Game is too linear and too simple

[Stabbey]

The idea of the game is really great, a looping day with murders to prevent, you can restart from different points in the house to see different things and be in a better place to stop a specific murder.

Unfortunately, the potential of that premise is not met. The game is strictly linear, and worse, it locks you out of most of the mansion, giving you access to only just enough areas to stop the next murder in the sequence. Even that could have been all right, except that the areas have very few things to interact with or pick up. There are no red herrings. The greatly limited number of things you can interact with and pick up makes the solution to the killing very easy to find.

I never found an item and had to ask myself "what killing will THIS be used to solve", and that's a big problem.

The only murders which I really enjoyed trying to stop were the Aurum/Thanos killings, because that one had a lot of steps and you needed to do them in a certain sequence. If the entire game was like that, with lots of exploration and steps to complete, I would have enjoyed it. If you needed to get items from distant parts of the mansion to solve specific killings, that would also helped.

Unfortunately one murder out of seven doesn’t cut it in terms of reaching its potential.

[Даша]

Aurum and Thanos was still heavily scripted, you were still locked from certain passages, and it was very straightforward and easy. This whole game was not hard, and I don't think it was supposed to be. It was all about the story, the characters, how you could see the crime from all possible perspectives. It's not a game that you enjoy the moment you beat it. It's a game you enjoy while beating it.

[Даша]

P.S. such a mediocre review to post both on store page and discussion... While it's cool to have your own opinion, you just copy pasted your review here without adding anything to it. What do you want people to tell you?

[Stabbey]

I'm disappointed because I really wanted to like the game and I feel like it could have been made more interesting and more challenging with a few tweaks, and I wanted to tell the developers so if they decide to make a sequel, they can improve on it and hopefully make a game I and others could enjoy more.

For example:

1) Cut out the forced linearity. Only plot lock the chapel, the basement after the intersection, and the guest cottage. Give the player free roaming capability almost everywhere else in the manor. (The locks where there are ghosts blocking the way are fine, I guess.)

- That means that the player will have to pick and choose what guests to try and save. There's the handy-dandy board in the map screen which lets you keep track and can let you select the guests you're trying to save. Once they're saved, you can't select them anymore, and like before, you get the day reset if trying to save them.

- The special area of the basement can be locked, as before, until you save all the other guests, but you could get down there as soon as you save Thanos/Aurum, but all you can go from there is back up to behind the bar through the painting.


2) With the entire manor available, that means you can move some important required objects farther from where they're used to make it a little less obvious what they're supposed to be used on, thus making it more of a challenge and adding some importance to restarting the day in specific spots to do things in a certain order.

3) Add many more "red herring" objects that the player can get prompts to use an item on, and more items to pick up. The game is too simple because you can only pick up a few items, which gives away that these are the ones you need to solve the puzzle. If there are more items, that makes it more of a challenge to figure out how to solve the puzzle. Some puzzle might need to be tweaked.


As for your second point...

For a game supposed to be about the story, there's very little emphasis on the story. There is in fact very little story until after you save Aurum and Thanos. That's not only where all the interesting story is locked away, but it also unlocks the mask which offers room info.

Most of the story is buried in the brochure, which requires finding hidden collectibles. The player cannot interact with any of the guests, and by necessity is a mute non-entity, which drastically cuts down on the amount of story.

I didn't have a problem with the story, even if the twist was unsurprising, the problem is that because most of the story happens 5/6ths of the way through the game, the first 5/6ths of the game has to be carried by the gameplay, which isn't as good as it could be.


Also, I wrote this post first and then decided to turn it into a review afterwards.

[No Life Loser]

did you watch videos before playing or walkthroughs? cause i found it tough, but again this game was my introduction to the genre

[Stabbey]

I didn't watch any videos or walkthroughs of this game.

I didn't solve all the killings immediately on my first go at them, but it didn't take long because there were so few things to interact with and pick up that figuring out what to do wasn't hard.

[Kargor]

Originally posted by No Life Loser:

did you watch videos before playing or walkthroughs? cause i found it tough, but again this game was my introduction to the genre

I completed it in a couple of days. And I'm definitely not a fast player.
But, then I spent more than a day getting the last couple of cards... 'cause that's a mess.

I agree with the game being rather simple/straightforward. I still gave it a thumb-up, though -- and I prefer a straightforward game over a frustrating one any day. Art style felt rather unique as well.

I don't know about introductions to genres. I don't even know whether there IS another game like this. I haven't played one, that's for sure.