I'll be honest.. (My demo review and thoughts)

[rCosmic]

I want to make it clear that I love the idea of rebooting HM, or HAUNT in-general, however after I just played the demo for this, to me personally it screams that this game won't be coming out.

I felt this demo was more meant to be played for a trailer review if anything than the actual demo for the game. The ending was disappointing out of everything, there was no hints or clues of what to do really during the playthrough, which I admit my first time around after seeing Slender for the first time and being locked inside, I thought I broke something and ended up restarting just in-case I bugged the game. Playing on ANY of the "difficulty settings" made no impact, which I thought was a bit boring, why add it as an option if the outcome is the same with no gameplay changes? Biggest offender being the piss poor flashlight, with it going dead on any setting regardless.

Sure the game itself has parts that can be tweaked, like the settings, the ability to change your resolution, FOV and so forth. But everything about this demo said "We aren't going any further with this project." It's been over a year, I know game creation isn't fast and needs work and time, but with no further updates from the devs or any other posts on the steam page for the game, what else can you think other than "We're done here."

What also disappointed me was the fact that there is a LOT more map than where we're meant to go, however going too far off the path will teleport you back to the start and basically force you to go through the house. There were some moments that gave me a good jump, like the first jumpscare of Slender after coming back upstairs from the basement, and the eerie music that plays after reminded me a lot of the old page collection music from the old Slenderman Shadow Maps (2012) I felt a sense of dread and thinking Slender might come attack me, but it all fell so, so flat after finding the "exit" to the demo, it honestly felt like playing Resident Evil 7.

I quite like the style and store of both Haunted Memories and HAUNT: A Real Slender Game, and I really had high hopes of this being a great continuation of Haunted Memories, but it was all so bland. It has great potential to be something good, and be good follow up and revive of HM, but with the current state of everything and the lack of information from devs, I don't see the Haunted Memories saga going any further, we have to thank steam for kind of allowing people to still download Haunted Memories (via a run executable using the Steamappid for HM) so those memories aren't forever lost and never be to played again.

All in all, I can only hope for progress, I do wish to this game take off, but I fear that this will be another abandoned project, left to rot, if it hasn't already.