When the run stuck, did you press it twice?

Crying is not Enough is the perfect title for this game, simply because the tears of frustration I shed as I forced myself through 12 hours of agony to complete this travesty wasn't nearly enough to accurately convey how incredibly BAD it actually is. Don’t let the promo videos and screenshots fool you. The game may look “pretty”, but beneath its barely sparkling veneer is one of the worst games I have ever played in my entire life, and I truly mean all 40 years that I have been on this earth. EVERYTHING about this dumpster fire is god awful from the writing, level design, AI, cut scenes, and the numerous NUMEROUS game breaking bugs. I don’t care that it took 5 years of blood, sweat and tears to create this abomination, some games simply should not exist, and this is one of them.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1641196797
With maybe a half dozen incomprehensible cut-scenes in the entire game, which are made even more incomprehensible by the all-too-sparse and horribly written notes and memos, I could barely follow the plot, so bear with me as I try to give a brief synopsis of the story's premise. I think it has something to do with a guy named the General experimenting on humans on some remote island with the goal of wiping out humanity, and the protagonist and his wife are somehow caught up in it. That’s all I got. In what I suspect to be an attempt at self-preservation, about halfway through the game my brain simply shut down whenever any narrative popped up, so that’s as much of the plot as I was able to absorb.

As bad as the story is, the gameplay is quite honestly worse. You’d think a game that’s attempting to be a mashup of Alan Wake, Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and The Evil Within would have SOME redeeming qualities, but no...it does not. Wait, no...that’s a lie. Cubica is amazing! The mini-game you can play to earn ammo whenever you save is the best thing about the entire game. EVERYTHING else is horrible. About 90% of the game's environment is empty with nothing to pick up, click on, or do. You spend almost your entire play time running around searching these areas practically in vain, because there’s very little direction given to you. And if you do happen to stumble upon a puzzle and successfully progress in some way, odds are you don’t know what that puzzle achieved because the game sure as hell isn't going to tell you.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vDISLfGvJM
But wait, what about the enemies? Surely, Pickaxe-Man can’t be all that bad. Well, you’re right, Pickaxe-Man is indeed the star of this show. He’s also really REALLY lazy and suffers from ADD and a lack of motivation. Rarely does he actually run after you, and if you’re able to get enough distance on him, he’ll quickly lose interest and start looking through bushes or stare at rocks. When he does manage to get within arm’s reach, he sits there for a second before actually swiping at you, allowing Jacob plenty of time to maneuver around him. Then there are the sexy mannequin creatures that laugh like a 6 year old little girl. To be honest, they’re probably the scariest thing in the entire game, not because they’re creepy, but because someone actually thought it was a good idea to use a 6 year old little girl’s laugh on these things.

There are two boss fights, one of which is a dude with a flamethrower who was super easy to put down, and the other a knock-off of The Evil Within’s Butcher, only his boss ability is that his room is bugged to hell, and if you save at the Cubica machine that’s RIGHT INSIDE, the door closes and never opens again. If you manage to down him and grab the hangar key from the bloody trough, you have to glitch your way through the door to get out or reload from a previous save. I’m not lying, this is absolutely 100% the truth.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OLXv7IpPbE4&feature=youtu.be
Speaking of bugs, there are so many in this game that it would take me several paragraphs to fully detail them all. But my absolute favorite is when you click on certain things and get a loud SPLAT!!! sound. Click on a keypad? SPLAT!!! Click on a memo? SPLAT!!! Try to open a locked door? SPLAT!!! I do love the absence of collision detection on random objects too. I made a mini-game out of trying to find all the things I could walk through. Barrels, tables, chairs, walls...it was great fun!

Honestly, I need to stop. I’m tempted to keep going, but I think I’ve made my point clear. DO NOT buy Crying is not Enough. Don’t even think about it. Playing this game is like sticking rusty needles in your eyes over and over again; it’s incredibly painful and makes you long for the sweet embrace of death. Take your $20 and spend it on something good, like...any other game in all of Steam’s catalogue. Believe me, you cannot do worse than this.

Hey, alright.

Το παιχνιδάκι γαμάει! Εσείς οι ξένοι είστε ξενέρωτοι!

Most horror enthusiasts probably remember the launch and subsequent utter disappointment of Crying is not Enough. Originally releasing in June of 2018, the game set itself up to look like a decent survival horror title, but instead, it fell short due to a massive plethora of bugs, glitches, and issues that completely broke it. Additionally, it didn't help that the developers decided to go completely silent from launch until April 2019, leaving the community to consider the game totally abandoned. Now Crying is not Enough is back under a "Remastered" version, and publisher/developer Storyline Team are hoping that gamers will give it another shot.

You play as 35-year-old Jacob Helten, a man who is in search of wife Claire. After a series of bizarre dreams, Jacob is summoned to the hospital where his wife has ended up, only to be told that she's nowhere to be found. Queue the entrance of a creepy old woman who says that she's Claire's mother and that Claire has been kidnapped. Jacob finds himself being transported via helicopter, only for the helicopter to be rigged with explosives, and he lands on an island infested with monstrous entities. Turns out Claire is on this island too, and he needs to find her.

One thing that can be said right off the bat is that Crying is not Enough has some serious issues with story pacing. If you don't have the patience for cutscenes and dialogue, you may want to go ahead and skip this release as the first half-hour of the game is just that. The graphics settings also default to making this title look as ugly as it possibly can, having motion blur, depth of field, and chromatic aberration all enabled by default. All three of these settings combined cause the cutscenes to constantly go in and out of focus, and overall the graphics look ridiculously fuzzy and awful. Turning the settings off does help quite a bit, but everything still looks quite dated; as dated as say, 2012's I Am Alive.

If you take a look at the "Massive Update" from April 12th, 2019, you can clearly see the amount of work that the developers put into fixing their mess. There's some hard work and dedication that went into it, but sadly it's still not enough. I ended up running into a game stopping bug in a puzzle right after I'd finished doing some pretty major events in the game, and I was forced to exit and reload my previous save; which was a ton of work prior to where the game stalemated me. What caused the stalemate? I simply paused the game to go to the bathroom, and I came back, exited the pause screen, and couldn't do anything else. No game should lock up on a puzzle screen due to pausing. Needless to say, even I, a dedicated reviewer that finishes 98% of all games that I review, could not bring myself to go through the hassle of doing everything again to get back to the point that the game locked up at.

As a survival horror game, Crying is not Enough: Remastered is just not scary or challenging; the two main factors that make survival horror games fun in the first place. It doesn't help that you can get a surplus of ammo by playing this really weird, out-of-place, random arcade game that also functions as a save station. The coins that you need to use the machine are scattered about in abundance, also. The atmosphere is okay, and there's definitely a heavy Silent Hill vibe going on, especially with the references to Mary, James, and Sylvia... but other than that, not much is going on.

Sadly, even the "Massive Update" and supposed "Remaster" of Crying is not Enough is just not enough to save this game. It's appreciated that the developers actually attempted to redeem themselves by resolving a ton of this title's issues, but at this point, it's really one of those too little, too late scenarios. Perhaps if small updates were issued along and along and communication was held with the community, Storyline Team could've learned even more from what caused this title to fail other than the obvious gameplay and engine flaws. The story pacing is atrocious, the voice acting is bad even by indie standards, the character models are hard to look at, the default graphic settings make the game look hideous, none of the puzzles are fun, the arcade game is unnecessary, there are not enough survival elements, there's no scare factor, the enemy AI is just terrible, and the story is needlessly convoluted and quite honestly unappealing. Especially for the asking price, this one is worth a hard pass.

The Horror Network Curator | Group Click for Gore

The developer provided a free copy of this game for review, through The Horror Network's Curation page.

The title is indicative of the product in many ways, one being that if you somehow leave the game on in the background for two hours and start to play it, only to realize what an unfinished, bland, buggy mess of a game it is, crying will indeed not be enough to sate the anguish you will feel playing it.

Crying is not going to be enough to solve the problems with this game, either. I get the feeling that if the developers took five years to finish this incoherent mess in the condition that it is now, no amount of time in the world will be enough to renovate this ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ of a video game to a playable state (and given how long it took them to finally push out the Halloween patch and not address the myriad of things that are still wrong with this game, it sort of sounds like I'm right).

The game's puzzles, tone, and story are incoherent, and I imagine an infinite amount of crying wouldn't fix those, either. I encountered several game-breaking bugs - one where a keycard at the airport wouldn't pick up and would softlock the game. Another shotgun shell item didn't fully despawn after I picked it up, and I ended picking it up so many times that I had enough ammo to start my own army. There's a guide somewhere that warns you of puzzles that tend to break and softlock the game (for example, thinking of the Judas Priest statue near the mansion that doesn't tell you what to do and won't reset if you do the puzzle wrong, hope you saved your game!).

I think the question that really needs to be answered here, after managing to slog my way from start to finish (including the incessant amount of backtracking the game makes you do in an attempt to pad itself out), is why in the ♥♥♥♥ does anyone think this is worth $20?

Was hoping for a decent horror game but no this is a turd! Crazy amount of loading screens, sound not in sync, subtitles not accurate (a helicopter is a plane apparently) just feels clumsy and poorly done. Avoid!

Tagged as a survival horror because you have to survive the horror of nearly 30 minutes of poorly animated and badly scripted cut scenes, before the game truly begins. You can check out these nightmare scenes in my first impressions video.
https://youtu.be/bbE1i17CIF0
Couple these unskippable cut scenes with numerous loading screens and you have one of the worst openings to a survival horror game I’ve ever experienced. The developers apparently spent five years working on this so there’s no excuse for this shoddy introduction. Did they not test this at all?

When you finally get to the gameplay things don’t get any better, with a very uneven frame rate, stuttering and even freezing. The camera is also pretty terrible and can occasionally clip through the player character. This makes combat difficult especially when enemies get up close. When you add poor FOV, fast enemies, ♥♥♥♥ frame rate and floaty aim, the combat becomes a confusing chore. You aren’t given a map and there are no objective markers (or objectives) either, so you’ll have no idea where to go or what you’re meant to be doing.

This game clearly wasn’t ready for release and whilst it evokes some nostalgia for classic survival horror games through its visuals, the gameplay and story actually take a huge step back. There are lots of third person survival horror games on Steam, many of them cheaper than this. I wouldn’t even recommend this if you’ve exhausted all the good titles because it’s just not fun to play. When the scariest thing about your horror game is the chore of actually having to play it, you’ve probably ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up.

Indie survival horror with a lot of flaws. I would maybe give a neutral rating if I could, but I can't, so I have to give a negative one sadly. The game is really just a 5 or 6 ouf of 10 for me.

So what are the problems it has:
-way too many and way too long empty corridors to walk through, especially in the woods
-the game quickly opens up and has simply way too big areas
-but even worse you have to do SO MUCH backtracking in this game, especially later in the game
-I don't really mind the gunplay, BUT there are just 2 weapons in the game! a pistol which you start with and a shotgun
-and the enemy variety is also not great: there is the regular "zombie" with low health but is quite fast; then there is very slow one but it has SO MUCH HEALTH like you need 10 shotgun shells to kill it, which is so much and not worth at all (except once where you have to kill one of those as a miniboss i guess) which means you have to outrun those every time; then is an enemy which can explode itself which is so easy to beat, you just use your radio which you find quite early in the game which stuns enemies and which will also make that guy explode after a few seconds, so just stay away and you delt with him; and lastly later in the game you find another enemy which does look different but gameplaywise it's not that different to the regular zombies
-especially in the big areas I mentioned before you can (and should) just run past every single enemy! You run faster than them, you don't run out of stamina and they loose aggro pretty fast. This is just stupid.
-the game is almost impossible to play without a guide: for example at one point you can choose between two major areas, one of them give you the shotgun, the other one has a boss which is basically impossible to beat without the shotgun, so good luck if you did those areas in the wrong order. The game doesn't tell you at all about the order you should do them.
Or how about that you usually have no idea where to use the items you find for, it's not intuitive at all, and often you have to use them at the other end of the map, so more backtracking
-later on in the game new enemies spawn at older areas plus a boss spawns constantly near you and chases you, Mr.X-like enemies are always annoying in a survival horror game
-there is a really crappy minigame which you can play before saving but you have to play it as it gives ammo
-you find a lot of useless healing items because you often need to combine two items to get a health item, well one of those parts is super rare and I had at the end of the game like 10 useless parts which I couldn't use because the counterpart is way too rare. But that's not all: there are healing items you find, which do heal you, but also poisons so. Nice. If you are poisoned you constantly loose health and the funny part is I didnd't find a way to get rid of it. There are pills you can use, but those only decrease the poison bar, but you are still poisoned and once it's full again you will again start loosing health till you die. This basically means you can't use those health items and there are also other ways to get poisoned in the game. Well, if that happens you are dead and have to reload a save.
This isn't such a big problem as you barely need health items except at that boss I mentioned earlier
-bad pacing, and way too many cutscenes, especially there is one near the start of the game which is SO LONG and the cutscenes are really bad. The voice acting is ok at best, but the character models, animations, writing and story are terrible

What is good tho:
-I mostly like the graphics, well except character models and animations
-framerate is usually good, there are a few areas tho where it significantly drops
-like I said the gunplay is all right
-ammo balance is all right
-overall RE-like gameplay is always fun

So overall I can only recommend this to die-hard fans of survival horror and even to those you should know what to expect.

The environments in this game are quite impressive. Unfortunately...not much else is.

The story is batty, but bland. The writing and voice acting varies from mediocre to slightly substandard. The volume levels are all over the shop, with some sound FX compelling me to turn the volume down, and some semi-submerged voice parts compelling me to turn it back up again. The default controls are bizarre - "C" for flashlight, in a horror game? - but can thankfully be remapped. The level design is needlessly convoluted at times (with no map you can bring up to make sense of it all). The puzzles are alright, but nothing we haven't seen a trillion times before. The resource management is competent, yet far from compelling. The save system is far from generous. The cutscenes, especially those near the beginning, are among the most stilted and tedious that I've ever endured (and seem to be unskippable, at least when playing with a keyboard and mouse). Last but not least, the human character models and animations - in stark contrast to the aforementioned environments - are among the ugliest I've ever seen. (Don't even ask me about the gore! The monsters are alright, though, even if they and the scenery do get quite repetitive after a while.)

Which brings us to the gameplay.

Believe me when I say that I do appreciate a slow-burn build-up in a horror game, but the pacing in the early part of this product was like watching elderly sloths fornicate. And what was my reward, when I finally got to enjoy my first moment of danger, about thirty minutes in? My character witnesses a monster smashing its head repeatedly into a rock or...something...not quite sure what he was doing, really...but as soon as the control reverted from the cutscene to my good self, I was pointed in the wrong direction! Not a very auspicious start to the action. And it doesn't get a great deal better from there. In fact, the combat is so lackluster - you can even methodically pistol-whip some enemies to death! - that I would've enjoyed this more if it was a walking simulator.

Don't get me wrong: there's definitely some solid atmosphere, and some good moments here and there. But mere moments simply aren't enough in a game of this length (I gave up nearly four hours in, and didn't appear to be anywhere near the end).

By all means, if you've played every Resident Evil game, every Silent Hill game, and every notable knock-off like the Evil Within games, Alan Wake games, Obscure games, etc...and you're somehow still desperate for a vaguely comparable third-person survival horror game? Knock yourself out. But as a bona fide addict of that style of gaming, I simply wasn't motivated to see this through to its conclusion; not least of all because, for all its ambience, it's really not that "scary" (the suspense generated rarely resulting in a worthy pay-off). And the price the devs are asking is plainly and simply misguided.

There's certainly no faulting this game for ambition. Unfortunately, almost everything else about it is kinda faulty (though the CB radio gimmick was a nice touch). Despite an apparently recent update of some magnitude, there's still far too much wrong with this game to safely recommend it. Do the devs show potential? Absolutely. Does this debut effort truly showcase that potential? The sad answer is no. Feel free to gift me your next game, Storyline Team...but this one's gonna be a "no" from me, I'm afraid. Better luck next time.

Verdict: 4/10.

(PS If you enjoyed this review, feel free to check out my two Curator pages: http://store.steampowered.com/curator/9284586-ReviewsJustfortheHELLofit/​
http://store.steampowered.com/curator/10868048-Truly-Horrible-Horror-Games/?appid=398210​
Cheers!)