AMFP Member Review Thread

[Ghieri]

Ok. Finally beat the game. I must say the first half was terrifying because I didn't know what to expect. In the second half of the game, I got used to it and then I felt almost no fear at all, even when there was a monster I was running from. I was actually able to push from the half-way point to the end in one playthrough.
TCR made a good game, but not a good horror game.


Biggest Complaints:

Spoiler below!

I successfully guessed most of the major plot points in the first half of the game. Namely:
-The kids were already dead.
-Mandus was the saboteur.
-The professor(Machine) was the bad guy.
-The "pigs" were actually people. Though, we knew this before release.

Second, the pig monsters weren't scary. At all. You can bull-rush the monster, jump OVER it, run like hell, and still escape. You can even take a few hits from it and live. I found this out because the first encounter actually froze me in fear, but then he hit me, hit me again, and I just jumped past him and ran. Then I realized I was both faster and more durable than the monsters could handle.

Third, electro-kaernk was a nice throwback, but I really have no idea why they were there in the first place.(Apparently they were confiscated from Brennenburg, but WHY?!)

Stopping the count, but an electro-pig-monster? Really? So we crossed from mysterious and highly-improbable but still believable to insanely out of place and over the top? They weren't scary, they weren't even believable. The second time I faced this, I actually died, then realized I had to run from it again. Which was more a chore than anything.

The scene cuts were confusing. The first one technically was the one where I mixed the compound and went through a series of corridors to get back to the room. I turned around and the door disappeared. I actually was shocked by that and wrote it off as a freaky hallucination thing.

But then it kept happening. I mean, near the end I was even questioning whether the machine was even real at all, and mandus was just an insane person who killed his kids.

We saw almost nothing about what the machine actually was used for. A few blood streams and a couple of carved bodies. But no assembly lines, no meat hooks with human remains. Just mostly random machinery that could be anything.

There was nothing truly terrifying about the machine. I think TCR steered us clear from the areas of the machine that REALLY mattered. All we got to see were vague-looking engines and pulleys that could have been for literally any machine. Near the end we saw the pyramid and the streams of blood but those were a bit over the top. But did make for a kick-ass final level.

What I liked:


The atmosphere. I will make love to this.

The first 30 minutes. Those were actually the most fear inducing moments in the game, because I had no idea what to expect.

Spoiler below!

Pretty much everything before I woke up the machine. Actually, no. Pretty much everything before I mixed the compound x to get through the padlock. That was the turning point when things stopped getting scary for me. Even the kaernk, which terrifies me in every playthrough I've done of TDD, didn't really scare me that much.

The story was actually very lovecraftian, and very interesting. But it was more of the philosophical kind of horror and not the in-your-face batter-the-senses kind of horror that we got from TDD. It will kind of get me thinking about things, but not the scariest game I've played.


That's it for now. Bedtime.

Oh, before I forget: I was surprised to see some FG forum members in the credits. Pretty cool.