Pointless Chase Scene: The Game (a review)

[Psyringe]

First off, I apologize for putting this here. I usually don't like it when people put reviews in the forum, because there _is_ a place for reviews, and posting them elsewhere mostly looks like someone wants their review to get more attention than others. That's not my point though - I just wrote a review that happens to be bigger than a character limit that I wasn't previously aware of, and I don't want to throw one-third of it away. So I'm also posting it here, where I can post it in full, and link to it from my "partial" review on the proper page. If someone gets angry about me posting it here, please rest assured that I understand, and I will take any criticism that I get about this aspect. Now to the review, though:

Pointless Chase Scene: The Game

Those Who Remain (TWR) is a first-person horror adventure that tries to be scary, serious, and mature, but unfortunately ends up being mostly annoying and just plain awful. It features a fairly interesting (albeit disappointingly generic) story, easy puzzles, terrible chase and stealth scenes, and a catastrophically bad checkpoint-based save system that forces you to replay already solved parts multiple times, before the game kills you again without warning, and you have to repeat the same boring stuff for yet another time. The story was good enough to make me want to see the end, but the gameplay was very poor, in fact it may very well be the worst out of any of the three-digit number of horror games that I have completed over the past 35 years.

Those are strong words, and I actually wish I were exaggerating because that would mean that the game was better, but sadly I'm not. I actually deleted my first attempt at a review because it used even stronger words, and I wanted to let a few days pass, hoping that I might see some redeeming features in this game after the initial disappointment wore off. Well, several days have passed, and my assessment unfortunately hasn't changed. So here's a list of the many, many things that make this game a failure in my opinion, written with calm sadness a few days after completing it.

• The story deals with important, serious topics, but never grows beyond plain stereotypes. Most characters are as thin as cardboard, you only learn one or two things about them and then the game moves on to the next scene, with completely different characters that are just loosely connected by the main story arc. Some of the characters (like the "army dad") are presented with a bit more detail and show that the writer would probably have been capable of delivering something better, but that would have required more effort.

• The main character seems, apart from the occasional "What the hell?" exclamation, completely unaffected by the surreal and ominous surroundings he moves through. He enters a house full of scary shadow figures with weapons and glowing eyes, and all he has to say are on-the-nose hints for the player like "I need to get upstairs".

• The game features a unique "forgive or condemn" mechanic that sounded interesting on paper, but is executed in the most primitive and boring way imaginable. Instead of confronting you with an interesting dilemma, it just informs you about exactly one terrible thing that the respective character did, and exactly one fact that may explain and/or excuse it, that's all. Your decisions also do not affect the gameplay in any way, they just determine which ending you get.

• Speaking of the ending, it transports a very simple, very predictable message, and even though I _agree_ with that message, I can't help noticing how awfully primitive and one-dimensional the implementation of this message was. Okay, perhaps _two_-dimensional, since the game usually presents you two sides of one coin, but there's never any nuance, and there's never more than one "coin" for every single decision you have to take.

• While not planning for it, I actually made every decision in a way that would have given me the "good" ending. Except in one single situation, where the game was very unclear in its directions and killed someone off before I even found them. And that was enough to give me the _worst_ ending instead. Either this sequence was implemented rather sloppily, or the game really wanted me to fail so that I might perhaps spend more time with it for another playthrough - but I guess I'll just consult Youtube instead. The only other option is to replay the game completely, there is no "chapter select" option to correct a decision.

• While the aforementioned shadowy figures are eerie and interesting for the first few minutes, you notice very quickly that they never move, so you soon view them in the same pragmatic way as the character does: as simple obstacles to your progress that you keep a safe distance from until you can remove them. From that point on, they lose all of their initial scariness and you see them as the fairly boring setpieces that they actually are.

• The game's first few puzzles do fit the environment, but are quite bland and simplistic (e.g. there's a fire blocking your way, the main character tells you that you need to activate the sprinklers, in another room there's an electricity panel where exactly one switch is turned off, you flip the switch and the character magically knows that this activated the fire alarm).

• The game's later puzzles have no connection to the rest of the game, they feel like prototypes for other games that have been shoehorned into TWR to pad its lackluster content. There's a supermarket sporting animal altars for no rhyme or reason, there's a maze where you have to carry statues around for no other discernible purpose than progressing to the next arbitrary scene (while you're being hunted by a monster that has no relation to anything else in the game either), there's a puzzle of moving pillars and switches that exists in its own abstract world, and so on.

• The game has lots of stealth and chase scenes, but implements them in the most primitive and lazy way possible. It's fine for a game like this that you can't kill or otherwise beat the monster, but this game doesn't even let you crouch, or jump, or lean to the side, or throw a rock for distraction. Whenever you want to look into a hallway, you have to behave like an idiot and expose yourself fully. When you encounter a line of chairs or cardboard boxes, your character is completely dumbfounded and cannot pass these insurmountable obstacles until he creates a gap by picking one of the objects up and throwing it away. The implementation of these stealth- and chase scenes lacks anything that would make them scary or at least immersive, instead they are just annoying. And there are lots of them.

• Many of the chase scenes take place inside buildings. You usually have to find some sort of exit which doesn't exist before the chase scene starts, so you can't know where it is. But if you enter any other room, you're usually dead, because all the rooms are little dead-ends, the monster is close behind you, and of course there's no command to evade or dodge it, why would there?

• Most of the chase scenes aren't part of the story in any meaningful way. There's also no discernible reason why your pursuer would show up at this place. It feels like most chase scenes have been thrown in just for the sake of having another chase scene.

• The game really, really likes to instakill you, regardless of whether you made a mistake or not. If you move one little step too far into a dark room while looking for a light switch, you're immediately dead. (It's worth noting here that the game also has no command for "walk slowly/carefully"). If you walk into a passage that _looks_ like it has enough light, but the developers actually decided that it didn't, you're dead. If you misclick and switch a lamp off instead of opening a supposed drawer below it, you're immediately dead. If you switch the light on and enter a room, the light might flicker and you're immediately dead. If you take one step too close to a chasm, you're dead. If you're walking down stairs, the game might suddenly switch into a different reality where the hallway is replaced with a bottomless drop, and you're immediately dead. The developers haven't found a better way of creating a feeling of immediacy and danger than the age-old "instakill the player at every opportunity" trope that games left behind, for good reason, decades ago.

• Whenever you get killed, the game transports you to the last checkpoint, and you may lose up to 30 minutes of progress that you made since then. There is only one save slot, and you cannot save manually. In one scene I had explored half a dozen buildings, solved two puzzles, survived a stealth sequence, viewed an unskippable cutscene - and then had to do everything again, because I took one wrong step around a corner. Another time I survived a chase scene, explored a house, listened to two unskippable monologues, encountered another chase scene, died because I chose the wrong door of two identical looking ones, and then got thrown back to a point _before_ the _previous_ chase scene.

• As just mentioned, the game's monologues and chase scenes are unskippable. If you have to replay content because the game once again killed you and sent you back to a checkpoint from much earlier, don't hope that you might be able to do it quickly. You have to view and listen to the same things you just did, again and again.

• The game's graphics mostly aren't very good, though the game hides this pretty well with its overuse and darkness and, in some scenes, fog. What's worse though, is that the game doesn't have any noticeable artistic direction at all. The quality of assets is all over the place, it looks like someone bought every cheap asset in the Unity store and just haplessly mashed them together. There's a supermarket full of plain white, low-poly shelves without any materials (no bump mapping, shine, or any other kind of detail) right next to a highly detailed, eerily lit animal altar that could have been taken right out of a fantasy RPG. And this is a place in the game's "real world", it's not in any of the "other worlds" where the devs might have gotten away with it.

• Many environments lack detail. All locations use the same copy-pasted cupboards, dressers, desks, lockers, and other furniture. Cardboard boxes are lying around everywhere. And almost all the cupboards and dressers are empty, which demonstrates a degree of laziness that I have rarely encountered in any game of this decade. Even in other games that used a lot of copy-pasting, the developers at least made the effort to copy-paste a few different things into most furniture. To me as someone who really appreciates little touches and an eye for detail, this feels like the developers didn't really care much about detail at all. It's also noteworthy that for many of the game's puzzles, you have to find objects which are hidden in furniture. So you end up opening every drawer and compartment, and almost every single one of them will be completely empty, which creates the exact opposite of an engaging or immersive experience.

• The sound effects have been done in a deplorably amateurish way. Throwing a ceramic vase downstairs produces just a hollow, muffled "thud" (it also doesn't break the vase). Lots of other sounds don't fit their respective occasions either. The range of the sound effects is also weird - on several occasions, you hear something like a radio clearly inside a room, but just a few steps away you hear nothing. Once again this feels as if someone purchased a bunch of cheap assets and applied them with little rhyme or reason.

• The voice acting is okay-ish - one character's monologues sound completely unnatural, but that's more due to the lines she was given than her delivery. However, the voice _direction_ was clearly lacking, if it was present at all. There are several occasions where the actor obviously had no knowledge of the conversation's context and stressed the wrong word, that's exactly the immersion-affecting detail that good voice direction is supposed to catch and correct.

This list was, of course, focusing on the negatives, and I apologize that it grew so big - unfortunately the game _does_ contain so many things that have been done in a ... suboptimal way at least. That said, there are of course also some positives, which should not be neglected:

• The game ran very stable for me, it never crashed. There were some oddities after reloading (e.g. some furniture did not reset, but some lights and all keys/objects did), but I didn't encounter technical issues of any sort.
  
• I didn't run into any bugs that affected the puzzles.
  
• The game offers key rebinding for movement keys. You can't rebind the mouse actions (interact / throw), but it's nice to see a feature that many gamers want or need, but that many developers neglect, especially in the first-person adventure genre. There's also an FOV slider, a sensitivity slider, and an option to invert the Y-axis.
  
• Some of the puzzles felt non-trivial, and there's a sequence where you have to navigate two "mazes" at once while the world switches between them, which felt fresh and interesting.
  
• One of the chase scenes had an interesting "moving furniture" mechanic that I _would_ have liked, even after failing it twice due to the unpredictability of the movement, if the game hadn't reset me to a point at the beginning of a long hallway and before another unskippable monologue after dying.
  
• The developers tried to tell a meaningful, mature story. Regardless of whether it actually worked, that requires courage and deserves recognition.

So, what's my recommendation? For most games, I can envision an audience that might enjoy them. For TWR, I guess if you really like chase and stealth scenes and don't mind being unable to crouch, jump, lean, or do any anything else that might feel immersive, and if you perhaps really liked the frequent instakills that were a hallmark of past games, then it won't be too bad. I'd still recommend to wait for at least a 75% discount though. That would make the game still cost more than I'd consider it worth, but at least it won't feel as bad as spending $20 on something which can't even be called "mediocre" in its current state.

Final words: This game claims that it is about forgiveness. Considering how often and how easily it killed me, how far it set me back sometimes, and how it gave me the most condemning ending just because I didn't find one person fast enough due to the game's unclear directions, it's certainly one of the most unforgiving games I ever played. If any of the devs read this, they may want to contemplate a bit about this and how hypocritical it makes them look. Your gameplay is effectively destroying your story's message.

(And yes, I do forgive the devs for making a crappy game, I don't condemn them and I wish them well. I just will also be honest about this game's deplorable lack of quality, and I certainly can't recommend it to others and keep a clean conscience.)

[Gromit]

Very nice and honest review, thank you !

[GreatApe51]

Played most of it on Epic, though now probably just going to delete it.

Agree, with this review.

[abysss24]

The game is awful, I pushed myself to finish it. I forgave everyone and saved the girl in the truck, and still got the bad ending, must have missed some NPC just like you did, oh, I don't mind. I don't care. All I want is to uninstal give my bad review and move on to a more fun and less tedious and repetitive game. I'm seriously peessed at this game, haven't felt so trolled by the devs, since I played Home Sweet Home, to which I have also written an extensive review so that people find out how frustrating it is. These devs just deserve to get some concrete feedback.