RE: Awakening to Shattered Life v1.3
I'm sorry, but I think it was really not good at all. I feel compelled to write a full review of it, because it had so much potential, and I have also made a full playthrough of it so you can see how I reacted to it and understand why. I'll upload it in the coming days.
First of all, the map design was fairly good, especially in the Dungeon part. Design - not layout. There were a few awful ones, like the "original lobby", which was way too empty, undetailed and bland, but I saw how much work you put into this - at least most of the time.
First of all, the scares. You say there are no jump scares in this story, but I beg to differ. In fact, the only scares that really startled me were the jump scares, and shortly after they did that, they pissed me off, since jump scares are just cheap. Throughout the story, you try to catch the player off-guard with various types of scares, including:
Monsters out of nowhere - and they weren't scary at all, since there was no buildup at all most of the times. Also, a couple of monsters started chasing me when I hadn't collected everything I needed, which required me to hide, wait until it was gone, and then search for the missing equipment. It happened once with the dungeon key - I had found the dungeon entrance key before - and it also happened when I had found the acid to melt the padlock, but not the hammer to break it. Don't trigger events when the player does not have all the items to proceed, at least not if it's supposed to be a chase.
Poofers - Yeah, please don't do that. Cheap, irritating and hardly scary.
Things flying off shelves/walls - not scary. Also, WAAAAY overdone. It became irritating after the tenth time it happened.
The skeleton sword torso guy in the dungeons - if you make it appear twenty times over the course of a minute, don't expect it to scare people.
Jump Scares - like I said, the only scares that bothered me at all, and they didn't bother me in the good way (as in the way of "I'm scared"), but in a really bad way (as in the way of "what the fuck is it with these jump scares").
Then, the plot. First of all, and this goes to everyone, please proof-read your stories, and if you're not good with English, let someone who is do it. Broken English breaks immersion and feels way out of place.
To the story (at least how I saw it): I'm apparently a guy named John who has a servant (who also appears to be a teacher) named William. One night, after a nightmare, stuff begins to happen and I am sent on a quest to save my servant. I proceed through a maze of rooms to the dungeon, where I have to assemble an orb for some unexplained reason. In the end, the orb does absolutely nothing at all in saving him, but instead lets me escape my castle - my own castle - and then I live happily ever after. Except that I'm now homeless. And still don't know just what the hell was going on in that castle. Also, I started writing a diary on some recordings I apparently made at some point in the past, but decided not to continue it past part 1. The End.
You expect the player to decide whether to save or sacrifice William at the end, making it seem like a really big ethical question, but in reality, it really didn't bother me much. There was no emotional connection to him whatsoever, so as soon as I got the opportunity to save myself, I did. To me, William was some random dude who just happened to be my servant. Sorry William, but yeah, good riddance.
I found it hard to immerse into the universe you created. Constantly, I was asking myself "Why did that happen", "How does this make any sense", "What the hell" - and well, there is that thing called suspension of disbelief, but for it to work, it at least has to make sense from an in-universe perspective. And no, it didn't, not at all.
So while I appreciate the work that went into this, it's really just a bad custom story. Sorry to critizise that harshly, but in the end, I was pushing myself to finish it, even though I really didn't want to. It bored me, and in fact, never amused me in the first place.
(This post was last modified: 10-31-2012, 06:39 PM by ThePaSch.)
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Awakening to Shattered Life v1.3
Thanks for everything.
