*1 free DLC is needed to 100% the game.

My Playtime: 16.9h (100% achievement, finished the game)
Grindy Achievement(s): Yes (2+ achievements).
Optional Achievement(s): Yes (23 achievements).
Difficult Achievement(s): No.

It's 3 AM and people are having fun at the parties. And you? Casually going to the party uninvited, killing all guests without being captured by the police. Welcome to Party Hard.

Pros:
- 12+7 levels
- Different levels have different solutions

Cons:
- Can be mind-numbing sometimes since levels can be long and it's easy to die

Specs
Intel Core i5-9300H 2.40GHz, 8GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650

Yes.
If a game where you have to kill a lot of people without getting caught sounds appealing to you, buy it at a sale.

---

Party Hard uses top-down, pixelated visuals. Each level spawns you in a single, unique location where you can do your killings. Sometimes, the rooms on the level might look different to give more variations to the game. Even though the UI doesn't use a lot of words, the interface is easy to understand.

The story might look confusing since it was mostly done at the end of each level and it needs time before you can see the next one. Luckily, the game allows you to see all cutscenes in the menu.

The story tells about a series of killings in various parties through the eyes of a cop. Despite the short length, it provides a lot of details in each cutscene to give a full story. The ending might be confusing to understand since you need to figure it out yourselves, but I found it to be clever.

Gameplay
You are tasked with killing all the people in the party. In so, you are equipped with a knife, the ability to activate traps and carry bodies, and... a dance to lure people away. Yes, sometimes, people might even beat you up just by dancing near them. Other times, they will get away from you. If you are not following the story, you might even think that the killer was doing this because he is suck at dancing.

The traps in each level are different; you need to figure out what they do one by one. They help to kill people without you being pointed out as the culprit, with some can be used to kill a lot of people at once. Since some traps can also be harder to activate and kill fewer people, you need to figure out which one you need and when to use them effectively.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1427110794

Despite showing all the interactables in the area, the game misses marking some spots. Phone locations are usually not marked on the map, and the trash cans used to hide the body are sometimes not obvious enough.

Killing can be done in two ways: stealth and not. Both of them still require you to kill people without being noticed. If you are going pure stealth, you need to hide the bodies, which is the most boring and the safest method to win the game. The other is to make people freak out. Just make sure to run away until people notice the corpse. This will make a more chaotic (and fun) playthrough, although you risk getting caught by the police. The game seems to encourage you to play like this because of the traps. Or you can do a combination of them.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=581649482

Hiding the bodies is usually done in some spots. Trash cans, freezers, coffins—as long as they are big enough to hide a body, they'll work. The game will be the one that decides whether you can do that, though. On levels in a high building, there won't be those things—you are supposed to throw them from the building instead. However, this wasn't made clear enough and I only thought you could only do it once at first.

Being found by the police will lead you to a chase with them. The first time they come around, you'll most likely be able to outrun them. However, they will come back with higher stamina afterward, making the chase to be more difficult. You can use shortcuts to lose them, but the shortcuts will not be available anymore if you do that. Or you can kill the cops. It's easier to do that after you get found a few times. However, evading the cops too many times will trigger an FBI coming to the spot, giving you a game over once they find you.

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=847895142

Levels
I like how the game makes the levels to be varied. You need to test how the traps work and the effective way to finish them. Each level looks like a new game again since you need to learn everything from scratch. However, it can be hard to figure out an effective strategy unless you know what to do, and restarting the game over and over can be boring, especially since each level takes a long time to finish.

Even though the game promotes stealth, going 100% stealth is way boring and mind-numbing, especially since you need to wait for people to go to an empty spot before you can finish them off. Moreover, you still need to take risks at some point, and it can be annoying to die after spending minutes killing people off slowly before that happens.

Length and Difficulty
I finished the main levels in 9.2h. 0.4h is spent to finish the Dark Castle DLC (my review) levels and the rest of my playtime is spent on the rest of the achievements. Most achievements are easy—you can use workshop levels to get the harder ones.

I like the game's premise—killing people off without being seen is not new to the genre, but not when you can kill out in the open while other people are freaking out. Each level is clever and it's fun to rediscover all of the mechanics again when you move to a new one. However, the game can be mind-numbing at times, so I suggest to buy it at a sale.

merder

Love the game