Recent reviews by Foka

I love me some atmospheric exploration games, I really do. The Town of Light made me instantly buy it after looking through the screenshots. Boy, was I disappointed.

At first, I was optimistic. The environment was truly beautiful and encouraged to look around. First rooms of the asylum really impressed me with the level of detail. All the abandoned medical equipment, disturbing charts on the walls, eerie lighting. That was, however, just about everything I liked about this game.

It was just so cliché and horribly paced. You walk around for like an hour, having no clue what's going on and then boom, a convenient medical file that basically tells you 1/3 of the total story. On the other hand, it's the only source of reliable information you get. We don't really know who our narrator is and her version of the events is contradicting to what we get to actually see. Well, one might argue, that's exactly what the devs said about the game - but does it make it any less annoying? There's also random retrospections, during which you can either walk around with the speed of a turtle or just watch, and still screens of rather disturbing illustrations. Sure, they're nice and add to the plot, but the placement of those is sometimes just plain confusing.

So is the gameplay any better? Absolutely freaking not. While, despite my confusion, I still find the story sad and engaging, the gameplay absolutely crushes any positive feelings I had towards the game. You walk EXTREMELY slowly and there's lots of it. Up and down the stairs, crossing long corridors and lastly, performing annoying chores. And I mean it, anything you might call a "puzzle" is just a chore. Go and pick up that doll, now put it down on a wheelchair etc etc. I spent 3/4 of my playthrough just thinking "I don't wanna do it! I don't care!". Remember nice graphics? Well guess what, you can't interact with most of the objects. You can only pick up items related to the "puzzles" and read notes scattered around the facility and that itself isn't the easiest, considering the size of the cursor (which fills up when you're able to interact, which sometimes is honestly really tough to spot). There's also pages of Reneé's diary and what I found weird about that is you don't actually read through them while you play. You pick one up and it sort of just goes away, you can only read it once you go back to the menu. Lastly - invisible walls everywhere, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥!

You also have a couple of dialogue options which branch out the story - there's only one ending however, which for me just makes it meaningless and the ending itself is a nail in the coffin. Again, quite a random time to end a game and the sequence of events that you follow before it feels even more out of place. Because, you know, the game wasn't cliché enough - they just had to throw a graveyard in.


All in all, I truly and honestly wish I liked The Town of Light, but at the end of the day, the clunky, infuriating and repetitive gameplay just spoiled it for me. While it does sound great on paper and I have nothing but respect for the realism of the environment and the historical background, the execution just isn't there.

Being an extremely patient person, I have never, ever quit a game after 40 minutes. And then I got to the Labyrinth.

It was frustrating. It was senseless. It was game ruining. A puzzle that relies on choosing something that is 100% randomly generated and in no way can be thought through does not deserve to be called so. This wasn't supposed to be engaging or challenging in a good way, it was created to make you angry for no particular reason.

The game isn't really anything, it's not a horror, as there is zero thrill, tension or any sort of a scare factor, there are no enemies, the notes scattered around rooms don't say anything that would make me any interested about finding out who the protagonist is and the puzzles, which are supposed to be the strongest quality of the game are utterly uninspired and, thus far, either completely random or demanding you to copy something from your nearest surroundings. I rage quit the game during the puzzle that required you to line up a couple of components. The default mouse sensitivity is so high that this alone made me nauseous and the process absolutely horrendous.

I regret spending a single pence on this game; I felt nothing but frustration and anger and I absolutely didn't care for the non existent plot.

The game doesn't allow the player to save. At all. If you rage quit during one of many frustrating sequences, boom, it's pretty much gone.

Cheap jumpscares all over the place and outraging, non existing save system that made me utterly furious after the game crashed (and it wasn't the first time it did) during the last puzzle of my second playthrough to unlock a different ending. My option once the game was back up? To start a new game. Unbelievable.

It proves that pigeons make better lovers than humans. 10/10.