Hey, Dread. Just today I managed to get my internet running again. It was quite the hassle, haha. So now I'm going around on a sprint, playing the games of the people that dropped me a comment over the past weeks.
So let's get straight to your game then.
First things first... your sound clips are, no doubt, quite high quality (as is your standard).
Sadly, I found that the atmosphere of the game didn't really put me on edge all that much. But anyway, let me just do a quick recap of everything as I experienced it:
- The monster was the biggest weak point in my opinion.
- I found the monster's behaviour quite predictable once I studied it a bit. And a monster you can understand, loses a lot of its edge from a psychological standpoint.
- Your monster was very human in nature, in the sense that it had very human limitations in its capacity to move and hunt you. So I could very easily tell the direction where it would come from.
- And quickly realized I could keep it in check just by looking in its general direction. So, once I realised it was turning itself into traffic cones and such, he became that much less threatening.
- Therefore, I felt too empowered to control this monster for him to have an effect on me.
- However, these comments have the caveat that the game ran kinda laggy on my PC, so I most likely had a lot more time to study behaviour than intended.
- Now, things you definitely did well:
- The bustling of the city actually relaxed me (but I don't know if this effect was intended). However, the occasional creepy sounds did bring the tension back up.
- I definitely appreciate your use of lighting to guide my path, since roaming aimlessly would have led me to assume that there wasn't anything else to see and drop the game halfway before its actual end.
- The voiceover lines do keep you on edge, as long as you don't fully understand what the monster is doing.
- And the use of darkness to keep you on your toes was also proper.
- The bustling of the city actually relaxed me (but I don't know if this effect was intended). However, the occasional creepy sounds did bring the tension back up.
- Another point also related to the lag in my PC, is that the camera felt kinda slippery and difficult to control, but that's definitely due to my system's performance.
In summary, I feel like this was a very "by-the-book" horror game. It didn't really push that many boundaries of what is expected from the genre.
Though I'm definitely grateful for it deviating from the "jumpscare doctrine" that plagues the genre since the last decade. A horror experience centered around the use of tension, rather than shock, was a breath of fresh air.