This is another horror game with a few cheap jump scares. You walk around a dark environment, slowly revealing the backstory piece by piece through listening to audio and reading notes you find. In this one, the environment is your house. You are Marcus, and you grew up here with your parents and your older sister.
You start out by waking up in the master bedroom, and the first thing you need to do is go downstairs to the living room. There you will find a smart phone, and a note telling you how to find the code to unlock the phone. Once the phone is unlocked, you can do multiple things with it.
There is a section on the phone which gives you one clue at a time. After you read a clue, it will be replaced by a timer counting down how many seconds you have to wait until you get your next clue. Another section lets you change some game settings. There are a few pics on the phone, but they seem to have no relevance to the story.
Over time, texts will pop up that you can read, and a survey will pop up that you can take. Although the title of the game is '[b]The Survey[/b]', the survey also seems to have no relevance to the story. It seems to just be something to waste a little time. No matter what your answers are, the survey will glitch out before the end ([i]but don't worry, that one is on purpose, not a bug[/i]).
So the game is simply running around the house, up and down the stairs, figuring out the story. You'll solve a couple of puzzles, get a few codes, listen to audio clues through the radios and the TV's, read notes and journal entries, play with the phone, and find ways to open locked doors. Occasionally, you will see an undead female. Of course, if she sees you, she will come after you.
I'd say the graphics are a little below average. Many things look "[i]blocky[/i]", and not very detailed. The sound is a little off, too. Sometimes the creepy noises ([i]footsteps, moaning, knocking, etc[/i]) don't seem to be coming from where they should. Also, some of the game text had typos. Sometimes it seems like effort was put into making the game, and sometimes it just seems like an asset flip.
The story is only mildly interesting as it unfolds, and isn't very deep. It could have been presented much better. There were not any shocking twists to it. It didn't take me long to figure out what some parts of the story were going to turn out to be, even before they were officially revealed. You have no inventory to manage, no weapons, and only one walking speed. There are trading cards, but no achievements, so the game has no replayability.
There are no manual saves. If something happens, you will restart back at the last checkpoint. However, when restarting from a checkpoint, things will not always be as they were BEFORE the first time you passed that checkpoint ([i]unlocked doors will be locked again, keys you took are back on the desk yet now can't be picked up, items are moved, lights are not on/off as they were before, the phone is relocked, etc[/i]).
If you don't encounter any bugs, the game should take you 1.5 to 2.0 hours to finish. However, the game is quite buggy. I am on what I'm sure is the last section of the story, but the game has crashed on me in this section 3 times so far, preventing me from completing it. I don't know what happened the 1st time. The 2nd and 3rd times was a bug related to the phone.
You apparently should NOT open the phone when you are listening to audio, or when you seem trapped in a locked room, as this phone bug could make the game crash. Whatever is going on, just be patient. Wait for the audio to stop playing, and/or wait until the game unlocks the door and lets you leave the room.
I got this game on sale for $1, so I guess for 2 hours of play I got my money's worth. You should definitely not pay full price for this one though. Between the shallow story, the bugginess, and the overall plain vanilla of the game, I'm going to give it a thumbs down.
