The Chain to Bind You to Earth has a good atmosphere and managed to unnerve me at times but it wasn’t enough to overcome it’s shortcomings. There is very little story here and just when things start to pick up it ends. I know that the visual style is supposed to be PS1 style but when you go so low resolution you can’t make any detail out. It just all looks like a blurry mess. The game play is straightforward enough in it’s tasks and explaining what you have to do to advance. The music was decent when there was some.

    I played The Chain to Bind You to Earth on Linux. It never crashed and I didn’t notice any bugs. There are no graphics options at all. There are some poor design choices such as pressing the “Esc” key will exit the game. There is no save system so this will make you start things over again. In pretty much any other game “Esc” pauses the game or brings up a menu so they really should have chosen another key quit. Alt-Tab didn’t work. Performance was terrible. I was usually in the 20’s for FPS and it dipped as low as 18 FPS. I did see 59 FPS for a brief second and a brief second in the 40’s. The graphical quality in no way justifies the low frame rates. Furthermore my hardware was in no way being taxed so it wasn’t lack of horsepower.

Game Engine: Godot
Graphics API: OpenGL
Disk Space Used: 187 MB

GPU Usage: 1-4 %
VRAM Usage: 240-241 MB
CPU Usage: 8-10 %
RAM Usage: 2.8-3.0 GB
Frame Rate: 18-59 FPS

    Even the price tag of free won’t make up for the issues as there are lots of good free games out there. I would have liked to see more of the story and I enjoyed the creepy atmosphere but much of the rest of the game seemed a mess. I finished the game in ten minutes.

My Score: 3/10

My System:

Intel i7-6700 | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | XFX RX 590 8GB Fat Boy | Mesa 22.2.3 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Garuda | Mate 1.26.0 | Kernel 6.0.12-zen1-zen