muito amor e ajuda para o rio grande do sul <3

The horror misses, and I'm not sure what's left is enough to justify paying $10 for just over an hour of gameplay.

At first, I kinda dug how they integrated the backstory/lore of what was going on with the Steam achievements and documents. "Main" story aside, I always dig this style of horror game where you're often looking at two screens: the in-game "game", and the out-"game" "desktop/interface"/etc.

Here's my problem with it though: there's a sizable disconnect between the "game" and the "desktop", and neither are fun or interesting enough to carry the relatively sizable $10 price tag on their own. The "game" is a simple Animal Crossing-lite: you can play it straight, ignoring the spooooky messages on the refrigerator that are obvious bait to put you on the bad path, or, spoilers, follow the spooooky messages on the fridge and go into the bad path. However, I wasn't scared. Not even once. In fact, I thought the scares were cute, which is (probably?) not what the game creator wanted. (probably). Since this is obviously intended to be a horror game, you at least need to have one or two moments that take the player by surprise, but I felt like I was playing through a creepypasta ripped straight from the Creepypasta wiki, and one not rated above a 6/10. And I know, horror is subjective, but I guarantee you that unless you're below the 6th grade, and maybe even then, you will not be scared, or even creeped out, by the scares in the game. However, horror aside, the gameplay of the "game" is not particularly deep either: it's basic "go to this location", "pick up this item", "use this item here", "task complete", repeat. Even when attempts at horror are made, it's exactly the same type of gameplay. So gameplay is shallow, imo.

This takes me to the out-"game" desktop portion, which leads to expect something much deeper but falls off there too. There's a documents folder, a profile folder (a glorified achievements checklist), a manuals folder, the emails folder, and a roms folder (holding (and will only ever hold) the singular Bem Feito rom). Avoiding spoilers, the manuals folder is completely irrelevant except for telling you one singular command that is used a total of exactly once with the Roms folder in the bad ending, and absolutely (to my knowledge) nowhere else. The roms folder itself is completely irrelevant overall except for that one single time with that one singular command in the bad ending. Same with the email folder, it's used exactly once in the bad ending to tell you "hey you got the bad ending". The documents folder is, to be a little positive, pretty cool: you get achievements in the "game", and those achievements tell you the codes to unlock the documents that reveals some of the backstory behind the haunted game. However, there is absolutely no connection to those documents to what you actually play beyond "ooh game spooooky". Unironically, 98% of the information in those documents are completely irrelevant to what you, the player, experience in playing Bem Feito (the overarching game, not the "game"), and the 2% info that is relevant is the fact that the game is haunted (which you could probably figure out from the very first time you play the "game").

This is my big problem with the game: there is no reason to have the out-game desktop at all. To borrow one of the core ideas from found footage: you need a reason why they need to constantly record. Here, it's that you need a reason why you are presenting the player with a in-game desktop interface to be paired with the in-game "game". And, unfortunately, the only reason I can come up with here is that it's to lore dump lore that is only barely relevant at best. Besides the one specific function for each of those folders I mentioned above, there is zero interaction between the in-game "game" and the out-game "desktop". Those achievements with the codes I mentioned before? Those are unlocked by playing the game naturally: you don't need to go out of your way to find them in crooks or crevices, they're just given to you by completing all of the tasks (including the spoooky one) and then checking the mail. That's it. And that disappoints me. To draw a comparison to found footage films (once again, since digital horror games like this one are just the natural evolution of that genre in video games), this feels like the found footage films with weak plots where the viewpoint character is inexplicably recording for absolutely no reason. Here, it feels like the developer just had the desktop because it's "cool" rather than really envisioning a specific narrative integration for it. A negative review mentioned that this really felt like a cash grab, and while I definitely don't think it's that, I can definitely see where they're coming from.

(TLDR) Buy this game on 50% or more discount for a cute game, not a scary one.