The Man in the Park 1 (PC) Review

 

The Man in the Park 1 is an extremely short Horror Game. I really have to emphasize the short part. I am no stranger to review smaller, shorter games, but The Man in the Park is criminally short. You can beat the entire game and unlock all 3 Endings in around 2 minutes combined.

The concept of the game intrigued me. You travel through a park at night, where you met a lonely old man sitting on a park bench. What happens next is up to the player. It reminded me a lot of ‘Last Bus Home’, which is a significantly better game on itch.io. 

The man in the park has practically no gameplay. I won’t spoiler the “story”, but after talking to the old man there is next to nothing to do. The premise is cool and you can also make a rather short game with a nice horror vibe, but the man in the park is too short to actually create something like a horror atmosphere.

The visuals are very simple, but that’s fine for a smaller Horror Game. The massive flickering of some of them however is a bit straining on the eyes and some of the few objects you can simply walk through, which is usually an indicator for lack of effort.

 

Result:

The Man in the Park is like a comedy event, where the comedian shows up, tells an okay joke, which started more promising than it ended, for 2 mins and walks off the stage. There is no follow-up act or anything else. The setup is good, but the “game” doesn’t do anything with it. No meaningful gameplay, no real story, just the attempt of a scare.

 

3/10

ScreeIn (PC) Review

 

ScreeIn is a psychological Horror game, which released in late August for free on Steam. The game has a somewhat interesting TV feature, which allows players to travel to different stages via a TV remote. This feature was supposed to resemble an episodic structure, but it actually just works more like a gateway between a couple of short levels.

The developer claims that these stages all symbolize different traumas the protagonist of the game has face throughout his life. I am glad the developer stated that on the Steam page of the game, because I couldn’t really decipher any coherent meaning of the game during my playthrough.

The presentation is actually at least decent in the game with some nice effects for a smaller game. I however really struggled during my playthrough to understand what the game was trying to tell me. Things seem to mostly happen because they look nice, not because they wanted to tell an understandable story. I was for example unsure whether the use of mannequins for all characters was supposed to symbolize the arbitrariness and exchangeability of humans or whether the developer just cheapened out of using proper character models. It now seems to me, it must have been the later one.

The gameplay consists of walking and solving very simple puzzles. Those were more like pseudo puzzles, who could be solved by picking something up and placing it on the only appropriate spot. The game should have definitely been more demanding in that area or just left it out.

The biggest downfall of the game however are certainly its many technical issues. This starts with the game using a completely unoptimized Unreal Engine version. The visuals may look nice, but there is a constant motion blur and even screen tearing present, which can’t be battled via the options, because there aren’t any. You can’t change the mouse sensitivity, deactivate motion blur, activate V-Sync or change the visual fidelity. What you see is what you get and that is a really bad performance.  

Other than that I also encountered game-breaking glitches on 3 different occasions. That is nearly impressive for a game that’s only around 15 mins long.

 

Result:

I like the idea of traveling via a TV remote through the mind of a mentally struggling person, but like with many smaller Horror games, the execution can’t really keep up with the idea. Nothing wrong with being a bit vague and leaving things up to interpretation, but ScreeIn seems too incomprehensible. The biggest flaws of the game however are the performance issues and game-breaking glitches, which will prevent most players from fully experiencing the game. There is definitely potential in ScreeIn, but it would probably require a very significant update to unlock it.

 

4/10