|
|
Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Senscape Released: March 13, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 and above Processor: Minimum, 2.4 Ghtz; Recommended, 3.8 Ghtz Memory: Minimum 8 GB RAM; Recommended, 16 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Nvidia Geforce 840M or equivalent; Recommended, Nvidia GTX 1650 or equivalent DirectX: Version 12 Storage: 30 GB available space Extra note: Consider having heart medication at hand. Just in case.
|
|
|
By flotsam Senscape Many years in the making (it was originally announced in 2010), this “spiritual successor” to the 2006 horror-mystery Scratches sucked me in and (dare I say) scratched a few of my itches. The game takes place in the Hanwell Mental Institute, at which you arrive by car after a rather good opening scene and set of credits. There is a Hammer Horror vibe to the start that sets a good tone. When your car ride concludes and you get to take control, it's point and click all the way. It utilises node to node progression through the gaming environment, which works fine, especially as you have complete visual freedom at every node. The particular scene pivots around a fixed central point as you move the mouse about, and a little pointing finger will indicate where you can further move. Hotspots (which you can highlight with the Space bar) will enable you to explore a scene more deeply, and the particular icon generated will indicate what can occur at that spot. When you first enter the asylum, take the time to converse with the receptionist. It will help settle you into the game mechanics. Two key elements are your journal (right mouse click) and your record book (Esc key). The former is an all-purpose repository of conversation topics, objectives and inventory items, whilst the latter collects documents, memories and transcripts of conversations. A pop-up icon will tell you something has been added to one or the other, and it's worth playing around in them (and turning all the pages in the record book) to best appreciate how they operate. Even a cursory glance in the record book will indicate there are a large number of things to gather, and while all of it may not be essential in order to complete the game, the bits and pieces tell the backstory of things that went on here. Which is rather why you are there. Something has drawn you back, and you hope to find answers. Visually the game looks good, and combined with the ambient sound and the minimalist soundtrack (which knows when not to play) a suitably less than wholesome atmosphere is created. It isn’t a scary game, but grim things happened, and its tonally dark throughout. All the more so as you progress, gaining access to new areas and uncovering past secrets. You will come across a few other characters, some of them patients others of them not. You can (and should) converse with those whom you can, using your notepad to do so. The contents are organised under different tabs, and you pick an entry with your pencil to ask about it. Don’t think though that you are limited to just asking about things in the Topics tab. Entries in the other tabs are fair game, and whether or not something is an essential conversation (and some things certainly seem to be) being chatty can be informative. Conversations are voiced but your characters thoughts (e.g., “there is nothing in there that interests me”) are silent and read. I thought it worked well – why would he speak his thoughts out loud? You might hear voices as well in the visions and cutscenes that occur. Puzzling is largely of the finding and using the right item kind, but there are a few out and out puzzles. Some also randomise, one early on involving records being a case in point. I thought that puzzle was particularly good, putting together bits and pieces from various locations. It isn’t a hard game, and where I tended to be stuck was sorting out what I should be doing next. You will need to go back and forth through the asylum, by design as well as perhaps in search of what to do, and the maps you will find throughout the asylum will help in that regard. You will also build up your own sense of how to get from here to there, and while I suspect I took the long way round more than once, I was confident that a known route could get me from where I was to where I wanted to be. The tale gets more fantastical as you go, and I won’t spoil any of it by saying anything more. How you feel about the end will be up to you. It came as a surprise to me, as much because I was sure my character knew enough to result in a different ending. Clearly not! The pace is measured, which I enjoyed. Walk and explore, and walk and explore some more. Find and do some stuff and do that again. Even when being pursued in a sequence towards the end there was nothing frenetic about it. Its an aspect I like about about many adventure games. Certain scenes and locations are a tad confronting, this being an asylum and all, and there is one particularly grisly sequence involving a cadaver. And as the Steam page says “some texts in the game include references to physical abuse, sexual assault, and self-harm.” You should factor that into your choice about playing. Character modelling is a bit wooden but nothing off-putting. Voice acting is more than fine. When the little spanner/wrench icon appears, right clicking will bring up your hand with a held inventory item. Scroll with the mouse wheel to run through the items you possess, and then left click to try and use. Tweak some settings and save at will, multiple save points being available, and the game will pick up at the very point you left off. I had a good time in this asylum. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
|
