7.5/10 Love-Hate Relationship
I do recommend the game, because it is pretty decent, and it's worth playing it even if only once. I enjoyed the characters, the names are good names, the visuals are high quality, too. The voice acting is also, I think, very good, I couldn't ask for any better, really. People have griped about the lips not syncing exactly with the dialogue, but this never bothered me, to me it's whatever.
The scary monster is scary, the audio is nice and the soundtrack complements the atmosphere well. The cultists' chants are also fun to listen to.
However, the game suffers from what looks like rushed production in so many ways. In particular, the devs could have paid an American English major a few hundred bucks to proofread the video for mistakes in English. There are so, so many. In the bar, for instance, there's a chalkboard that lists the patrons' tabs, in a scrawl that looks like it was written by someone who does not know how to make our letters. the dollar sign is after the number, not before it, and it has only one line through it, so $9 is 'gS.'
One of the sailors says, '...when we were still fishing for whales.' Fishing for whales???
Pierce says that he served in the '307th Infantry Regiment,' which sounds weird because we don't say 'Regiment,' just 307th Infantry. Dr. Colden says that Pierce should keep mum because 'we don't know the *bottom* of it...' Hmmm, I've never heard anyone say that before, it may come from 'get to the bottom of it'? Pierce says, 'The police *took* the decision to do such and such.' We don't say that, we say 'made the decision.' Regarding Sarah's paintings, the words invocation and 'revocation' are used, which is incorrect: it's invocation and evocation. Three characters say the word 'figure' in the game,' and they each pronounce it 'figger,' which is just, sorry, that's weird.
In one chapter, you are seeing the game through Dr. Colden's eyes in the hospital. She must turn the water valve off, but when she attempts to do so, the valve is too tight to turn. Which is weird because valves aren't opened so tight you can't turn them, it's when they're turned off. Finally she is able to return with a pipe wrench to turn the valve, and she turns it to...the left. Doh.
I would say that approximately one third of the written documents have incorrect English syntax, or entire words are missing, as in, 'Patient seems suffering from psychosis,' and other times you encounter strings of words that don't make sense. Whoever was in charge of Chapter 5 managed to make a mistake in every single piece of reading material you find. There are so many mistakes and it is all inexcusable, as it would have been a simple task for an American proofreader to spot.
In one cutscene, Pierce is driving a car and we see the chassis for a second, and the axles are just perfectly straight bars, it's comical like a toy, like a kid drew it.
When we finally see the foreshadowed image from the opening dream sequence in real time, the form of the figure in question has been reversed from its earlier shape.
Sometimes the characters say things that don't seem to fit the flow of the conversation. Chief West says to Pierce, who is already standing in a jail cell, 'Let me show you to your new home for the night." Followed immediately by 'Well, okay, good night." At least 4/5ths of the conversations have a bit that does not fit.
A good deal is made about Sarah Hawkins, even old Winchester called her an "exceptional person, who cared for everyone around her." But when we meet her, she is far from exceptional, her personality is expressionless, she has no emotional depth whatsoever, and she isn't bothered by her husband and son's fate the way a mother would be.
The game also suffers from a lack of fun locations. You spend time in an old mansion that is only massive bookcases filled with books, an awful insane asylum, a hospital, a bookstore, not the most fun locations.
There are dialogue inconsistencies, as well. Captain Fitzroy early on says that even though Charles Hawkins was a 'landlubber,' he was good man, but then later on he says that the Hawkins family was a major ship-owning family, from father to son. Hmmm.
There doesn't appear to have been a single solid vision for who these characters would be in the story, because their mysteria is built up and up and up, and the final resolution is not satisfying in the least. Just what the eff Charles is doing is a mystery that the devs appear to have not known, either, and it just gets stretched out for as long as possible. The final explanation of what he is, in fact, doing is ridiculous and seemed like it was just thought up on the spot to fill in the blank. It makes no sense. The early foreshadowing of these characters seems to be out of step with their later resolutions, and maybe it's due to the early partnership with Frogwares, idk.
I get the impression that the people who made this game were young and without much life experience or understanding of human relationships. As you can see by how many hours I've spent playing this game, and I've posted my playthroughs on my YouTube channel, the game has a special place in my heart despite its flaws, and that's just a personal thing, I guess. It's a love-hate relationship because the mistakes are not forgivable; this game should have been at least 50% better than it is. I spent more time proofreading this review than I think they spent polishing a commercial product before releasing it to a global market in exchange for money. I hold out some hope that it will be remastered at some point and brought to its full potential someday.
Peace.
