So I just played through this game in one sitting. My playtime clocked in at 5:53. I really enjoyed the atmosphere, visuals, sound, and even the gameplay, to a certain extent. The story, though... God, it's so lame.
Spoiler time ahead! I'm not going to bother marking them, as most of you won't play this game anyways, and, plus, it's basically the rest of this post.
Also, while we're listing disclaimers: I've slept like two hours in the past thirty-six. So... yeah.
So the game starts off with your character looking for his wife and daughter. About ten minutes in, he finds a little girl who he thinks is his daughter, but isn't. Then he spends the rest of the game reuniting her with her mother, and saving the two of them.
Meanwhile, periodically, the game keeps cutting back to someone watching the main character taping bits of the story on his camcorder. You know from the start that it's going to be a Silent Hill: Shattered Memories-style "twist," where, uh, it isn't the main character watching it, but his wife and/or daughter, because he's dead by the end of it.
After finding his house, the main character (I keep referring to him as such because I can't for the life of me remember his name) immediately forgets about finding his family in favor of helping out this other little girl and her mom. That's fine, as maybe the first and maybe second act of the story, but at some point you want to get back to the main character's story.
This never happens. The final scene of the game is on the camcorder, of main character-man saying goodbye to the little girl and her mother as they board the U.S.S. Deus Ex Machina to what's apparently a safe haven somewhere. He mentions how he still has to go find his wife and daughter, and also help out the wheelchair-bound ex-fireman who knows where they are but got kidnapped by bad guys at the last minute for no explained reason by an opposing force whose motives aren't really clear. Then, the camera pulls back, and it's a woman (presumably the main character's wife or [grown-up] daughter) watching the video on the camcorder. The camera (that you, the player is viewing, not the camcorder) pulls back, and you see all your guy's gear on a table, implying he died.
That's fucking it. Roll credits, score screen, bam, back to title screen.
What. The. Fucking. Shit.
I about had twelve heart attacks for how half-assed of an ending it was. I wasn't expecting, y'know, cinematic amazingness or anything, but man, for a game with such interesting mechanics and amazing atmosphere, it really deserved better.
Oh, and also, when you're in the kind of recurring hub-area-thing, you see a hunched-over zombie-like creature on an inaccessible(?) piece of land. When I first saw the thing, I was terrified, and kind of excited that it was going to turn out that the Event was some weird radioactive mutantmakery after all. But nope, as far as I could see, there was no way to get over there, and there were no other creatures like it anywhere else in the game. What. The. Fuck.
But yeah! The sound design is pretty good, if slightly repetitive, in terms of musical cues, the gameplay is interesting, if slightly clunky, and the graphics are atmospheric, if slightly... bad, upon close examination. The level design, visually, though, is amazing; whoever made all these levels really knows how to make torn-up-by-earthquakes-and-shit city buildings, because damn, they look great.
And now this is turning into a review or something, because I'm tired, angry at how the game ended, slightly hungry, and I have to use the restroom after sitting still for six consecutive hours. Did I mention I'm tired?
3/5
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