Claire is simply not scary or atmospheric. Even if you don't consider it a horror game, it's still just a boring slog. I also did not care for the characters or premise, there was no sense of mystery and the level design was full of padding, with its many empty and featureless rooms.

One of the earliest things that didn't sit right with me was the presentation. There were times when I entered an empty room and I would be met with a sudden, full-screen distortion effect accompanied by loud noises. Is this supposed to terrify people? I assume that this effect is supposed to signify something. Perhaps not though, because nothing happened afterwards and the rooms that I entered were still empty after all, with absolutely nothing interesting or significant to look at. Maybe the developer decided that this would be the best way to keep people from falling asleep.

I could also tell early on that there was a lack of playtesting due to my interactions with the rather annoying enemies. They can manage to get in some cheap shots from distances that really make you wonder if it's their bad body odour that's killing you instead. They can also get you when you look at your inventory and map. Yes, inside the inventory and map screen in a side-scrolling game where you'd expect things to be paused so you can at least get your bearings and try to make sense of the top-down view map. If you thought that was ridiculous, then get a load of this as well: enemies can kill you in the main menu screen after pressing Escape. Intentional design or an oversight? We may never know...

There are also some inconsistencies in the way enemies are programmed to appear which can lead to what are probably unintentional results in their encounters. For example, I made my way to a locked door after finding a lockpick and before I could get a chance to actually get close enough to open the damn thing, an enemy spawned right in from me and immediately started slicing and dicing (I'm just going by the sound effects here since there weren't any obvious attack animations visible in the poorly-lit area) while I just stood at the door reading about how picking the lock is just going to take a 'few more seconds'. I decided to leave the area and come back in an attempt to 'reset' the encounter, only to find the enemy standing right in front of the door that I was trying to unlock. Reloading the game resulted in the enemy spawning further away and it was the only way I was able to unlock that door without taking unnecessary damage. I can only imagine how much more frustrating this would have become if I had continued playing.

So with enemies that are more bothersome than terrifying, and without anything to hook me in the first hour or so, I simply did not want to go on any further. There are a multitude of better horror games. Many of them are from the PS1 and PS2 era, but still, there are many to choose from if you do a little research. I recommend removing Claire from the wishlist or chucking this rotting carcass of a game into the 'Crap' category if it's already in your library. It wasn't great back when it was first released and it's certainly not getting better with age.


*By the way, here's a random tip: If you factor in Sturgeon's law and you're concerned about the size of your backlog, consider a 'Mostly Positive' rating in Steam as meaning 'Mixed' at the very most instead.