I get many vibes from Buried such as X-Files, Lovecraft, The Thing, The Mist as well as some good old fashioned original creepiness. The gameI get many vibes from Buried such as X-Files, Lovecraft, The Thing, The Mist as well as some good old fashioned original creepiness. The game does a great job of describing just what kind of bleak dread is going on around you. You play as a logger who wakes up after being knocked unconscious from some kind of blast to find his site in ruins, some of his crew dead and many missing. From there things only get more strange and worse for him. You get to make many choices throughout the game and one thing that was always in my mind was the feeling that even if you make the choice that seems like the “good” or “honorable” choice that you will just cause yourself some kind of harm down the road. That if you chose the option that may help others that you will suffer for it later. I love it when a game can make me feel that way because let’s face it: life seldom gives you options where everyone comes out a winner so this game can get pretty real. The soundtrack was well done and served it’s purpose to set a grim tone. I will say that it didn’t have a lot of variety and did get old after a bit. The game is ambiguous in it’s ending, something I don’t mind as it allows me my own theories. The background art is great. There is no voice acting but that isn’t a negative in my eyes. I’ve long held the view no voice acting is better than bad voice acting.
I played Buried on Linux. The game never crashed on me once. I didn’t notice any spelling errors. There was no manual save system. The game would auto save every time you quit the game. I would have preferred a manual save system but it’s not a long game so it wasn’t a big deal. There were no options at all such as to change the speed of text, enable/disable fullscreen, etc. A visual novel doesn’t need all the bells and whistles like some genres but most visual novels have more options than Buried. While playing the game my system RAM usage was at around 2.1GB, my CPU usage around 6%, my GPU usage around 13% and my VRAM usage around 423MB. The game takes up 514MB of disk space.
I really got into the story of Buried and will easily recommend it. There are a good number of choices, good art and soundtrack and overall was a great experience. I finished my first playthrough in about 2 hours 45 minutes. I paid $3.29 CAD for Buried and it is easily worth that and more. They could have asked me for $10 and it would have still been worth it. If you enjoy visual novels, especially ones with a darker story then give this a go.
My Score: 9/10
My System:
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X | 16GB DDR4-3000 CL15 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 19.2.1 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Manjaro 18.1 | Mate 1.22.2 | Kernel 5.3.6-1-MANJARO… Expand
