Serena (2014)

The voice acting was a little on the cringe worthy side. It would've been acceptable if the plot was more intriguing but it didn't hold up. The plot twist at the end I found very unsatisfying and the last scene froze as I was staring at the window. Put up with all that just to have the game freeze on me at the end for no apparent reason.

This is a bizarre and quite disturbing short game. You play as a man waiting at the cabin for his wife and the object of the game is to walk around, clicking on objects to piece together the relationship they share. Things start getting really weird and then... well, you'll have to find out. I enjoyed the unsettled feeling that slowly develops and the little hints you start to pick up to find out what's going on. While it is a short game, it's the perfect length for the main objective. Since it's all point and click, there is no real skill involved, but you will want to be mindful of some things (like checking the photograph on the table often) and since it's a horror game, there are some disturbing elements.

As much as I hate knocking gifts, I can't say I really enjoyed Serena, a short adventure game designed by several veterans of the adventure game industry and released free of charge. In Serena, you play a man idly exploring the cabin he and his wife shared in happier times, looking for her and trying to remember where she went. As you examine all the old souvenirs of happier times, the story unfolds and the sordid truth of the matter is revealed. Gameplay is limited to clicking on an area of the cabin to explore, then selecting objects in the environment to examine. It's a simple game, and I honestly love the idea of using interactive environments as a medium for telling a short story, but the execution here just failed critically on a few fronts.

Perhaps it was an intentional move, but I quickly resented the protagonist, finding him more whiny and irritating with each inane object he babbled on about. Examples include a salt shaker, a dried flower, and a piece of gum on a chair. His story did eventually pull me in, but I kept finding myself loathing the stereotypical bitter asshole beta male he embodied. What was less intentional and much more harmful was the painfully phoned-in voice work for Serena; while the protagonist's voice acting wasn't half bad, Serena's voice actress sounded like she was just reading off cue cards she'd only just seen for the first time. This wouldn't be too killer an issue, but voice acting is how the entirety of the story is told.

The stranger issue I had with the game was how much the Kickstarter extras destroyed the atmosphere they were trying to create. Don't get me wrong; I love goofy extras in games. I just prefer when some effort is required to find them. Serena instead chooses to blast you with them right off the bat. Every aspect of the intended story is painfully sincere, and the environment they place you in is dark, decrepit, and tragic, but moments into the game you find a bookshelf full of novels about lesbian goat zombies and goofy retro video game references. Various Kickstarter donors were allowed to populate the bookshelf, and this is the outcome. At another point, you find an inexplicably non sequitor Lovecraftian comic book page in a dresser drawer. I have no idea what it's supposed to represent, but I assume it was another Kickstarter donor addition, since there's no other Lovecraftian elements in the entire cabin. In such a short game, with so little room to wall off the goofiness, these elements were just tossed in wherever they'd fit. They contributed little and seriously threw off my ability to get into the actual narrative.

Serena is free. If you own a Steam account, you already own Serena, so there's no point in me saying whether or not to buy it. On top of that, you can easily beat it in just under an hour, so there's no real commitment stopping you from playing it. If you enjoy adventure games, it's not without merits, but it also makes me feel grateful for games with bigger budgets and longer development times. If nothing else, consider it an excellent example of what not to do with Easter eggs.