I have no idea what drove me to randomly want to try this game out but from the get go I can tell you: It is very cheap with it's horror elements, it is kinda of hilarious at just at every attempt it will try to introduce a "new" enemy or just, throw something for you to fight randomly, enemy speeds are completely random and sometimes zip zoom around the place and it is a horror game that makes one say "What the hell?" in terms of like design, not like genuine fear or anything like that, like things just happen. I don't think the development of this game had anything particular in mind when going for something, it lacks vision or purpose, so it is mostly a generic survival-horror inspired canvas to splatter ideas on.
For someone (me) who isn't particularly scared by jumpscares, they tend to come off as a bit hilarious because the game is desperately trying to throw things on the wall of an otherwise nonsensically mundane scenario with not much explanation. Enemy combat is incredibly random and comes off a bit as funny. Enemies are supposed to be scary and surreally unnerving but they just come off as if they're badly animated, like the same feeling I get from them is from seeing a fast moving T-Pose model.
However, it is a playable game, that much I can say of it? Weirdly open-world is a sense, it reminds me of one of those free half-life mods one would obtain that tried to do horror things, and for all of it's issues, I do like that it is somewhat fast-paced in which it allows you to run through the game a lot at a high speed, there is a certain dull build up but really things just go fast unless you get lost, and a lot of that is because there are many locations that serve no purpose other than show the modeling skills of the developer, credit where's credit due: some places look like nice detailed areas that would of probably have been cool maps for an FPS RPG game.
But, as fancy as the maps can look sometimes for an indie game, they're empty. Sometimes things just end in a dead end, you open a new location and you might be confused because that new location ended in NOTHING, a part of me gets that it is getting inspiration from Silent Hill, but Silent Hill had quest markers, and proper dungeons, a game from 1999 had those, this has entire streets with not much to do. As far as these assets seem like a stroke of talent (they could be asset flips I'm not sure but they all seem to be in a unique art style) a lot of locations are not necessary.
There's a difference between this and the multiple "locked doors" of Silent Hill, while Silent Hill goes out of it's way to even scratch out in your map all of the doors you tried, Silent Hill doesn't usually send you out to a corridor that has NO progression to go towards, this game does, if going up to the stairs goes to a room with nothing, why not just block the stairs like a usual survival horror does? And due to the non-linear nature of this open-world-lite game, you always think "well what if i didn't 100% explore it" but you did, you can definitely cut trims on the paths that go nowhere.
The idea to make your flashlight run on rare batteries that drain quickly is also a bad idea because it is likely you will forget and leave it on, but considering how lighted up everything is, it isn't that necessary. A dog randomly appears, and you get to pet it. Sometimes doors taunt you that you can't open, like "this door is locked" will suffice, but "it is locked from the other side" might make it seem as if you have to go through a secret passage, no, it is just locked forever. Again this game LOVES to make locations with nothing inside them and it makes you paranoid if you missed anything because due to the nature of being open-world to some extent, the worst thing is having you go all of the other way because you didn't spam E.
