izigame.me

This review took a long time coming. It was difficult for me to figure out if this was a pass or not.
This story takes a film crew to, who are failing at being successful, to a famous replica of H H Holmes hotel. Some may know that H H Holmes was considered a serial killer. He made traps in his hotel he built for guests to fall victim to. The story of HH Holmes is quite interesting if you want something to research on.
These guests were invited to film on site and that is where the story starts to crumble for the characters and you begin to unravel the mystery of a replica killer, or killers.
The setting was great, the music was great. The creep factor was great and they balanced the jump scares a bit more. The lighting is always amazing. Although I wish they would stop using lighters for a light source. Please just stick with a flashlight.
This was the season finale. As most of the fans of the series (myself included) were really hyped up and excited to get their hands on this as a play through. They added new features. Jumping, climbing, crawling, shimmy balancing and running. Those were nice features to add to the game. This gave it a bit more realistic approach and some cool features in the game.
Then they added....items....cool right? nope. They added coin collectables alongside the "evidence" or points of interest.
Let's start with the items and item system. This system was very basic. Everyone had a special item they could use. The items were toggled on the D pad ((for controller players)). These items (aside from the light source) could only be used in certain situations. There was no upgrading them, there was nothing specacular feature to it. The system was clunky.
You go up to a point of interest. It tells you, you need an item to open or interact. Then, you gotta toggle your item. Then you re-interact with the interest point and then do the thing you need to do. This is very clunky. Originally, if I was was holding an item that logically could only be used on that interest point, you clicked one time and that whole sequence of events would be automated. That, to me, is more streamlined, than the system they have in place.
There is only 1 time you can offer or exchange a specific item between two specific characters which might affect how you approach certain things, but that was the only interesting choice you could use with an item. They should have just kept the original, no items, or if you have an item, use it for a particular thing at that time. The item system was very poorly planned and if it was not there, it would have been just fine.
The coin collecting did not offer any in game benefit. These coins are only collected to unlock meaningless dioramas that you look at once and say, great....now what. For those who like collecting and exploring, cool. However, when you play multiplayer, these coins are not shared between the characters. So if you are a slow walker or taking in what ever, while your partner is running ahead. You may only end up with a few coins at the end. I can understand why they would put something like this in the game, replay enticement. Most who I know have played once through, or twice and leave the game alone.
They added puzzles to the game and those who have watched Saw will be reminded of this. The traps were in place and they all encounter trouble on their journey to find a way out of this death trap. If you don't choose wisely, or mess up the trap ends up going off.
The QTE's are fair and they continue to add varying difficulties for those who are not quick with QTE's. They added a hide event, specifically reminding me of The Quarry's "hold your breath" events and I liked them a lot. They brought back the keep calm events. These keep calm events would be much better if you could just use the hide mechanic instead of "keep time" mechanic. These almost always fail especially if you are in multiplayer mode, someone is bound to mess up, which may lock people out from seeing some different scenes.

The characters were mostly okay, Fliss was back in this one, which she is a welcome face to see since Man of Medan.
The worst character would have been the chain smoking, tantruming director. This character got on my damn nerves. Is this good acting or character writing? That's hard to tell.
They also artificially increased game play with the puzzles / climbing / jumping / running, shoving and pushing. I was expecting more scenes to ineract with, than just running about a hotel or on the hotel grounds.
did I like the game? yeh. Did I love the game? No. I had to really think about this because it is the first in the series that I gave this a thumbs down. I expected more from a season finale. However, we got two failed systems. Coin collecting and item inventory.
I still have faith in Supermassive games to bring in Season 2 with. This would definitely be a sale purchase, so that is what I recommend. If you are interested, wait for a sale 100 percent.
Sorry supermassive, this didn't make for a good ending.
In order of my favourites
Little Hope (game 2)
House of Ashes (game 3)
Man of Medan (game 1)
The Quarry (Spin off of the dark pictures anthology)
Devil In Me (game 4)