Recent reviews by DECimotA

Overall Score: 52 of 100%. Great potential, but currently disappointing and not yet worth it.



Concept and Originality: 20/25

I absolutely, absolutely love the idea of this game. Using mechanics like the microphone in the horror genre can be terrifying if used to good effect, and also because it isn't something you often see. The main gimmick of surviving by keeping yourself quiet despite whatever gets in your way is super fascinating to me and I can't get over how cool of a concept that is. It's not anything I've seen before, so it really stands out and I think this could be an amazing game once more things get added, stuff gets fixed, and all of that goodness.

Game Design: 14/25

The design itself is pretty alright, I like the style of the introduction and the menu, and the filter is used to good effect as does the forest seeming pretty real. There is an odd effect where the ground always seems to be loading in around you as you traverse the map, which I assume is something that hasn't yet been worked out with the game being in Early Access, but it does distract from the overall design of the forest somewhat. One critique I have is that the sound effects of the footsteps your character makes just... always sounded kind of off? It always sounded like there was something else walking to the side of me instead of just my character walking, which had me constantly thinking that something was walking along with me and about to scare me like everything else in the game.

Overall Gameplay: 06/25

Oh boy, the gameplay is... it really isn't much. I very much agree with what other people have said in that, despite a really strong start and build-up before the sky turns to night, the game very quickly becomes repetitive, mostly cheap jumpscares or predictable sequences that also tend to repeat because you'll see the same ones over and over within a single night given the long time period, or they'll occur again on repeated playthroughs if you don't make it through the 18 minutes on your first attempt, and that can quickly desensitize the player. And it really just becomes a walking simulator around a forest while random things try, and probably fail, to scare you unless you're extremely caught off guard. I know that more dynamic and diverse scares are in the works as well as side objectives, which would greatly help here, but there really needs to be some kind of objective that forces you to keep moving and to have a clear goal in mind. This could also be useful in taking you out of the forest and into buildings or structures where things can be worked much differently than the openness of a wild forest, and perhaps a time limit as opposed to running a timer down to 0 could even work in the game's favor, pressuring the player to keep moving forward even if they're extremely hesitant, creating a sense of fear and panic beyond that which the scares attempt to create. Furthermore, unless approaching certain entities could kill you (which I'm not aware of), the only threat in the game is simply screaming, given the objective. This tends to work against the game's horror aspects because random threats and enemy encounters begin to feel very weak when a horde of spiders or some demonic beast approach you when you know you're not going to die unless you happen to scream or gasp if you weren't expecting it, and they're not actually going to kill you by slicing you in half or biting your head off or anything. There's a ton of potential here and I cannot wait for future versions of this game to implement more mechanics and scares and whatnot, but the current aspect of the game really works against it between the repetitiveness, cheap jumpscares, incredibly long playtime, lack of any real threat, etc.

Personal Enjoyment: 11/25

Overall, it wasn't a bad experience but it definitely didn't live up to what I had in mind, but I can still see a lot of potential for this game as previously stated. I definitely look forward to what the developers have in-store for the future and wouldn't bother trying to take my money back for this product or anything, but I cannot recommend the game in its current state due to how quickly the game loses its charm in the gameplay, as well as other minor elements like some graphics and design choices needed to be worked out. I strongly believe that quality-of-life updates, new content, bug patches, design fixes and other such changes could vastly improve the game and that it would be more worth purchasing at that time, but that is not currently the case.