Young Lloyd goes to sleep and enters into a world unlike his own.
This is by far the best thing I've played in quite some time. It has the challenge of old school feeling somewhat like something from the 90s with one major difference that makes it significantly more palatable today; the thing is for a while games basically had to compel you to rent them for an entire weekend. Because of technological limitations it was simply not possible to make enough content to last that long.
That is of course unless one is willing to make something that while it ultimately doesn't take very long to complete it takes a lot of time before you get good enough to carry out what you need to in order to get all the way through it. This means that if you get 99% of the way there and then fail you would have to start all the way over. Screw you, should have done better. According to "how long to beat", this could take you four and a half hours in order to 100%. Significantly shorter.
In this it saves fully each time you clear an entire chapter, which, since there are no randomizing elements that mean that it would be difficult to recreate, albeit costing it replayability past a few collectibles and some achievements, mean that if you can memorize all that you need to do it'll be very easy to it much faster. And if you fail along the way you'll never have to redo more than two or three minutes.
This very much throws you in the deep end and hopes you can swim. You are given almost no instruction and seemingly you can go in a lot of different places though many will eventually have a dead end at least until you complete something in another part. This kind of openness is going to intrigue or frustrate you - possibly both at different points.
Given where it's set this does feature dreamlogic similar to the longer, more varied and also excellent Psychonauts. Gravity can be manipulated. You can walk on walls, even the ceiling. Certain things may be small when you pick them up and normal size when you use them. Some areas can be rotated 90 degrees entirely at your will and it's up to you to discover exactly when and how to, since this obviously opens up options that are normally closed off.
The atmosphere is incredibly effective, very gloomy, clearly seen in the lighting lots of blacks whites, shadows. The colors are not missing, rather, dimmed, with a few exceptions such as the neon teal electricity in wires. It feels oppressive; the haunting music works extremely well for this. The sound design is masterful. This manages to be terrifying without having to resort to violence and gore. While they add a lot to many horror stories, they would have felt out of place and excessive here. For example when they censored that stuff out of '80s movies like The Thing, The Terminator, The Fly, you lose a lot; they help make it clear how dangerous the situation is.
This features well-handled stealth. Basically sometimes you'll spot a creature that looks human and yet not quite that is moving at least a little bit and this is an unmissable clue that you have to sneak past them. It will be completely clear when they could hypothetically see you and basically you move when they aren't looking. Sometimes this requires you to hide part of the way there. All you have to do is get to that spot, the UI will indicate there's something you can do there, you press, and the animation for taking cover will play and you can stay there until it's safe to leave.
There are some parts where something takes a tiny bit of getting used to but the interaction is incredibly intuitive. Everything is controlled with WASD(movement) E(use), Space(go onto wall), Shift(run) and I(inventory). This is in stark contrast to games from 20 or 30 years ago, where they acted like the fact that essentially they could assign stuff to everything on the keyboard was a dare. There are parts where you have to quickly run away from something chasing you.
There's a ton of variety to the puzzles. Tile manipulation. You have to guide certain things from one point to another; maybe there's something along the way that needs to be aligned in order for that to happen, maybe you have to find items that then go in your inventory and you later use in static places. Like, at one point it's a literal extension cord. All this again is the kind of thing you can do today that you couldn't always. I love the two Gubble games, or Goober in certain parts of the world. However, they definitely don't have a huge amount of different types of brain teasers. Essentially they have one or two things they can do and then they do those in dozens of different ways.
I'll close this out with my personal favorite part. At one point there is a maze that you have to get through. It's one of those things where there's a ball that has to be guided and you can actually see all of the walls so technically by itself it's not hard to do. The reason that it still ends up really difficult is the fact that once you start on it the camera begins to turn the full 360 degrees around. And though if you remember what the next part is like, you can be solving it throughout that time, you can actually only see it for 90 of those and the remaining 270 show that a hideous being is gradually getting increasingly close to you. If it reaches you before you're done you'll have to redo the whole thing after being treated to the, for this rare, first person perspective jump scare. 10/10.
This is by far the best thing I've played in quite some time. It has the challenge of old school feeling somewhat like something from the 90s with one major difference that makes it significantly more palatable today; the thing is for a while games basically had to compel you to rent them for an entire weekend. Because of technological limitations it was simply not possible to make enough content to last that long.
That is of course unless one is willing to make something that while it ultimately doesn't take very long to complete it takes a lot of time before you get good enough to carry out what you need to in order to get all the way through it. This means that if you get 99% of the way there and then fail you would have to start all the way over. Screw you, should have done better. According to "how long to beat", this could take you four and a half hours in order to 100%. Significantly shorter.
In this it saves fully each time you clear an entire chapter, which, since there are no randomizing elements that mean that it would be difficult to recreate, albeit costing it replayability past a few collectibles and some achievements, mean that if you can memorize all that you need to do it'll be very easy to it much faster. And if you fail along the way you'll never have to redo more than two or three minutes.
This very much throws you in the deep end and hopes you can swim. You are given almost no instruction and seemingly you can go in a lot of different places though many will eventually have a dead end at least until you complete something in another part. This kind of openness is going to intrigue or frustrate you - possibly both at different points.
Given where it's set this does feature dreamlogic similar to the longer, more varied and also excellent Psychonauts. Gravity can be manipulated. You can walk on walls, even the ceiling. Certain things may be small when you pick them up and normal size when you use them. Some areas can be rotated 90 degrees entirely at your will and it's up to you to discover exactly when and how to, since this obviously opens up options that are normally closed off.
The atmosphere is incredibly effective, very gloomy, clearly seen in the lighting lots of blacks whites, shadows. The colors are not missing, rather, dimmed, with a few exceptions such as the neon teal electricity in wires. It feels oppressive; the haunting music works extremely well for this. The sound design is masterful. This manages to be terrifying without having to resort to violence and gore. While they add a lot to many horror stories, they would have felt out of place and excessive here. For example when they censored that stuff out of '80s movies like The Thing, The Terminator, The Fly, you lose a lot; they help make it clear how dangerous the situation is.
This features well-handled stealth. Basically sometimes you'll spot a creature that looks human and yet not quite that is moving at least a little bit and this is an unmissable clue that you have to sneak past them. It will be completely clear when they could hypothetically see you and basically you move when they aren't looking. Sometimes this requires you to hide part of the way there. All you have to do is get to that spot, the UI will indicate there's something you can do there, you press, and the animation for taking cover will play and you can stay there until it's safe to leave.
There are some parts where something takes a tiny bit of getting used to but the interaction is incredibly intuitive. Everything is controlled with WASD(movement) E(use), Space(go onto wall), Shift(run) and I(inventory). This is in stark contrast to games from 20 or 30 years ago, where they acted like the fact that essentially they could assign stuff to everything on the keyboard was a dare. There are parts where you have to quickly run away from something chasing you.
There's a ton of variety to the puzzles. Tile manipulation. You have to guide certain things from one point to another; maybe there's something along the way that needs to be aligned in order for that to happen, maybe you have to find items that then go in your inventory and you later use in static places. Like, at one point it's a literal extension cord. All this again is the kind of thing you can do today that you couldn't always. I love the two Gubble games, or Goober in certain parts of the world. However, they definitely don't have a huge amount of different types of brain teasers. Essentially they have one or two things they can do and then they do those in dozens of different ways.
I'll close this out with my personal favorite part. At one point there is a maze that you have to get through. It's one of those things where there's a ball that has to be guided and you can actually see all of the walls so technically by itself it's not hard to do. The reason that it still ends up really difficult is the fact that once you start on it the camera begins to turn the full 360 degrees around. And though if you remember what the next part is like, you can be solving it throughout that time, you can actually only see it for 90 of those and the remaining 270 show that a hideous being is gradually getting increasingly close to you. If it reaches you before you're done you'll have to redo the whole thing after being treated to the, for this rare, first person perspective jump scare. 10/10.
