Conarium

Played through about 3/4 of this. Mostly a walking simulator, but does require some puzzles to be solved. Definitely one of the best horrors out there. No jumpscares, or silly combat, or chase sequences, or monsters to avoid, just pure-and-simple tense, mysterious, creepy horror.

The game is primarily a Lovecraftian-style walking simulator with a few puzzle solving elements. Some of the puzzles are perfectly straight forward, but there was a calligraphy based one and a light based one that were both rather inane with the clues not being a whole lot of help.

From a visual standpoint, the game is equal parts beautiful and creepy. It does a great job of building an eerie and mysterious atmosphere as well as nailing the subtly in it's horror elements through it's visuals and audio design. The development of the game was done by 3 people, so I'm impressed the game looks and plays as well as it does. The publisher is only 13 people strong, so good work all around.

The game is rather short, I completed my play through in a little under 3 and half hours. The game is also very linear, occasionally a branching path will pop up as a means to find a collectible, but then it's right back onto the main path.

The main character's voice acting is pretty brutal, which is unfortunate because the game's sound design is well done. Funny enough, the game offers a "Silent Mode" which doesn't allow the main character to provide commentary throughout the game.

The game has two endings and I'm not a fan of either one of them. The endings are separated by making a binary choice and then solving an extra puzzle. They both end the game rather abruptly and come across as fairly ambiguous as to what's concluded within the story.

Overall, I think this game straddles the line between Hazy and Good/Great

This one's alright but I really feel like they should have done more with the story, have it feel like it was really building up to something rather than coming across as a series of disjointed events without much of a logical conclusion. This still has good graphics and atmosphere though.

17 hours ago, RaTcHeT302 said:

doesn't that mean that it's the perfect lovecraft game if it drives you to insanity?

Not really insanity, more like mild disappointment and confusion.