Void Mine has had a name change to Oculto in case people didn't know. This info will make my review make more sense. Oculto is a game whereVoid Mine has had a name change to Oculto in case people didn't know. This info will make my review make more sense. Oculto is a game where the negatives simply outweighed the positives for me. I liked the story and it was what kept me playing. I thought the way it was told by finding messages and corpses was well done. I thought some game play elements were great such as if you take to hard of a hit to the head area it can smash your lamp which you can repair by finding repair kits. You can also get your propeller jammed; tear your suit on sharp objects; as well as receive hemorrhages due to explosions. Health kits can fix what repair kits don’t. My only issue is that hemorrhages and oxygen leaks both are time sensitive issues that if not dealt with before their timers run out will kill you. Combine that with the fact that you can’t carry repair or health kits in an inventory meaning that you have to backtrack to find them all the while trying to evade a shadow that one hit kills you and it adds up to something that will either make you enjoy the tension or you will find it annoying. I found it annoying. The lack of a map system also can complicate things as you may have to lure the shadow away from where you want to go and back track to it which can lead to confusion at times whether you have explored a room or area before. The levels aren’t massive but regardless a map system would have been handy. Apparently the game used to have one that also showed you the location of the shadow at all times which made things too easy so the map was removed. If true I think a better compromise would have been to just remove the location of the shadow from the map. I would have also like the messages you find throughout a level to be stored in a log. As it stands if you wanted to reread one you need to backtrack to it. This becomes a nuisance as these messages usually contain clues to a password needed to exit the level. I took to writing clues down on a pad of paper but still a proper log system would have been nice. The graphics are nice enough for the genre. The asteroid has a lot of darkness which isn’t great for showing things off but the object detail was nice enough when you see it. The audio was great, especially the shadow. You can not only hear it but the game did a great job of having it accurately giving me an idea of which direction and area it was in if I listened close enough but being creepy as well. The background music also helped with this.
I played Oculto on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors. Alt-Tab didn’t work. The game doesn’t allow you to edit controls at all. This was a slight issue for me as the game pad I was using, the Logitech F310, had the default key to move around as the left thumb stick. This is fine but it also had the default button to bring up the pause menu as the left thumb stick being pushed in. This led to a lot of seeing the pause menu I didn’t want just by accidentally pressing too hard on the thumb stick which can happen when you’re trying to outrun a shadow trying to kill you while trying to dodge floating explosives and sharp objects. Had I been able to edit controls this wouldn’t have been an issue. There are no graphics options aside from vsync and film grain. You can’t save the game during level as well which was annoying. Being 30 seconds away from exiting the level only to have the shadow come into a room you’re in that only has one exit and then having to redo the level isn’t fun.
Game Version Played: Build 386
Game Engine: Unity
Save System: none during level
Disk Space Used: 173 MB
Game Settings: film grain off, vsync on
GPU Usage: 5-38 %
VRAM Usage: 510-613 MB
CPU Usage: 18-28 %
RAM Usage: 2.2-2.6 GB
Frame Rate: 136-144 FPS
Overall I don’t think that Oculto is a bad game at all. The story and damage mechanics are great for the most part but the shadow being able to one hit kill me combined with certain damage being a timer counting down to death; the lack of a save system during levels and lack of an inventory and map made me have a worse experience than I would have liked. These things are more personal preference than bad mechanics. If you don’t mind these things you will probably love Oculto. I finished Oculto in three hours and eight minutes. I paid $3.39 CAD for it. The value and length are great.
My Score: 6.5/10
My System:
AMD FX-6100 | 16GB DDR3-1333 | MSI RX 580 8GB Gaming X | Mesa 20.3.3 | Samsung 870 QVO 1TB | Manjaro 20.2.1 | Mate 1.24.1 | Kernel 5.10.7-3-MANJARO… Expand
