I have often thought that Valerie Dusk's work had good atmosphere but didn’t always connect on a story or game play level with me. Veins was more of a technical problem for me to go with those other gripes. I was expecting a walking sim but got something even more aloof then those usually are. Basically I walked around until the game started putting text on the screen at which time I could press “E” and maybe get a fade to black and have the next part begin. I did this for a few scenes until falling off the world while exploring and have the game just go black. With no menu system at all or a save function to reload I had to force quit the game and reload it from the start. This is a short game so it’s not like I was out hours of progress but it still was annoying. After this I was able to figure out how to finish the game but I must say the lack of any kind of hint just leaves one wandering aimlessly. Sometimes it gave good hints such as saying a door had opened but when trying to find the terminal I didn’t even know I was supposed to be looking for one. The character seemed to walk really slowly as well which might be due to the frame rate which I will touch on. The game was a little pixelated for my liking as well. I think it was possible to keep the style while having a little more detail.

    I played Veins on Linux. It never crashed. As mentioned it lacked any kind of menu or save feature and you could freeze the game by falling off a ledge. The frame rate seem to be capped for me at 24 FPS which is very low and a possible reason the character seemed to walk slowly.

Game Engine: Unity
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 873 MB

GPU Usage: 0-4 %
VRAM Usage: 231-232 MB
CPU Usage: 4-8 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-2.8 GB
Frame Rate: 20-24 FPS

    The game had good atmosphere and music but had a lot of issues for me. No menu; no saving; a lack of idea of objectives; slow movement; grainy detail; and a lack of overall story made it hard to enjoy. The game is free but so are many others. I enjoyed Whispering Rock Thrift and Bleakstead more than Veins despite them having some issues with narrative as well. I finished Veins in nine minutes.

My Score: 4/10

My System:

Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.1 | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.0.2-zen1-zen | AOC G2460P 1920*1080 @ 144hz