KEY to FREEDOM 1.0 release!

[lllDash]

So, I finished the custom story today, and I loved going through the puzzles and scares. However, I found a major glitch in the game that shortened my experience.

Spoiler below!

At the area where you need to put the orb pieces into the orbs I noticed there was a trapdoor on the ceiling, where I found the nearby ladder and tried to climb up to it. Eventually I put the ladder under the trapdoor and steadily stood it up, then I was able to climb the ladder quickly and touch the trapdoor which loaded the next room with the key to freedom.

After that, I realized I just skipped finding two more orbs to get to the room, and I finished the story sooner.

Yes I am aware of this bug. It's now fixed. thanx. Either way you could've just not gone up the ladder and continued with the CS normally

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Okey so, Dash. I am just here to say that i have found a bug in your map. And that the map is still amazing in all ways, but there is this bug that i found and it will destroy all of the game play.
And when i can, i will uppload a video on youtube to show where the bug is. But you will have to wait on that because of my internet.

Just tell me what it is. I know the CS like the back of my hand. I'm always updating it. Thanx

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Thank you all for the positive and informative feedback. Thanks to the community, I was able to discover glitches and unrefined aspects of the Custom Story. Because of you guys I was able to improve on the CS and now it currently holds a 9.6/10 on ModDB. Thanks again X)

[xiTuneR]

Hi i like your CS very much but i cant find the red shard to solve the orb puzzel. I think its maybe in a trapdoor over the eaglestatue but im unable to reach up there even with that ladder... Could u help me please?

[Red]

What is with this key trend lately? Anyway, i am gonna put this under my critic scope and say where does this belong in my personal 1 - 10 score scale, i will be back.

[Red]

I am back but to say i am stuck.

Spoiler below!

The ladder part at fifth map might be too complicated. I am totally clueless how to get to the hatch. If there's a logical solution for this which i've missed, I won't lower the score, otherwise i will count that as flaw.

EDIT: To tell more, i've found the box and the ladders. For some reason, the
combination of these two doesn't seem to work. I must be missing something, or so i think at least.

Great story so far, one of my fauvorites definitely.

[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

[lllDash]

Thanks for the review. Some rooms may seem empty, but I couldn't add too much detail for performance reasons, I even mentioned this in one of my commentaries. I also don't get what you mean by lack of contrast in lighting. Oh well, glad you enjoyed the mod. Cheers.

[Kreekakon]

I also don't get what you mean by lack of contrast in lighting.

Sorry for the late response!

Anyways, what I meant by contrast of lighting was that in a single room I often times noticed that the brightness of lighting in the room felt very much the same a lot of the time. Dark parts were not really dark, and bright areas were not really that bright. It may have been owed to the overall layout of the maps that putting such a contrast in would not make sense based on where the light sources were, but in my opinion I think this can also be considered a flaw of the mapping.

When the lighting seems too similar across the board it can seem very bland, and uninteresting. With more contrast a room can really be spiced up because of the variety in lighting, and be very interesting to look at.