being the skeptical one
Madi is annoying. and her mom is dead i guess. That's kind of it. She's just there for the sake of having cheesy dialogue without any real purpose
Stan is annoying and unlikable. The game presents him as a weird sharlatan and then expects you to care about him for some reason
Sam is there. He's Frank's nemesis, because he's a cop and Frank is a killer. But he kills Frank in the first 10 minutes and then.. that's kinda it. He somehow knows about the camera and that Frank is a ghost skeleton across universes but he's kinda useless
Robert, Sam's kid, is there just to create relationship drama with Chris and Jaime
Chris is annoying too. The moment something doesn't go her way, she throws a tantrum. That's kinda it. She's also Jaime's girlfriend
Jaime is Chris' boyfriend
Bonnie is the only character that remotely stands out design-wise. She is Jaime's sister who barely gets any development and dies. She's also Madi's mom. That's it
Augustine is the lamest villain i've ever seen. She looks so bland i thought she was Linda's twin.
They're all incredibly unlikable and very stupid for no reason. See that explosion? Let's just stand and stare at it instead of running. See that serial killer? Let's just stand around for a while so he has time to catch up to us.
The plot, if you can call it that
Frank Stone was a serial killer from 1962 that butchered his victims at the Mill. Sam catches him and shoots him. Augustine has a thing for The Entity. She wants to bring Frank back to life, using space time continuum bullshit and a magic camera. This is where it gets boring af because the exposition lasts SO LONG. In 1980, a bunch of adults(?), Chris, Jaime, Linda, want to make a horror movie at the same Mill, unaware of the incident. Sam startles them while filming and they drop the camera, breaking it. Sam tells them to stay away from the Mill. Chris doesn't understand why. Linda explains it's because of Frank Stone having used that place for killing. That makes Chris wanna use that place even more because yeah let's disrespect the victims. The three borrow 10$ from Bonnie to fix the camera. They get a new (cursed) camera from an antique store run by alternate dimension future Augustine. They sneak to shoot their movie at the Mill at night. They accidentally resurrect Frank, now a ghost skeleton, with it. Sam shows up and traps Frank in the same camera because. Then, they all share pieces of the film roll between each other so he may never be free again. In 2024, Madi picks up a hitch-hiker (Linda) on the way to Augustine's mansion. Each person invited there, Madi, Linda and Stan, have a piece of the film roll. Madi got it from Bonnie, Stan stole it from Robert and Linda just has it from back then. They slowly discover that Augustine has been to different timelines to gather the 'best' parts of Frank to resurrect him and offer him to The Entity. The Sam in that manor turns out to be from a different universe, but who cares. They fail to stop Augustine, Frank comes out of the completed film. Augustine gets stabbed by Frank and dies but it's fine because she has a time and alternate universe travel machine that brings in more versions of her anyway. The rest (except Stan in my case) escape into a forest, where they reach a campfire. Yeah, the one from Dbd. They're in The Entity's realm, alongside Frank and Claudette for some reason and the game ends with the sound of the match starting. And a little cliffhanger of Augustine returning from her device thing.
This story is not Dbd-ish at all with its time travel and alternate universe plot. It's not horror at all, it's more so a boring slice of life, because it just does nothing for hours. You can get some new info every now and then, but then it will inevitably be repeated another 10 times before anything actually happens.