2D walking simulators seem to be a whole new genre of their own, are more interesting, and tend to be better than fully 3D ones. Games like Limbo, Little Nightmares, and Inside are perfect examples of this. There is some light platforming, some puzzle solving thrown in, and maybe a little bit of stealth. While none of those had stories that blew me away, they did make up for it in atmosphere and character. Shady Part of Me sadly doesn’t accomplish any of those things. The only thing going for it is the dual-character puzzles, and that’s about it. There really isn’t even a story to speak of. Yourself, your shadow, and some disembodied voice narrate the entire game with cryptic dialogue that really is either open for translation to the player or is entirely meaningless.
This game reminds me a lot of Limbo and Lost in Shadow. You play as a little girl in a white dress who is afraid of light, and her shadow (always on the wall) is afraid of darkness. You switch between both to help each other advance. Puzzles involve pushing boxes and pulling switches, and in later levels, your shadow can defy gravity and even take over puppet bodies. Most of the puzzles have that “Aha!” moment, which can be satisfying, but there were a few that really stumped me and took a lot of time just fiddling around until something changed. Most puzzles have you manipulating objects in front of lights to make new shadows, move them, or make them grow or shrink. The real girl can’t jump, but your shadow can. This means there is light platforming in the shadow, but nothing complicated.
I did find the aspect of two characters to be a bit tedious. Some areas just have you running to the right to stop in the circle to advance to the next area. You then have to switch to the other character and run that full length again. It’s not a major problem, but it happens too frequently. I also found the rewind feature to be really handy. This prevents constant deaths and restarts. You can rewind as long as you want, so I have to applaud the developers for making this a frustrating mess. A lot of times your shadow will die or you will get caught in light, and it stops the game, but rewinding allows you to see the error you made and correct it. If you fully died every time and went back to a checkpoint, this game would be unbearably frustrating.
Overall, the visuals are great. The sketchbook look and early 20th-century aesthetics are fun, but they’re also nothing memorable. We’ve seen this kind of art style before in other games. That’s the biggest takeaway from Shady Part of Me. It does what it does fine. Nothing more, nothing less. It doesn’t leave a lasting impression like the above mentioned games. Limbo was gruesome and had a memorable atmosphere. Little Nightmares’ ghoulish monsters stood out, and Inside’s dystopian world put you on edge. You will spend around five hours in this game and mostly forget about it the next day.
One of the scariest things to me is being alone on a planet. I’ve had a recent fascination with this, especially after reading The Martian by Andy Weir. It’s a different form of psychological horror. The human mind is a vast pit of emotions and an endless imagination. The fear of the unknown and the human mind running rampant combined is a scary combination that very few media tackle. The Invincible is one such story, and it’s done well.
First and foremost, this is a walking simulator, but with a bit more freedom. There’s really no gameplay, but you can interact with objects and control a vehicle a couple of times, but that’s about it. It does what walking simulators are supposed to do well, and that’s provide good characters with great writing and a story that keeps you hooked. The Invincible starts out slow and may come off as a typical space adventure with pretty colors and nothing more, but the story just gets darker and darker as you move along. The length is a couple of hours longer than a typical game of its kind, and it helps. There is more character development, more explanation of what is going on, and more of this planet, Regis III.
It’s a desert planet similar to Mars, but with an ocean. You play as Yansa, one of a small crew of scientists scouting out a possible Earth-like planet. You learn about two warring factions known as the Alliance and the Commonwealth. The space race to find a planet of paradise is very apparent. I don’t want to talk too much about the story, as I can easily spoil something. I will just say the story keeps going when you think it ends and gets darker and deeper, and the theories behind what is going on are very fascinating. There seem to be some choices you can make in the game, but I’m not sure if they impact the ending or not. Most of the dialogue is between Yansa and another crew member on her ship, the Dragonfly. The story has so many ups and downs, emotion-wise, as your fight for survival takes a back seat to a larger plot point, and the excellent voice acting helps suck you into this void.
You spend most of the game climbing ledges, dropping down ledges, and examining objects. There are a few large open maps, but you have a linear path you need to follow thanks to the well-designed map system. The interactions are always changing, and the pace is great after the first opening sequence, and things pick up. There is always something new happening, and I love that about this game. You aren’t just walking in a straight line in a borefest like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and it’s not a jump-scare-induced horror roller coaster like Layers of Fear. The terror of survival, death, and being alone is omnipresent in The Invincible. Just seeing a robot can make you feel less alone. The atmosphere is so well done in this game.
I usually start complaining about a lack of gameplay or that the story is so short that there’s no time for anything interesting to happen, but The Invincible does what walking simulators haven’t really done in a long time: make you want to walk through something and keep going. Between the 50’s art deco-style designs of the ships and equipment, the immersive first-person view, and the excellent voice acting, there’s so much to take in. Sure, the visuals aren’t impressive on a technical scale. There is also no ultrawide screen support, which is a real bummer, but it’s not enough to knock this game down. The Invincible makes you think and talk about the story to your friends because you want to theorize, and it entices you to think about life on other planets, which might make you go read a book or watch a movie like Apollo 13 or The Martian to continue experiencing this fear of being alone on a planet. Walking simulators aren’t this good very often. Enjoy it while it lasts.
When a studio says they take inspiration from adventure games like Life is Strange, I pay attention. We follow a maid during the late 1950s, working in a hotel for a crass boss. You are basically a snoop and end up getting involved in a mystery of a love triangle, and you take it upon yourself to get co-workers involved, and the entire thing spirals out of control. Is this game a lesson on minding your own business or doing what you think is right?
You play as Ms. Roy. You start out by getting to know your co-workers, learning the game’s mechanics, and starting your amateur sleuthing. There’s not much to the game’s mechanics. You can interact with dozens upon dozens of objects, mostly letters you end up reading, and either throw them away or just inspect them. You spend your time between three floors. The fifth floor, the basement, and the lobby You eventually pick a male or female co-worker to help you dig into other people’s business, but you also have a job to do. You need to clean and tidy up each room, and all of your actions have consequences towards the end of the game. I don’t want to say what can or can’t cause these, as it can really spoil the ending, but just know that picking things up and keeping them is something the game tells you to think about the most.
Inspecting items doesn’t really matter as you’re putting them back down, but scouring all the drawers, every item, no matter how simple it seems, might give you a clue to figure out what’s happening in the love circle you want to so desperately be a part of. Sometimes you need to go to the basement and get items you don’t have, and there are a few puzzles thrown in. These aren’t difficult either. matching up pieces of paper, deciphering a code, or just finding a few clues here and there. You can hear Roy’s inner dialogue to help give you hints, and you can read everything you picked up in your inventory.
Outside of interacting with objects and solving the occasional puzzle, there isn’t anything else to do. There’s no exploring, character interactions are scripted, and there are only three characters in the entire game. This is a very short game with a runtime of about 3 hours. I do have to give credit to the developers for creating such a tense mystery at that time and actually giving the characters some depth. It’s not long enough to really give an entire backstory like other adventure games, but they cut out the nonsense and get to the meat of what they want to do and the story they want to tell. The writing is well done, and the voice acting is pretty excellent too. Your choices also really do matter, but the physical interactions with objects make you realize what you could have done differently as the final moments of the story pass.
The visuals aren’t anything impressive, but the game looks period-correct, and it’s not ugly. The lip syncing is off, but the characters look good, and they have a unique look and a lot of character in their personalities. Sadly, my biggest complaint is that I wanted to know more about these characters. The game focuses solely on this mystery, but just enough personality in the characters pokes through that this could have been a much longer game. I wanted to know more about Ms. Roy and who she is as a person. That’s what made Life is Strange so great. It focused a lot on the characters, who they are as people, and their lives. There’s a lot of potential here for something greater, but the end product of an interesting and gripping mystery is done well enough. This makes for a fun evening with choices that really matter, but that’s about it.
The Cold War was a rough time, and you really feel it in the South of the Circle. You play Peter, a British scientist struggling between love, his career, and being stranded in the Antarctic during one of the most strenuous times with Russia. Peter is a climatologist and ends up meeting a Scottish woman, Clara, who is protesting the war. He ends up torn between her companionship, his career, and the present times of him stranded at a remote research station trying to find rescue.
I don’t want to spoil the story because that’s all that South of the Circle has going for it and is the only reason to keep playing. There is almost zero gameplay outside of pressing buttons for dialogue choices. These come in the form of emotion bubbles that range from neutral, scared, sad, happy, and so on. I don’t quite know if this effects the overall story path, as my choices almost seemed to not matter. As Peter is talking to people, a bouncing red ball means a scared response. A blue ball hanging low means a sad response. A sun icon will make Peter respond joyfully, etc. These come up pretty frequently, so you’re always pressing something. Occasionally, you can move Peter around and interact with the rare object here and there, but that’s all there is to it. There are no puzzles or anything like that.
You follow this linear path of Peter trying to find people at this station while seeing flashbacks. You start in the middle, and as you move forward in the story, the flashbacks start from the beginning. It’s very entertaining, and I was interested in the story until the end thanks to the well-written dialogue and fantastic voice work. The visuals are striking in the sense that they almost look rotoscoped. There is motion capture for this minimalistic style of art, and it’s quite captivating.
The entire game is a linearly scripted adventure and lasts less than four hours. It’s a bit longer than most super-short story-driven walking simulators, and the excellent writing will keep you hooked. All of the characters have depth, and you actually have feelings for certain characters, despite some having only a short time on screen. Scenes can get intense and emotional, and you can feel the dread that Peter is facing in his struggle for survival. It’s just so well done, and it’s sad there isn’t more gameplay attached to it. It’s one of the better walking simulator stories I’ve finished in recent years.
Overall, South of the Circle provides an entertaining, well-acted, and well-written story and script, but the lack of gameplay makes you question whether this is just enough here to be an excuse for a game. The art is fantastic, and the motion capture is enticing. I wish the dialogue choices were a little more obvious about what they did or if they changed anything at all.
Walking simulators can be really great or really terrible. There is usually no in-between, but somehow Kona manages to accomplish this unremarkable achievement. You follow Carl Faulbert, a private investigator, who arrives in a remote other Canadian town to discover something is lurking around and killing its residents. The plot itself is mostly uninteresting, and details are really only explained in found notes. There is a narrator who explains things throughout, but he mostly just asks questions and never answers anything for us.
The game starts out fairly simple, and it’s an illusion of how the rest of the game is. You walk around in first-person view, interact with objects, and drive your truck. You can pull out your map in the truck to figure out where to go. You have an inventory system and can pick up objects to store, such as duck tape, hardware, flares, matches, etc., but most of these items are useless, and you don’t ever use half of the consumables. The game isn’t open-world, but there is a giant area to explore. You can wander off the beaten path or main road to find campfires to light, objects to pick up, documents to read, and various other things, but this is purely for achievements only. Wandering around the town is a chore due to the slow walking speed and short sprint speed. You have heat, sanity, and health; however, the heat meter helps drag the game down further. Yes, this is a remote area in the cold, but needing to find a specific object to obtain a jacket from a person you may never find without a walkthrough is pretty annoying. Once you get the jacket, your heat meter never becomes an issue. There are wolves spread out in the wilderness off the main road, and these can harm you. Hit them with a hammer or hatchet, or shoot them with a gun, and they’re gone. There’s an option to throw steaks at them if you want to hunt for achievements too.
The game always feels clunky in some way. Having to constantly pull out your map to check your surroundings gets tiresome, and never knowing exactly where to go will make people quit early on as well. You just wander into each house marked on the map and hopefully figure out how to make your way north until you reach the end of the game, which isn’t satisfying and doesn’t make me excited for a sequel. You can only save at campfires, and if you don’t have matches, a firestarter, or a log, you can’t save. Your inventory space is limited, so you must drag your items around in the back of your truck, and then if you need something, it’s a hike back.
You have a camera and can take photos, but again, this is mostly for achievements. Achievement hunters would love this game, but outside of that, the gameplay is mostly repetitive or pointless. The visuals are great and hold up well even today, but you are mostly seeing just white and log cabins. There isn’t anything artistic or unique about this game, which makes it a very boring game to look at. The narrator does a good job, but what’s the point if he doesn’t help progress the story? I only kept pushing forward to see if the story got more interesting or had a really awesome ending that made all of the mind-numbing walking worthwhile.
Overall, Kona has its place for a certain crowd. I love walking simulators, but many often waste my time with forgettable stories, boring settings, or mind-numbing gameplay. Kona has more gameplay than any other walking simulator has a right to, but if you cut all of it out and only let the player drive down the main road, that effort put into all the extra exploration stuff could have been put into a better story. As it stands, Kona doesn’t do any one thing particularly well.
Well, here we are again. Nearly 40 years later, we are, surprisingly, only at number sixteen. Of course, there have been spin-offs, remakes, and remasters all strewn throughout the timeline. The games have gotten bigger, more epic, and more cinematic, and they have started to abandon the traditional JRPG formula they helped create. This is probably the most action-oriented mainstay game to date, with cinematic quick-time events and mega boss fights.
First and foremost, this is not an open-world game like Final Fantasy XV was. There are large open areas, but this is a very linear-driven game. The main focus is on the main quests, and then there are side quests that we will talk about later. The game slowly introduces the combat system and the way the mechanics work over the course of the first fourth of the game. My favorite part, and the biggest draw to this game, is the sprawling story that is heavily inspired by Game of Thrones. There are various kingdoms at war with each other over the mothercrystals that supply magic to the people. These kingdoms are governed by interesting characters, and there is even in-house fighting and scrapping, just like in Game of Thrones. Plenty of betrayal, deceit, and various ways of hurting another person Each kingdom has an Eikon (or Aeon), and these are the famous ones we all know, such as Ifrit, Bahamut, Phoenix, and Shiva. Each Eikon is used during battles and war, but there’s a blight coming that’s sweeping the land, and the kingdoms are warring over land that hasn’t been plagued. I don’t want to go into anymore detail as it might spoil the story, but there is a useful Time Lore feature that can be used during cut scenes to read about what is going on. Despite how deep the story is, it’s not confusing or hard to follow at all thanks to this Time Lore feature.
There isn’t much to explore in this game. You can run around the open fields, collecting sparkling orbs that contain healing items or stuff used to forge equipment. There are occasional treasure chests with pendants and other items, but looting and forging take a backseat in this game. Enemies are found on the field and can be engaged in real time. This makes the game feel faster-paced and reduces the need to slog through hours of turn-based grinding. In towns, you can take on sidequests that are green marks and can fast travel to any area that’s been unlocked or a travel crystal has been discovered. Later on in the game (probably way too late), you can unlock a Chocobo to ride, as some areas can be pretty vast and you will visit many multiple times. There are a few dozen areas to explore, but sadly, there’s nothing but pretty sights in most of them. There is no substance to the exploration. You mainly just use the enemies to grind a bit until you outpace the enemies, and then the area is literally useless to you. Thankfully, many of these areas are never visited again after the first time, unless a side-quest takes you there.
Combat is obviously one of the biggest draws to the game, but it’s more flash than substance. There is only a single melee attack button, a magick button, and a dodge button. The game focuses a lot on dodging and parrying, as enemies and bosses are fast-paced and can spam insanely powerful moves. You have to master being defensive, or you will die a lot in this game. Sadly, most of the combat is focused on using your abilities and quelling cooldowns. Each Eikon you unlock gives you abilities. Shiva gives you ice abilities, Titan, Earth, and so on. You gain ability points and can unlock new abilities and upgrade some through a skill tree, but I felt this was mostly useless. By the end of the game, you have already unlocked most of them; however, abilities need to be switched out according to the enemy types. You have offensive and defensive abilities. There is also a single fully upgraded mega ability per Eikon, and these are a must-have during the final chapters. They take a long time to cool down, but they inflict mega damage and can really give you an edge in battle. I sadly hated that I only used my standard melee attack when abilities were cooling down, and then there is the rage meter, which is also used in between. It’s similar to an MMO, where you just queue up attacks based on damage and availability. There’s almost no skill involved outside of defense.
This makes combat boring after so long. Sure, it looks cool, and there are a lot of well-done animations and effects, but when you get to the large Eikon battles, they just look cool. Some even take place in space on a cosmic level, but those are even simpler with just basic melee combos and the occasional ability. If the game didn’t look as slick as it does, the combat would be mostly inexcusable for how simplistic and formulaic it is. I never quite hated it, as you do have to stay on your toes, but I never really felt powerful enough, no matter how leveled up I was. I wish I could have devastating combos and not have to rely so heavily on my abilities or rage meter. Bosses’ health meters will slowly chip away and can seem to take forever to defeat. Thankfully, the game is forgiving and will start you over at checkpoints with recovered health items. At least on easier and normal difficulties.
You can buy new gear, but it’s very simple and rudimentary. You get a sword, a bracer, and a third piece of armor, and that’s it. You can use the forge to enhance them with materials or just buy new ones. You end up with so much Gil because there’s nothing worth buying. The only expensive items are things like songs for the jukebox at your hideaway. That’s it. You also don’t get to play as any other characters, so you’re just stuck with Clive. There isn’t a full party to outfit here. I always had the best gear because there wasn’t anything else to focus on. It almost seems pointless.
There’s nothing else to do outside of all of that, except maybe bounty hunts. These are just optional mini-bosses. Mini-bosses are enemies with yellow stagger bars that take much longer to defeat. They pop up often and can bog down the flow of the game. They also repeat very frequently and damage sponges. I’m not a fan of these mini-bosses. However, the rewards for doing these bounty hunts and side quests are points you can use to get material packages, which is pointless as you end up with plenty of Gil to buy whatever you want. The sidequests themselves are boring fetch quests that you would see in an MMO. Hunt these enemies, talk to this person, deliver this item, etc. I gave up about two-thirds through the game on these.
The game does look absolutely fantastic. Every area is oozing with color, atmosphere, and excellent effects. The characters look good, and the English voice acting is top-notch for once. We are a long way from Tidus’ infamous cringy laugh from Final Fantasy X. I really enjoyed the story and the darker tone of this game. It’s a gory, brutal, and harsh world that’s a stark contrast from other light-hearted JRPGs from Square Enix with the typical whining, spiky blonde-haired boy saves the world scenario. It was a breath of fresh air, and I wish the gameplay and exploration didn’t take a back seat. This is more of an action game than an RPG.
Gylt, a Stadia (RIP) exclusive upon release, is a stealth game in a similar vein to Alan Wake. You play as a little girl trying to save her cousin Emily from monsters in a strange town, and you don’t know where you are on top of all this. You slowly get introduced to new gameplay mechanics and fight a couple of bosses.
Gylt’s short length means there’s pretty much no story or character to capture your interest or care about. In the four hours it takes to complete the game, there is zero world-building. There’s even a creepy old guy that we never find out what his purpose is or why he’s even present. We don’t know anything about the main character or Emily. It’s like starting 1/4th through a book and ending at the halfway point. I felt like there was a lot missing. There is no context, exposition, or anything like that. You can go around collecting journals, birds, and whatnot, but what’s the point? I won’t collect things in a game if I don’t feel connected to the world in some way. There’s no motivation to push me to want to find out the small details. Gylt has pretty much none of that.
When it comes to gameplay, Gylt is a run-of-the mill stealth action game. The puzzles are elementary, giving no challenge to the players at all. You have two tools at your disposal. A flashlight and a fire extinguisher. The flashpoint can not just light your way, but a focused beam can remove objects, bust pustules on enemies to kill them, and the extinguisher can freeze enemies, freeze water, and put out fires. This is all fine and dandy, but there’s nothing challenging to go along with these tools. You will be plopped into a room with a single moveable ladder. It’s obvious from one glance around the room that it goes against the wall with the vent. However, you must destroy three eyes with your light to unstick the ladder. It’s pointless filler gameplay. Even the light-switching puzzles are dull and simple.
Unlike Alan Wake, the focused flashlight to kill enemies just doesn’t feel as fluid, and I understand combat isn’t the main focus of Gylt. You are supposed to use it as a last resort—if you get caught at all. Most of the enemy patrols are easy to bypass as there are a ton of objects to hide around, and the game pretty much points a finger at your most direct path. There is a central hub with buildings that connect, and these are your main levels. Each level usually requires some sort of master key to get to its boss, and this is the only time the game was challenging or changed the pace. There are two bosses, and one focuses on combat and the other on stealth. I wanted more of this, but as the game dragged on, it never got more challenging.
The voice acting is good, the cut scenes are hand drawn, and overall, the visuals are nice. Pick any 3D animation studio in the last 20 years, and that’s how your game looks. It’s dark and moody, but never scary. A few monster designs are a little interesting and different, but nothing crazy. Also, don’t expect the game to push your systems to their limits. This game may look nice artistically, but technically it’s nothing special, and that’s also okay.
Overall, by the end of the game, I had no reason to care for anything I came across. The characters aren’t fleshed out, there’s no back story to any single thing in the game, and I’m left just moving on from this game and will most likely forget about it in an hour. I love indie games that are short and sweet, but many are forgettable with passable gameplay and mostly decent visuals. This is becoming a trend lately, and it’s kind of scary. I can’t really recommend Gylt unless you want a short, spooky evening, but don’t expect anything but average gameplay.
Resident Evil: Village is one of the best games in the series. It delivered dark horror that continued from VII, great level design, awesome characters, and an overall fun experience. Shadows of Rose ends up feeling like a super mini-RE game and runs for about three hours. You play as Ethan’s daughter Rose this time around, learn more about her kidnapping, and revisit a couple of areas as her, with new powers to boot.
The game plays exactly like Village did when you were Ethan. The only difference is that Rose is slower and not as strong as Ethan. You also only get two weapons in the DLC. A pistol and a shotgun. As a trade-off, you can use your anti-mold powers to interact with the environment and counter enemy attacks. You get to upgrade this over time through the story and can eventually slow down enemies with it and repel some. You end up revisiting Dimitrescu Castle and the home of the creepy doll, as well as a small section of the village. It’s nice to go back to these areas, but they are completely different with Rose present. There are also a couple of boss fights thrown in for good measure. The first third of the DLC is all action and shooting-oriented. You can still craft health and ammo, and you only find two upgrade parts for your pistol (none for the shotgun). The second third of the game is focused on stealth and puzzle-solving. The final third of the game is more cinematic-oriented and rather short.
I felt Capcom did a good job reusing these areas and constantly mixing up the gameplay. The stealth sections felt tense, the puzzle solving was simple enough to not need a walkthrough or guide, and the boss fights were pretty fun and interesting. It felt like Village all right, and the only question is whether or not the ending to Rose’s story is worthwhile. It’s included in the Winter’s Expansion, which includes a third-person mode and Mercenary missions, so I would say so. However, there is no reason to go back and visit this DLC, unlike the main game. The powers aren’t interesting enough to come back to either. They are mostly used to clear obstacles and stun enemies, and that’s about it.
Rose herself isn’t a very interesting character. I feel I don’t have any reason to care about her, and she wasn’t talked about enough in the main game. I feel she could have potential, but would need her own main game to pull this off. There isn’t much story in the DLC to begin with, and I was left with more questions than answers. I just shrugged at the end and didn’t give it a second thought. Most people come for the action and gameplay and not for the story.
Bloober Team seems to really love their Layers of Fear series because they thought it was big and important enough to remake both games and tie them into each other with a third overarching story. If either game was confusing enough, nothing is cleared up in the story, and it all comes together to feel mostly poetic, vague, and abstract. While the writer’s overarching story makes sense as she’s trapped in the lighthouse that was meant to be an inspiration, the painter’s or actor’s stories are much improved.
Trying to describe Layers of Fearis a challenge unto itself, as the gameplay is about as abstract as the story it’s trying to sell. The game is full of excellent visual effects, disappearing acts, illusions, the opening and closing of many doors, jump scares, and anything else you can think of to make a game feel like a lot is happening when really nothing is. The game is all flash with no substance, and the remake didn’t do anything to change this. It leaned into the flash at full tilt thanks to the Unreal Engine 5 upgrade and ray tracing. It looks pretty (mostly in the first game, The Painter’s Story), and that’s about all this game has going for it. I thought it would be scarier to push the supernatural themes a bit more, but instead, Bloober chose to just give us an enemy that can hurt us in each story, but it doesn’t add anything. They are slow; you can run from them, and you can also banish them with light, but they come back.
Layers of Fearcame out when P.T. clones were rampant. You start out in a seemingly harmless house with rooms you can walk into, the bare sound of ambient noise in the background, lights flickering here and there, and drawers and cupboards you can open. You end up wandering around the first house a bit until you discover the painting room and dive into the first chapter. There’s a lot of narration in the background, disembodied voices, and notes you can pick up and read to help with context and exposition. Every interactive object has a white circle over it, and you can twist it, pull it, and turn it. Essentially, Layers of Fear is a Bop-It® simulator in disguise, but I digress.
There are rarely any puzzles to challenge you. There might be a large hub with doors that branch off and you need to get an object from each room, or there might be a code you need, but they are always right in front of you by opening a door or looking at the correct object. Layers of Fear‘s only challenge is not getting bored to death because the story is too busy trying to be poetic and pretentious over telling something interesting. Once you’ve opened the 100th door, most may turn the game off, especially when no other gameplay is introduced outside of crouching in the second story. Sure, the second story has fewer illusions and parlor tricks and feels more like an adventure, but I also understand the painter’s story is a trip through madness and insanity, but you sure wouldn’t be able to tell if it weren’t for the visual rollercoaster.
I even felt the DLC from the first game didn’t add anything known as The Inheritance. It was 45 minutes of frustrating mazes that didn’t deliver anything new or exciting. The new DLC called The Final Note is just more of the same without giving us anything unfamiliar or appealing in the slightest. Even the overall story for the writer that’s supposed to tie all of this together is very short, linear, and completely unnecessary in the long run. With two games to get through and the second story being much less interesting, I don’t see many players finishing this at all.
There are collectibles in each game that can get you achievements, but many are easy to miss. If you don’t look at the right object, open the wrong door, or just walk past something, you can miss it. They don’t give any additional facts, story bits, or anything noteworthy, so outside of achievement hunting, there isn’t a reason to do this. I honestly would have preferred an entire third entry rather than a remake after spending around 2 hours in each story. The game just becomes a slog of cheap thrills and poor storytelling.
The visuals are a treat at least, but for some reason, they don’t look as good when you get to the second story, which is Layers of Fear 2. I’m not sure if it’s because the graphics are just more plain here. Things are less colorful and trippy and are a bit more grounded, but the first story looks so good with great lighting effects and better textures. Once I finished the first story, I did look forward to what was happening with the writer’s chapter, but these segments are so short and don’t give us any more meat for this already scrawny game.
Overall, Layers of Fear is a remake no one asked for. Remaking an already mediocre and mostly bad sequel and trying to tie it together with a half-assed third story just doesn’t work. We get the first game’s DLC that feels pointless, a new DLC that feels aimless, and monster chases that are now dangerous but don’t need to be. The game is barely a horror title. Without the lighting effects done the way they are, you wouldn’t know. I didn’t ever feel scared; there were occasional moments of urgency, but that’s about it. The stories are convoluted hollow shells that do a bad job of telling a story in a game that you feel imprisoned in with no gameplay, and the only thing to look forward to is the story. This should have been a third game and not a remake.
When it comes to walking simulators, some get more praise than others, and some are just forgotten. Ethan Carterwas talked about quite a bit upon its first release, even receiving a BAFTA award for best game innovation. After playing this game, I can’t understand that kind of high praise for game innovation, but it sure does look pretty, and I have to give the ending some credit. It’s one game that builds up to a great conclusion where everything comes together. However, during the actual journey, the narrative is pretty messy and vague.
You play a detective trying to find a boy, Ethan Carter, and along the way, you solve murder scenes. The game is built to be sort of open-ended. You can easily miss side content (in the form of puzzles) if you don’t wander off and check out the house off the beaten path. Your main goal to advance the story is to find every clue for the scene, then go to the main part of the scene (usually an object), hold down the mouse button, and go into detective mode to piece everything together. Blue whisps fly out and show scene segments. You need to put them in the correct order and play it out to find out what happened. Once you do this, you get a piece of Ethan’s story and can move on.
There are a couple of areas with optional puzzles. You need to navigate an area to find the clues, which are usually identical to the area with the puzzle in it. These are either audio or visual clues; they can be quite challenging and make you think a bit. Notably, there aren’t any collectibles in the game, so you don’t have to worry about missing much. There are a couple of objects to find for achievements, but that’s about it. I wish there was some sort of reward for taking off into random, remote corners of the game. The path seems to be far more linear than it lets on. It’s really more of an illusion of how far you can walk.
The locales vary quite a bit, and the game is really pretty. When the game was initially released, it was a great piece of tech for PC gamers pushing Unreal Engine 3, and now it has been ported to Unreal Engine 4. While it looks sort of dated today with some less-than-stellar lighting effects and a lot of 2D leaves and branches on trees, there is still a lot of detail. Huge open vistas look into the forests, lakes, rivers, and dams of the Wisconsin wilderness. It looks good in these wide-open areas, but the interior parts look pretty average, and there’s nothing to write home about in terms of art direction or style. It’s hyper-realistic-looking, with very minor touches of horror sprinkled throughout.
While looking at the landscape is nice, you can easily get lost as the game prides itself on not holding your hand; however, being completely clueless also isn’t fun. Without a guide, many will turn the game off before even knowing you must solve these murder scenes during the first ten minutes. You can walk for quite a ways before realizing nothing is happening or hitting a dead end. This requires a lot of backtracking and aimless trekking through nothing but silence. While there is technically a “path” you can follow, it’s very loose and not so obvious all the time.
My favorite atmospheric segments were when the detective narrates and you’re just traveling through the vistas and valleys, taking in the scenery. It’s a bit foreboding in spots but never creeps into horror game territory. There are no jump scares, no ghouls, and nothing supernatural. A building might be dark and dilapidated, and you might enter an old mine, but there’s no creepy music or anything. It’s foreboding. That’s the best word I can come up with. I constantly found myself confused and disoriented trying to figure out what was going on in the story most of the time, so I always looked forward to that break in solving crime scenes with the walking and narration.
Overall, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a game I have put off for nearly a decade, mainly because I knew it would be a confusing mess and the story would disappoint, but I do have to say waiting for this Unreal Engine 4 port was worth it. If you like walking simulators, this is among the best visually and is a nice change of pace from the horror ones we seem to get mostly. Even if the open-ended nature of the game frustrates you, stick with a guide or keep trying, as the ending is well worth it and those open vistas are incredibly gorgeous to look at.
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Try multiplayer. A lot of fun !