Dark Memories – Prologue (PC) Review

 

In the Prologue of ‘Dark Memories’ you get into a snowstorm while you travel towards a holiday location called ‘Brenton Lake’ and have to now search for shelter.

The driving experience is a large part of the Prologue and it is admittedly done quite well. The snowfall is very heavy, the visibility low and there aren’t too many distractions. It is quite a realistic depiction of the scenario and therefore quite immersive. You really want to find that shelter to get out of the snow chaos and survive the night. I also like how you slow done significantly when driving upwards and have to actively break when going downwards, which you don’t see in every game with driving sections.

But let’s talk about the big problem of this Prologue. It is a Horror Game that so far lacks nearly all Horror elements. I don’t mind a game, that takes its time and slowly raises the tension, but in Dark Memories you wait for this increase till the Prologue abruptly ends. I acknowledge that the pure expectation, that something scary is going to happen soon, is a part of the Horror experience, but the Prologue needed to show us more.

Interactions here are decent, but very brief. There is just not enough going on so far or rather there isn’t enough to do as a player. I understand that the Prologue isn’t supposed to be too long or spoiler too much, but it should feel like something that could stand on it’s own. Even a little scare or a meaningful ending would have gone a long way. So far it feels like you just started playing the game and after 10 minutes somebody randomly pulled the plug, regardless of where you were. It is undeniably more work to create a short Prologue, which is completely independent of the full game experience, but it might have helped to actually showcase the game experience better.

What I can however praise are the visuals of the game. For an Indie Horror Game, Dark Memories actually looks quite well. A lot of other small Horror Games go for a Pixel or PSX inspired visual style, but the visuals do fit well here.

I also saw some users complaining about the performance, but I can’t really confirm that experience. The settings offer a good amount of customizability and the performance for me was rather smooth. The game received a couple of updates in regard to performance improvements, so maybe those did the trick.

 

Result:

Evaluating the Prologue of Dark Memories is pretty difficult. I like the immersive start of the game, where you drive through a snowstorm in the middle of the night, while trying to stay on the road a little while longer, till you can find some shelter. But there simply isn’t enough going on to properly judge the game potential so far. The Prologue unfortunately doesn’t feel like a complete experience. Just when you expect something to happen, it ends out of nowhere. I can’t deny that I am a little intrigued, but there are too many unnecessary questions still open and make the Prologue feel like a bit of a wasted opportunity.

 

5/10

Whispering Death - Prologue (PC) Review

 

In the Prologue of Whispering Death you wake up in a twisted nightmare version of your own home and have to escape from there.

This is by no means a groundbreaking new concept, but the game has a few strengths. The atmosphere feels always threatening. You are never fully at ease, since you can both see a demon lurking around the corner and hear her talking to you. In the beginning this is great and immersive, but after a few minutes it wears off. The voice clips keep repeating too often and too frequent and you will come to discover, that you don’t get attacked by the demon, unless you enter a room with her inside.

The gameplay actually incorporates the nightmare setting quite nicely. Instead of respawning you will keep waking up each time you died, like a nightmare you can’t escape from. The difference is, that key items will be rearranged each time with procedural generation. On the one side it’s great, because it encourages really exploring your house each playthrough. On the other hand it can also make the game much more cumbersome, since objects sometimes get hidden in really obscure places or occasionally seem to disappear altogether.

The game also has a really annoying physics feature. Instead of just opening doors via a mouse click you have to open them via a mouse movement, which adds nothing but frustration. The mouse movement often doesn’t register or overshoots, which makes opening doors more convoluted than necessary. I get that the devs wanted to show off their fancy physics engine, but this is just a bad feature. The have apparently already got player feedback in that regard months ago, but neither fixed nor removed it.

The ending of the game is also quite disappointing. There is no ending cutscene, instead you just see a black screen with a dog barking in the background. This was very dissatisfying. Whispering Death has only 1 Ending and features 6 relatively easy Steam Achievements.

 

Result:

Whispering Death is both intriguing and disappointing. The nightmare setting is a good idea and procedural generation could in theory even enhance the experience by encouraging further exploration. So far however the feature is a bit too flawed and would require more polish. The physics engine also needs an overhaul for the release of the full game. Whispering Death so far does a competent job at initially creating an immersive Horror atmosphere, but it can’t keep it up for long till the flaws become apparent.

 

5.5/10

Nebula Realms (PS4) Retrospective Review

 

Nebula Realms was a real-life simulator game on PS4 and Steam, similar to games like Playstation Home and Second Life. Especially Playstation Home inspired Nebula Realms massively. Some areas in this game looked nearly identical to those of its spiritual successor (Did somebody say Asset-Flip?). Since Playstation Home shutdown its servers in 2015, Nebula Realms has been battling with Atom Universe over the title of being the go to real-life simulator game on the Playstation Store (I am not saying it's a battle anybody paid attention to). Since Nebula Realms has now shutdown in December 2023, the battle has apparently been decided.

Btw, Playstation Home has received private servers in 2022, which make the game playable again. Unfortunately it does require having a modified Playstation 3, but I thought I would still at least mention it.

But let's get back to the topic of today's article: Nebula Realms. As a real-life simulator, the goal for Nebula Realms was to provide a place for its players to meet up, chat and engage in gameplay activities.

The last aspect in particular was a huge problem for Nebula Realms. I have been talking with a couple of people, who told me I shouldn't be so critical of a game, that has a strong focus on the social aspect. I personally however disagree. Yes, Nebula Realms has a focus on connecting people and that was certainly one of its few strengths, but this is a videogame after all. I am not expecting AAA Quality, but there should at least be some kind of fun you can have with the gameplay of this videogame.

Nebula had a large hub area, where players could meet up on a disco space right next to a swimming pool. This area was clearly one of the most popular places in the game and players would just stand around here in the dozens while talking to each other. I do think it was one of the better areas in the game, even though it did feel a bit empty outside of the disco space. From this hub area you could travel to all kinds of rooms and places to experience all the "exciting" gameplay activities of Nebula Realms. There were for example two other, even bigger, Disco areas with barely any players. So far, so unexciting…

You could also visit places, like a medieval village, which sounded pretty cool. In this village you could even enter most houses, but they were all completely empty with nothing to see. All the houses you entered in this game were actually completely empty in every room, without decoration or items whatsoever. I don't know what that was about, but it felt like a big waste of time. You could at least shoot love arrows with an cupid bow onto other players in the medieval village, which did feel a bit creepy, but each to their own.

Another place to visit was a Ghost Town, where you could get scarred by paper ghosts. A friend of mine called it one of the most pathetic things he ever saw in a videogame and I can't argue with him on that. You could also visit a couple of more open house stages, which were actually more of empty house stages. I just don't get what the developers were trying to achieve here.

There was a button memorization minigame, which is something you would only expect in a small kids game, where they learn to count and read, or in Nebula Realms. It was however better than the plane minigame, which might have sounded exciting, but unfortunately controlled like hot garbage. Even completely tilting the analog stick barely moved the plane. It was an uncontrollable mess, we better not talk about anymore.

Nebula Realms even managed to make Jet-Ski races look boring. That isn't even easy to do, but you could just drive in a very small, strictly limited area without any checkpoints, obstacles or anything of interest. But if that for some reason was too exciting for you, you could also drive a paddle boat on a tiny Sea park in slow motion. There were actually checkpoint races in the game. You could walk through the same lazily designed park for a whole minute. If you were lucky, you didn't experience any glitches during that. There was also an actual kart racing track in the game, but everytime I logged in, the kart track was closed. Maybe this could have been the gameplay activity that saved Nebula Realms, but I doubt it...

Instead you could ice skate in Nebula. It was very slow and the area was smaller than any ice ring I have ever seen, but better than nothing, I guess. Unless you got unlucky, like a friend of mine, whose game apparently glitched and he could only walk across the ice... He could however participate in a very exciting snowball fight (not really)…

But enough with the negativity, let's talk about the activities, which weren't completely abysmal. For example Tic, Tac, Toe. It is exactly what you would expect, but in this game it was a highlight. You could even play chess in this game (how impressive...). The Bow and Arrow game was actually quite decent. It's not like it would be worth playing the game for, but it didn't suck. The same goes for Bowling. It wasn't the best Bowling inclusion I have ever seen in a videogame, but the gameplay was totally fine and not sleep-inducing. The best activity in Nebula Realms however was the Pool Billiard Minigame. It's the same experience you could get in a million different free Billiard games online, but it was actually the best time I spent in the game.

I nearly forgot, you could of course also buy your own apartments, actually decorate them and invite some players over. A good feature for sure, if it’s in addition to other well done aspects of the game, which Nebula sadly totally lacked.

To sum it up: The highlights of the gameplay were unremarkable, but totally fine, while most other activities were abysmal. But let's talk a little more about the glitches and technical status of the game. I experienced multiple game breaking glitches during my time with Nebula Realms. Game freezings were a regular occurrence and I even managed to twice trigger a ice sliding glitch, where my character wouldn't be able to walk normally anymore and just slide across the floor without any movement or walk without moving from the spot. What a mess!

Oh, and I haven't even mentioned the constant screen tearing whenever you moved the camera. I don't know if this was only on the console version, but on PC you could at least battle the screen tearing via V-Sync or some other settings. On the PS4 version you were dependent on the mercy of the developers, which meant players were doomed.

Talking about players, I was actually shocked at how many players I encountered in this game. Sure, it wasn't comparable with actually popular games, but when i tested this game with a friend on a weekend about two years ago, we probably saw around 100 players on all rooms combined, which is far more than I would have expected for a 7-year-old relatively unknown game. Pretty shocking that so many players stuck around. Maybe they hung around for nostalgia or the friendships they made ingame.

Worth mentioning is also, that Nebula had one of the worst new player introductions I have ever seen. The game just started without any tutorials, explanations or even a character creation. The smart players probably quit at that point.

 

Verdict:

Nebula Realms tried to become the new Playstation Home and in my opinion, failed miserably in the attempt. While I personally wasn't much of a Home player back in the day, it was a much better experience all around. In Nebula Realms you can talk with people, but that isn't much of an accomplishment. The technical status and gameplay activities were plain awful and not worth anybody's time.

You could actually have more fun chatting and talking to somebody while sitting at home and doing nothing else, than to chat and talk to somebody while playing Nebula Realms. Do I need to say more? This game was terrible and it's one of the few games I won't miss after its shutdown. I am a big supporter of videogame preservation, but Nebula Realms teaches us that not everything needs to be saved.

 

2.5/10

RedShift (PC) Review

 

Redshift is a short Horror Game about another dimension called ‘Redshift’. You play as a technician, who is being sent to repair an old abandoned watchtower relay.

The Redshift Feature is the clear highlight of the game and allows you to see into another dimension. You can switch between this reality and the other one with the press of a button. The feature reminded me a bit of the game ‘The Medium’, which is based on  a somewhat similar idea. In the Redshift you can also see a threatening entity, which is constantly chasing you. You can only spot him in the other dimension however, which makes avoiding him a lot more threatening. His presence in turn reminded me a lot of the very underrated movie ‘It Follows’.  

Redshift can be beaten in around 10 Minutes at most, which makes it a really short game. It does feature multiple endings however and has 8 Steam Achievements, which are all pretty easy to get.

Since its launch in early September the game has received frequent updates, which mostly improved the game. I say mostly, because some of the changes are up to interpretation. While the enemy in the game was originally a lot slower, which reminded me even more of It Follows, where the slow pace contributes to the daunting atmosphere, he has gotten a lot faster with the updates and is now actively running after the player. I personally found the slower pace even more immersive, but the faster chase is admittedly also quite thrilling.

An Update to the Lighting system has also made the game much darker, which I am not the biggest fan of, since it has become significantly more difficult to see inside the relay building. Admittedly, a lot of bigger studios are also fans of those fancy Lighting mechanics, but I personally prefer to just be able to actually see at what I am looking at. The addition of mouse sensitivity, sound and graphics settings on the other hand are undeniable quality of life improvements.

The lead developer mentions that the game is supposedly still in ‘Early Access’ and additional content updates or performance improvements could also arrive in the future. Additional content would be appreciated to not only increase the length, but also give players more interaction opportunities. Right now the game is pretty straight forward.

Redshift uses an Unreal Engine and the Visuals do look quite nice, but this also means that the optimization isn’t perfect. I have however seen a lot worse. It was at least perfectly playable for me. The Voice Acting in the game is also pretty decent for an Indie Game. It’s certainly not up to professional standards, but it wasn’t bad either.

 

Result:

Redshift has a really interesting alternative reality feature and a fitting Horror atmosphere, which make it a good experience. The game is mostly hold back by its short length. Additional content updates, like a larger relay area or an additional prequel/sequel level, could potentially improve the pace and score of the game. For fans of It follows, the game is however certainly worth a look. Right now, Redshift gets a

 

6/10