Asylum

Disappointing and hard to recommend.

It's a throwback Lovecraftian horror point-and-click adventure, which sounds great, right? But it's mediocre by its own standards. The atmosphere is excellent, but unfortunately that's the game's only strong point. The story is at once full of holes and predictable and the gameplay is clunky and frustrating.

The first issue has to do traversing the building. In order to force the story progression, you are barred from moving around freely. Without spoiling the game I'll just say that the rationale is so silly that it breaks whatever sense of immersion is created by the rest of the design. And it's not the only silly thing. There are various other events that happen in the game that make no sense. Not Lovecraftian weird, just plain ridiculous. These problems feel very avoidable, because with more thought and creativity it's not hard to think of alternatives that do make sense.

Worse, perhaps, the silliness creeps into the puzzles. They feel so arbitrary, solvable by just backtracking and clicking on everything with every item you find. But this is tedious rather than satisfying, because of the incredibly poor affordances offered. For example, those areas that are initially barred from you will "open" later on. But that change is very poorly indicated (there's a document you find that hints at some of it) and it's basically an annoying experience of running around and finding out what has opened up. In one case a door that was previously described as a "dead end" was suddenly open-able. Ridiculous.

Likewise, you better have some patience for pixel hunting. Often the area on the screen on which you can click is extremely tiny, and unless you move your mouse exactly there you will miss it. This completely threw me off for one puzzle, to the extent that I wasted an hour looking for an alternative solution. Giving up, I looked up a walkthrough and realized that I just didn't move my mouse over the right pixel. Yay. By the way, even though the game supports controllers, the experience is so bad as to be basically unplayable. Pixel hunting with an analog stick is a zillion times worse than with a mouse.

Finally, this end product is just so disappointing! For the record, I backed this game on Kickstarter and followed the 15-year (!!!) development journey closely. It's hard to understand how, after so much time and effort, we got low-resolution textures, poorly thought out story elements and puzzles, bad voice acting, and lots of bugs. I reviewed this game on its own merits, but its development backstory adds a baffling meta-factor that is hard for me to ignore.

There are much better horror point-and-click adventures out there. Play them instead.