Please be warned that this review contains spoilers for in-game content.
Graphics
Graphics are quite nice in some aspects, not so great in others. It's a bit of a mixed bag which is sad because there's a lot of potential shown here. If I had to sum graphics up in a few words they would be 'nice but half-assed'. How so?
The graphical components are a hodge-podge of different styles in the demo. Some are very obviously lovingly crafted but! they often are coupled with graphics and mapping that is less than stellar. This distracts and detracts from the custom graphics and leaves the demo feeling unfinished. Which, granted, it is, being a demo and all but it also comes off as disjointed in a few areas which does no favours for the whole feel of the game.
An example of this is the disparity between the house inner and the cottage inner. One is filled with -not badly mapped, but not well mapped either- RTP tiles, while in the other everything is custom or highly edited. This, sadly, adds a realm of disbelief in the world of the game since comparative items are used that break the immersion - key point, the beds. One is the size of the sprite, the other is much, much larger.
Another graphical issue is simply that the atmosphere doesn't do anything to help the game. This is a horror game. It is made to scare the player. Currently the demo doesn't do this, bar one occasion. Said occasion is a jump scare that you could see coming a mile away and it was not so much the actual event that caused the jump but the content itself.
There is no build-up to incite release. There's no stringing the player along and making them worry for their character. There is nothing that gives you the feeling of danger and what few sudden deaths there are just don't make sense or do not shock because of that lack of build-up. It's something that the creators will have to work on in order to actually make a horror game, else the whole concept falls flat.
Story
Your wife is missing. It is the middle of the night. Go find her.
That is the premise of what story there is and it's not very gripping. Sadly, in the demo there was no emotional attachment to the wife for the player. Your only clue that the hero is romantically involved with said woman (who we only ever see a shadow of and may not actually exist at all as far as the player is concerned) is the word 'dear' in some intro dialogue and the double bed your hero wakes in. It is only later that the hero mentions her as his wife.
Character depth is missing, but that's too big an issue with most horror RPGs. Frankly, nameless little girls tend to be a trend in the horror world (not that I can talk about that ;p ) so it is nice to change to a man. I've been told that there are plans and that there will be a very engrossing story but we see none of it with-in the demo.
In fact, that only really interesting point is right at the end - the introduction of Shadow. Sadly, he's not enough to pull along the story or even make you that curious about what will happen next. He babbles out a few philosophical lines about being the main character - an 'other self' if you will - and that said missing wife is his as well and... that's it. End of game. But he's nothing we haven't seen before in other horror games so he comes off as not quite interesting. Hell, the shadow in The Way (not a horror game but with aspects of horror) was more interesting and it didn't get to talk until much later in that game, from what I recall.
I think one thing that makes this antagonist fall flat is the lack of action on his part. We meet him playing a piano, cue applause from shadow figures, them 'dying' and... that's it. He doesn't do anything to inspire us to fear or worry about him so, sadly, he falls flat.
As for the title character? We only ever see him on the title screen. I thought that was the wife, actually, since we know she has brown hair thanks to some interaction with a giant (graphically out of place) mask. Who is this guy and why is he relevant? No idea.
What would have made this better was some sort of shown affection and interaction between husband and wife. Hell, add in cutesy-lovey flash-back time with the beloved pet in the back yard (who you only know is a pet and not some wild animal that got slaughtered and dumped there thanks to one line of dialogue) and there would have been a lot more incentive to actually care about the main character and his plight.
One thing I can say, though, is that the writing - while stilted in a few cases - is well done. Grammar, spelling and punctuation (bar a few ellipses overuse) was used well and dialogue flowed decently, what there was of it.
Sound
There wasn't much music from what I could hear, but then I had to turn the sound down pretty low due to it being very early morning and the recording of the game. That said, what there was was decent. Nothing mindblowing, but decent.
Sound was used in some cases and that's great, but there needed to be more subtle use of it to build tension and atmosphere. The lack of music should make you tense in a game like this but it didn't. The sound effects were decent but more of them were needed to herald the coming of bad things - an example would be the sound of rushing water near the river. Add a small overlay of drips when the body pulls itself out to stab you and you'd have created a bit more atmosphere.
Some sounds were, sadly, jarring. The manic laughter, for example, was quite cliche and didn't really convey anything. Madness? Not really, it wasn't the right kind of crazy laughter for that. Still, at least there were sounds used, but more would definitely help.
Gameplay
Gameplay wasn't bad in most cases. It was probably my computer but I experienced some lag at times, so just double-check that there's appropriate lag killing in events just in case.
When there weren't bland deaths, there were bland puzzles. They didn't really require you to think or retain information, to explore or really do anything interesting.
One was basically guessing what the tree wanted, collecting the required item which was a few unhindered screens away and then grabbing a key. The weirdest thing about that part was the sudden appearance of the choice items just outside the screen where the tree was after you 'get the quest' and the just as sudden disappearance after you fulfil the quest. It would have been a better idea to encourage exploration by making those items collectable through the maps between finding the tree, then having to make a choice as to what to use on the tree when it asks for your 'aid'. Not only would there have been better interaction, but it would have encouraged exploring your maps instead of just breezing through them.
The second 'puzzle' involved checking a room for items, reading a book and then leaving. That was it. You get a poem, which I'm sure comes in handy later, but perhaps you could have involved other aspects into the puzzle like, oh, finding a way to get the book out from under the bed (where Mr Jump-scare lived) without dying by using different items in the room.
The last quest was also an odd one. You had to answer four statues and pick the right choice. Get it wrong, instant death. A sign told you the answer at the start and... that was is. Just save and fudge your way through it. Get it wrong, reload, retry. It just didn't engage the player at all. Why were we answering these statues beyond getting past them? Where did they come from? Why were they blocking the way and how did they get there? It just really came off as filler for fillers' sake - a way to pad out the game without actually making puzzles that required real thought.
I mean, you could have had the four statues all around the forested areas (there was one in the lake) and have them ask questions which you could find the answers to in books hidden around the house. It would involve learning more about the hero - what books a person keeps says a lot about themselves - and tie in to the whole 'other self as me' thing - that the locks were parts of the hero's persona that he needed to remember. Throw in something like a wedding album where you can see a wedding photo or pictures, letters, personal bits and pieces that you could sort through and there's a lot more addition to the characterisation of your hero and his wife right there.
Summary
Look, I wanted to like this demo, I did. It has some really nice looking graphics but they're let down by laziness (you created giant footprints that are about the size of the hero's head when it would have been just as fast and easy to have created appropriately sized ones.) Some scenes could have had really cool stuff done with them like the body in the water, but it was opted to just do a slap-dash job of it instead of bothering to really make it shine a bit more. Puzzles were bland, sounds were okay but didn't help build atmosphere and in cases were jarring, characters weren't fleshed out enough and the plot was vague and basic (not in a good way) at best.
I know. It's a demo. Sure, I get that. I get that desire to release something into the world and say "Hey, look, see what I got here, check it out~" but the thing is - and I said this in my LT but I'm gonna say it again - demos are supposed to drum up excitement for a game. They should pop out and stick in the mind so that when you do release the game in full people will be all "Oh, hey, I remember that game! I want to play it!"
Unfortunately, this demo just didn't do that for me. Give it six months and more likely than not, all I will remember of it is the controversy that struck up over the reviews. And that is sad because I do see some promise in this. I can see the shiny little diamond that it wants so badly to be. I just think it should have been given a bit more love and polishing because at the moment, it's more coal than gem and it deserves more than that.
