Recent reviews by TAAAAAAAAASTY

♥♥♥♥ me dude. I spent a lot of money. My mom is gonna be pissed. What the ♥♥♥♥ have I gotten myself into? At first it was a game, then a fun way to spend some money. Why is this ♥♥♥♥ not regulated like gambling is? That's all this really is anyways, gambling. I feel as though I was just stabbed in the gut. I can't even ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ handle this anymore. I'm out. My life is over anyways, I might as well take the easy way out. I can't believe I ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up this badly. I've done some ♥♥♥♥ in the past, but never on this level before. ♥♥♥♥.

Before getting into the juicy bits, I'd like to provide a bit of background to what led me to write this "in-depth" review. At the time of writing this, it was only a couple hours beforehand that a friend of mine mentioned a new horror game with co-op has released; that game being Stay Close. I'm used to being badgered by the same friend to play a game of questionable quality, but that usually entails that said game is free, or a couple dollars at the most. I haven't heard of this game until that moment, so I can safely say that what you're currently reading is not something I typed out while blinded with the hype of a follower of the person(s) who have made this (for better or worse). My friend and I also did our best to go into this game as blind as possible, meaning that this review is pure, unadulterated, semi-biased-but-in-a-good-way opinions. Now with that out of the way, let's get down to the nitty-gritty.



As soon as you click play, you get a wide command window and another, smaller window with the game itself. The main menu is easily understandable, so at least it takes low effort to get into the settings. The settings themselves are a bit barren; nothing too spectacular. You have sliders for the usual graphic settings - shadows, texture quality, meshes and models (don't quote me on those two), even some for motion blur and FOV - that range from Low to Epic (Get it? This game runs on the Unreal Engine, made by Epic Games!) Also some checkboxes for stuff, but I wasn't paying much attention since the game runs mostly okay with graphics automatically set to Medium on my PC and I wasn't expecting to write a review after finishing to completion. The game itself looks fine graphically from what I've seen, but I will say that the flashlight felt almost worthless in some areas due to how dark it was. Perhaps I should have checked for brightness or contrast settings.

As for audio settings, well... at the time of writing this, there aren't any. At all. The only way to change the volume is by doing so with Windows or whatever OS this game lets you run it on. Maybe the audio menu is hidden somewhere? It's loud enough to hear most of what happens, but the first few minutes I played were spent looking behind me because of really faint footsteps that were actually mine. Good thing you don't have to worry about finding the checkbox for subtitles though, because there isn't any voiced dialogue whatsoever! At least the ambience is fitting.

For controls, there's only a really few amount of keybindings. WASD for movement, left shift for sprint, and mouse 1 for your flashlight. Was there controller support? I couldn't tell you. You're a nerd if you use a controller for a first person game anyways, so it doesn't matter.







Note: I haven't played single player which is supposed to be marginally different from what happens in multiplayer and I'm not significantly invested in Stay Close enough to play it just to write out an extra paragraph at best, so if you're a loner with no friends or if your friends refuse to buy this game/accept this game as a gift and you want to get your spooks on during October, you should probably look elsewhere.

So you or your friend clicked host game and after waiting forever for the game to finish loading, you find yourself in a pitch black room with a little entrance that leads to the words "Stay Away". If you're there with your friend, congratulations! You made it in record time compared to my friend and I what with the troubles we had. That dark room is, based off of my best guess, a lobby for you to wait in for a friend to connect. Once one person passes through, the other is stuck in there until you restart the entire process. If your friend crashes and needs to rejoin, you need to restart the process as well. Hopefully, this will only be the most glaring issue that you come across.

Upon going through the "Stay Away" entrance thingy, you're teleported to a well-lit back alley in a sanctioned off part of a city with not really much to do in terms of exploration. I thought the setting was nice, at least - night time in the city, boarded up buildings and flickering street lights, 4 body bags laying in that alley you start in and then no mention of what's up with them - very rustic. Very aesthetically pleasing. The thing is though, I had no idea where the ♥♥♥♥ this city was located. Some signs I passed by were in chinese, others in plain english, and all I could do was be irked by this inconsistency that isn't explained at all. Since most of the area is blocked off by fog It's time to explore what little you can.

Anyways, most of the gameplay and story that I can describe can be dumbed down to walking around in this city, doing requests for an old man named Cyrus while solving some of his relatively thought-provoking but overall easy riddles, and also coming across notes that don't have an effect on anything except world-building. Speaking to Cyrus reveals that all is not what it seems (surprise!) and that the characters that you and your friend play as are a couple who don't know where they are or how they got there. You solve a set of 3 riddles and then he sends you on a fetch quest to get a compass to an apartment where you encounter your first monsters.

The monsters themselves are nothing special; The first one is a feminine, mannequin-esque statue-but-also-a-living-thing that chases you unless you keep your flashlight pointed at it. I think it's called a Creeper? At this point, all I can think about is that it's a possible reference to Doctor Who, or maybe it's supposed to be unique and different and not at all like those statues but ends up being so. It might unnerve you for maybe 10 minutes or so until you get adjusted to it. As for the other monster, it's the direct opposite: a living thing with pink flesh, almost alien in appearence, that just so happens to chase you when your flashlight IS pointed at it; let's call them chasers. How convenient!

It's great and all that these two monsters exist, and you probably continue on in the game into the park looking for a different couple, an uncared for building that is apparently the city entrance in an attempt to find a key, along with the subways, thinking that there will be some more great and challenging attempts at scaring you, but there isn't. These two monsters are all you will encounter for the entire 2 hours of this story. I wouldn't be so rough about it if it wasn't so easy to take advantage of the AI of these things. For example, the Creepers will reset and go back to what is defined as their home point once you run a certain distance, as do the Chasers. It ends up just being management and memorization of their positions. It becomes stale. Not exciting. Not fun.

So, what happens when you reach the subway, which is the final part of the game? You meet Cyrus for one last time who summons a train to get on and he tells you what essentially amounts to, "Thanks for playing my game, you can go home now." So much for that unique twist. All I can say is, I expected nothing, and yet I still can't help but feel disappointed.





So, like, yeah. It could definitely be a lot better. I watched the trailer after completing the game, and the best way I can put how this game is in its current state is that it's like scraps. Maybe this game accidently forgot its Early Access tag, maybe some content updates will bring it to a level of quality that I'll miss out on, who knows? There are already plenty of horror games that do what Stay Close does, but better. All I know is, I wouldn't spend $9 on it in its current state. $6 is pushing it.