Not sure whether to consider this a survival horror game or simply a really creepy adventure game, but there's
. An overview:
The game has you take on the role of one of 3 characters (with the third being unlocked by completing the game as either other character), each with a seperate storyline in a small, architecturally surreal town about to witness a plague outbreak. It's primarily an adventure game, but with stats. Your character must eat, sleep, take care of his/her health, immunity, etc..
The game is full of surrealism. The whole game is somewhat structured to be a "theatre play" of sorts, there's mysticism and superstition in the form of mistresses experiencing visions (and the third playable character is supposed to be a mystic of sorts), the town architecture is most often unusual with curvy and jagged gratings or round rooms, sometimes downright insane with places like the Polyhedron. And that's before the plague starts. Atmosphere in general is the game's main strength.
The translation is a bit odd. While it most often simply sounds surreal (somewhat as if keeping with the whole "theatre play" approach), sometimes I can see downright translation errors like inappropriately trying to make verbs out of certain nouns where that would make sense in Russian, but is simply wrong in English. It doesn't help that nearly everyone speaks in uncommon metaphors, nor that they hardly ever tell you the truth (which is actually a plus). So it's either strange dialogue with errors, or a complete mess. I find it hard to judge. But I can still make out what they're trying to say.
Another issue of sorts is the graphics. They take getting used to, as there's no special shaders, bump mapping or bloom. They're downright 2000 in terms of the engine, but otherwise I find all the props and architecture well-modelled and contributing to the atmosphere. It does use colour themes (plague areas give a greenish tint to everything, for example), but I doubt any graphics whore could play this for over 5 minutes.
Not sure whether to consider this a problem, but the game is hard. For an adventure game, it's bloody murder. You must keep your character fed and rested while keeping him from getting infected (and you will have to enter the infected areas). It's hard to find any real income, you'll have to scrounge through trash bins for bottles, razors and other junk worth trading, and then the prices can jump from day to day due to the plague, making your currently held currency worth toilet paper. There's also muggers who come out at night and try to kill people like yourself, but you can eventually learn to kill them with little effort.
And besides that, you have "adherents" to take care of - people who may die if you fail to fulfill your current day main objective. You may still reach the end of the game despite their deaths, the death of some of some adherents may even help and give a better ending. But how exactly is unknown to me. The objectives and adherents vary based on the character you play as.
The storyline progresses through time whether you do something or not. Every day you get a new main objective, starting from a note/letter you receive at the beginning of the day. Fulfilling these mostly consists of talking to certain people. You may encounter side objectives from talking to various people as well. All objectives received must be fulfilled by the end of the same day or they're crossed out and the consequences follow. To my knowledge, you cannot "lose" in any way other than simply dying, but there are different endings to the game based on how well you've done.
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Topic: Obscure horror games (Read 7590 times)