KEY to FREEDOM 1.0 release!

[Kreekakon]

Yay! I just got back from choosing this custom story as the one to stream on Twitch for Amnesia night, because of all the rave reviews, and here are my thoughts on the whole thing! Been quite a while since my last CS review.

The review will be SPOILER-FREE

Mapping/Setting:

Let's get the ugly out of the way first. The mapping I feel is the biggest letdown in this otherwise really great mod. There are many rooms which are too empty, or could just do with more detail overall. The lighting lacks a lot of contrast, and quite a bit of it is quite implausible very noticeably.

It's just not extremely good is really all I have to say on the subject here. Adding more detail, and/or improving the lighting effects would help tons here!

Scares/Atmosphere:

The strongest point of the mod starts here...with a trait that almost all of the following categories below have: Originality.

There is a lot of old stuff here, but it is all used in a way that seemingly no one has thought to do before now. Things we have all seen before in other mods will move around, and behave like ones you've never seen before.

It is incredibly creative.

There are also a lot of subtle cues which after quite a while can be genuinely unsettling. Once I thought I heard an extra splash of water, but it was timed so well that I "definitely" heard it, but was subtle enough to dismiss as my own imagination. The follow-up sounds strongly proved me wrong. Not sure if it was intended, but props if it was!

There aren't many monsters in this mod, but that does not hurt the fear factor at all.

Storytelling:

The story in this mod is very simple with the player being tasked to recover a key from the castle, and discovering what had happened in said castle.

It sounds like it should be lackluster, but with the pacing of events, and the amount of information convoyed, this "should-be" lackluster story feels very adequate.

Don't get me wrong, the story itself does not go incredibly deep, but the way it was executed along with many of the hidden cues that players will be bound to find if they are paying attention (Especially the ending) make it all feel just satisfying enough to carry the weight of the story-telling burden in this mod.

Gameplay/Puzzles:

This one section is probably the STRONGEST of the entire mod. The gameplay, and level design for the most part is so well paced that you will naturally be fed right into the section as one ends. This is done through a series of actions the player takes, changes in levels, as well as subtle cues in the notes that will hint players as to what they should do next without outright shoving it in their faces.

When the player does an action which unlocks another part of the castle, torches next to it will light up.

Some people may call these sort of cues hand-holding, but I call them drawing a decent balance between pacing the player along your game without making them feel either overly hand-held, or lost. In the case of the torches it's fine since the player probably know that they opened some place anyways, and just want to know where it is.

Many of the puzzles have multiple phases in which what the player has already tried on the puzzle not being enough. The follow-up to these are always obvious, but just hidden enough so the player feels immensely satisfied for discovering it.

There is a part in some of the puzzles which I actually really didn't like though is when you came across the ones where you could only crack a code through brute force. This was not satisfying for the player to discover, because it feels as if they were just trying every possible combination rather than skillfully inferring the correct answer from someplace else.

Technical Issues:

None! Didn't run into any bugs whatsoever!

Verdict: Very adequately balanced story with immensely creative execution of gameplay, and scares using the old Amnesia assets is only really eld down from being truly a masterpiece by lackluster mapping. 8.4/10