Viviette

When playing this game it is clear that its creators wanted the player to be scared. Viviette has a good atmosphere in the survival horror genre and a slow and terrifying pace.

There are too many creepy statues, too many pools of blood, and too many run-ins with the knife woman to keep up the pretense that I'm supposed to be terrified. Viviette tries to go gonzo with the jump scares and frenetic furnishings rather than showing a crumb of constraint, something that would have gone a long way to keeping the tension from the first 45 minutes or so alive through its conclusion.

Viviette's art style and visual environment, as well as the plot, are its greatest assets and major contributions at stimulating the player for exploring the game's world. Where Viviette falls short is when it comes to keeping the player's interest for longer periods of time, due to its repetitiveness, inconsistent difficulty level and rather short lifespan.

Viviette is purposefully inaccessible to all but the most hardcore puzzle solvers. Perhaps this is the point, and many will undoubtedly see this as a good thing. If you want a game to really push you to the absolute limits of memorizing a whole area to identify every hidden clue, then Viviette may be the game for you. Otherwise, it’s best to look elsewhere, since you’ll probably spend more time looking up solutions online than actually figuring them out yourself.

Apart from the wonderful 16-bit audio-visuals, Viviette turns out to be nothing more than a repetitive search for key-item after key-item, with a little bit of puzzle-solving thrown in, next to a simple horror tale that won't really creep you out that much.