Recent reviews by chaosharlequin

There's plenty of reviews and essays -- written and video -- on why this game is garbage.

It only took so long because of constant crashing and reloading and I didn't even get the final achievement, even though I finished the game and sat there through that atrocious ending. I don't have the patience to sit through that crap AGAIN. The writer/director needs to seriously reconsider how they want to tell a story.

Save yourself the money. Don't buy it. Not even on sale. Just don't get it. "Oh, all these positive reviews must be worth something!"

No. This isn't a "discussion piece." This is every heavy-handed subject handled in the clumsiest hands. The positive reviews have no idea how awful and misrepresenting this is of everything it tries to handle. Don't waste your money.

I have a couple other Sapphire Dragon Productions games, but this is the first one I have played.

I have to say, I'm not impressed.

But there's more than I can simply say than "It's bad."

I will never be one to rag on voice acting too much if not done professionally, but everything felt very, very forced. At one point I took a Snapchat and sent it to my French friend to see how fake the accent was and she burst out laughing. Not a good sign. I don't quite understand why we needed a mishmash of people; it actually made the characters harder to keep track of instead of easier. Their "accents" were their characters, and in a story-heavy game, they need far more than that.

This had a very Soprano's-esque ending; very sudden, very jarring, no closure on anything, since I didn't particularly care for any of the characters. So an abrupt ending like this is also a smack in the face to anyone who actually sat through everything, listened, and put the story together.


For that matter, I didn't really care about anyone, or the plot. The story is told as you have to sit there and listen and try to decipher these very stereotypical accents to figure out what the characters are saying. Something such as flashbacks enacting the scene may have helped. Sprites to the characters, if nothing else. I didn't remember the charaters' names, I didn't particularly care why they were there. I was thinking more of how unrealisitically this "campus" was laid out -- mazes through forests to get to another part of campus? I can assure you, that doesn't happen.

A forest maze I can understand, but the library maze was completely unnecessary. It wasn't hard in the slightest, just padded the game out further. Our main character even lampshades this when he asks why there is a maze and switches in the back of a library -- if you can't tell me why it's there, then don't put it in.

All in all, this felt very slapdash. It feels like there was a story wanting to be told here, but there was too much left untold (and not inferred or "oh figure it out" written cleverly; I know stories don't need handholding. A pet peeve of mine actually) and too many holes. On top of that, the main character's running speed should have been the walking speed. Holding down Shift to go everywhere was also tedious and a bit asinine. The cherry on it were the unchanged sound effects from RPGMaker defaults.

This isn't worth two bucks, guys, and it makes me leery of the other projects by this studio.

And hey, when people report and achievement is bugged? Please fix it. I'm missing the most complained-about bugged achievement, which was supposedly fixed and reported again with no updates since.

Proof that you don't need an amazing story or controls to provide a ridiculous amount of fun or a feeling of being an immense badass. Whenever I don't know what to do or want to kill some time, put myself in a better mood, anything, I gravitate to this game.

For $4.99, I really can't recommend it. If it were a buck, two bucks, sure. I've seen and played better games that are free or less than this.

For what it was, it did do some things right; it's not complete garbage, like I see a lot of people saying. Some of the ambient noises were effective, and if you are home alone, it is at least unnerving to constantly have your surroundings questioned. But it's mostly too heavy-handed.

The jumpscares got me a couple times only because I'm highly suscepitble to them, not because they actually frightened me. I find jumpscares to be pretty cheap tactics, and they were absolutely cheap here. A well-executed jumpscare need a lot more buildup in tension. Popping up in the middle of the question or dialogue was simply hilarious after a while, and I kept finding myself chuckling.

I can see what the dev was going for here, and I do applaud them for attempting something different, at least. This was far from meta, however, even though it continually tried to push the envelope. Overall, though, I do feel like this was five bucks I could have spent on something else. I wanted to try it for myself after seeing John Wolfe play it. I'm pretty middle of the road on it, but can't recommend paying full price, even for curiosity's sake.

If you're even the slightest bit curious, just wait for a Steam sale.

My full review is over here: over here. [valsvideogamevalhalla.com]

But, tl;dr?

Definitely give Kathy and her story a shot; it’s one that’s brilliantly told despite its shortcomings, and a breath of fresh air in today’s gaming world.