Distress marketed itself as drawing inspiration from Mass Effect, Silent Hill and Snatcher and in some ways I can see that but in other waysDistress marketed itself as drawing inspiration from Mass Effect, Silent Hill and Snatcher and in some ways I can see that but in other ways it falls a tad short. It can certainly have some creepy vibes from the monsters you encounter that make me think of Silent Hill but sadly we don’t see much of them or interact much with them much. The game has a rich lore you get introduced to, lots of planets and colanies mentioned but it is mostly in passing. You don’t actually get to go to these planets, get any flashbacks to the lore, or ineract with the colonies. I keep going on about what the game doesn’t have but let me mention what it does have. It has a solid story to it that I think has a lot of potential for prequels. It has a great vibe to it, I love the unsettling locations and the bits of mystery and suspense the game is able to create. The cast of characters are all interesting and make me want to know more about them but sadly not much info is given. The soundtrack is great and puts me back into 80’s era sci-fi which is my childhood and I love. The choices you get to make are decent but do have one big flaw I dislike: false choices. Some choices mean your death and the end of the game. You have to reload and choose differently. My issue with this mechanic has always been that a choice that makes you reload and pick differently isn’t really a choice. There is no voice acting in the game but I don’t count that as a negative. I’d rather have no voice acting than poor voice acting.
I played the game on Linux. I used version 1.2 from Itch.io. The game never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or glitches. The game does have one issue in that it launches on the wrong monitor and I have to manually move it over to my main monitor. There is nothing in the config area to choose monitor. This isn’t a game issue however but an issue with the Ren’Py engine itself. I have seen this on various Ren’Py titles before. This issue was fixed in Ren’Py version 7.2.1 but Distress uses version 7.1.0.882. Either way not a huge issue. While playing the game my total system RAM usage was 2.7GB and my CPU usage was just 2%. The game uses just 202MB of disk space.
I finished my first playthrough of Distress in just 46 minutes. It isn’t a long game by any means but I think the story is worth it. I paid $6.78 CAD for the game and feel that is good value for what I got. If you enjoy visual novels I would recommend Distress and can also recommend some of the devloper’s other work “The Right Side of Town”.