This game is horrible and feels as if development started when the game was announced earlier this year.
First off, changing the graphics settings (between high, medium and low, along with fullscreen and resolution settings) does nothing as the game sets itself back to the default after leaving the options menu. As is tradition for Unreal Engine games, the game loads textures slowlyThis game is horrible and feels as if development started when the game was announced earlier this year.
First off, changing the graphics settings (between high, medium and low, along with fullscreen and resolution settings) does nothing as the game sets itself back to the default after leaving the options menu. As is tradition for Unreal Engine games, the game loads textures slowly (you'd think that would have been fixed in the fourth iteration of the engine) and the game generally looks pretty ugly. When the textures do finally load, they do look pretty nice, but that's as far as the positives in this game go.
Walking towards the house at the beginning of the game is interesting, due to blatantly copy pasted grass, the rough animations of the player character (who actually has a visible body in game) and her coworker Stan (who features voice acting that sounds as if it was done by Microsoft SAM). Opening the door to the house, I was greeted with a loading screen rather than the creak associated with haunted houses.
Upon loading, I was met with loading textures (makes you wonder what the game was actually loading) and severe frame rate drops. The game didn't explain what to do, with locked doors preventing travel through the house at this moment and continued not to explain what was happening as the screen shook, went black and the character woke up in a bed in a locked room. I spent a good deal of time in this room due to a lack of explanation and the game glitching and not allowing progress. Grass and ivy growing on the hard wood of a second floor room instantly caught my attention, as did my discover that crouching appears to make the character partially sink through the floor. I also found that the walls would occasionally glitch in parts and I could see through them, into the room next to me, which didn't seem to actually exist as there was no door in the hallway outside. Walking through the terrain seems to be a feature of the game, with the ability to walk through a doll house and the curtains.
After giving up and reloading the game continued as it should have, allowing me to use my psychic powers of seeing blue to investigate a pack of crayons that allowed me to move a chest that was covering a hidden box containing feathers and a key to the room's door. I never said the game made sense.
The hallway outside the room featured magic walls that possess the ability to flicker in and out of existence at will, showing the blue void that existed beyond the house. after exploring a few more bedrooms, the game introduced it's 'crafting system'. This system involves nothing more than clicking the name of the spell (no idea how you craft magic) you wish to craft (the first the game giving you being a light) and feels as if the very last minute thought of a game rushed through a few months of development. The character's subtitles (due to her lack of voice most of the time) seemed to lack the ability to display an apostrophe, instead showing strange characters in 'it's'.
Shortly after this, the game introduced it's first enemy, a shadow monster. The game saying to turn my light off to allow me to hide from the monster. turning the light off, I became stuck when the character couldn't get through a spiral staircase, having to crouch to make it down. the monster immediately found and killed me while I was hiding, proving the AI was brokenly smart. Trying again, I turned the light on and realised that the monster would see me regardless of where I was and that if I turned the light off as the game had told me would make the monster impossible to see. At this part I gave up as I couldn't find the way out of this room as I couldn't get away from the monster and every door out was locked.
Technically, the game is atrocious, and one of the worst optimised pc exclusives I've ever seen with frequent frame rate drops and no graphics or control options. Alt+ tabbing out of the game moved the mouse cursor out of the window (because it refuses to properly be fullscreen) and the only way to return it was to restart the game. The game crashed only once during my time with it (I was surprised it wasn't more) at which point I was greeted with a error message blaming FRAPS for the crash. Somehow I doubt that was the cause
Although this game is one of the worst I have ever played, I give it a 1/10 instead of 0 due to the game being quite (unintentionally) funny until the first monster encounter at which point it became impossible to continue.… Expand
Haunted House: Cryptic GravesYour Score0 out of 10User Score
