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arsonforcharlie · 7 years

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so, i finished playing corrosion: cold winter waiting (i keep wanting to call it “the winter soldier” but that is not right.)

thoughts under the cut

not the worst horror game i’ve ever played, or even the worst one that @egg-tats has sent to me. (that honour goes to the one that, for some reason, would not let me move my cursor to the bottom half of the screen, which was also where all the menu options were. how do you fuck up that bad)

however, this game was far, far longer than it needed to be. part of it was gameplay factors- it is a point and click, and you have to turn around manually, so it takes three screens to get to the end of a hall, and longer if you look left and right to see if anything is there. but part of it was just unnecessary bulk. you found the code, now you have to walk all the way across the map to enter it into the door, and then you find the time and date of an audio file so you can listen to it, so now you have to walk all the way back in order to punch that into a computer in the room you just left!

all this walking would be fine if it served a purpose in story, atmosphere, or gameplay, but it doesn’t really. the facility you’re wandering around isn’t really frightening enough to really build tension as you wander around in there. a lot of it looks the same, and for some reason, they opted to put the map on a computer file instead of something you could bring with you, so navigation is a bit of an issue. there’s no threats except in one short section of the game, so it’s just sort of walking around trying to figure out where you’re headed. point-and-click walking simulator with middling graphics isn’t the best effect.

i did end up having to use a walkthrough in a few spots- there is a bit of insane troll logic in the solutions to puzzles. (in one part, you’re presented with a keycard that’s on a table through a vent that you can’t reach. you do have a long pole and an adhesive pad. however, you can’t use those together for some reason. i assumed it was because i was supposed to get it later- nope. i was supposed to thread the pole through a section of rubber tubing, then stick the pad on there. why.) there’s also a lot of things happening around the facility for no reason with no hints- like, you finish reading someone’s diary, and for some reason, this causes something to happen in a room that’s across the map, with no indication of what’s happened, so you just have to go room to room and inspect every element and see if something changed.

the clicking lock “puzzle”! clicking for every single number to get that damn combination lock to go from 0 to 72, then right to 96, then left to 26 was ridiculous. there should be some sort of more functional interface, especially given that if you click once more by accident you have to start all over.

similarly, the google mechanic was.... like, i can see it being a really cool thing, but you have to put work into it. there were a few key phrases you could type in there to get information about what was happening, but a lot of the things that i wanted more information about weren’t on there. (and a lot of the things you could google were relatively nonsensical- you look up the hotel, and in the hotel’s basic directory information, there’s information about the manager’s blog, where he blogs about the people who stay in the hotel, using their real names. that’s... that’s not a thing that most hotels would do.) it could be fantastic for worldbuilding and character development- like, you type in a character’s name and find an article about how they were arrested a bunch as a teen or their various life tragedies. there was one character that was supposedly once a big football player- how is there nothing about him on google?

the football player character really wasn’t relevant to the plot. we didn’t find out anything about him, and he wasn’t even mentioned in any of the diaries with anything more than “well he was certainly there i guess.”

the writing was really not there, like, at all. you get to read a bunch of characters’ diaries, and they’re generally written similarly to how i wrote when i was 13, despite the characters supposedly being fully grown adults. and even given that (spoilers) the hunters are being lied to, they don’t even follow their own logic. they believe that 50% of the earth’s population is infected by these demons, but they also believe that if one of their 8 or so captives that’s infected escapes, the whole world might end? like, there is a point at which you have lost, and i think that point might be somewhere before the five of you have to individually kidnap and torture 3 and a half billion people to suicide. i also feel like we could have used a bit more background on how the leader of the hunters convinced them that demons are real before they got in and he could drug them. like, if some guy contacts me saying “hey there are demons would you like to come kill them in my basement” i’m not gonna be too convinced.

i don’t expect too much from the voice acting, because let’s be real, it’s an indie game. however, there were a lot of moments where lines just didn’t really make sense, and the VAs just read them straight. they’re also kind of not good at conveying emotion.

there were also some odd things with sound effects. at one point, there’s just a crying baby sound for no reason. at another, there’s a phone ringing. why? when a demon kills you in the one part of the game where you can die, it makes a loud noise that sounds like the bleat of a sheep run through autotune, and it’s definitely more funny than scary. at the end credits, the game plays a brahm’s lullaby music box, despite lullabies or music boxes not being part of the game whatsoever, and children only being mentioned in passing, and not in a menacing manner. there’s a lot of things that seem like they’re just being done because they’re designated spooky things, without any regard for what makes those things spooky. it’s the video game equivalent of horror movies that say “just throw a creepy doll at it.” yawn.

at the end, if you google the right thing in-game (you have to google one of the characters’ names to find out what the drug does. googling the drug name doesn’t bring up any results. that’s not how google works.) you find out that whoo spooky you’ve been drugged with a hallucinogen and you can’t know if what you saw in there was real! which is great except, like, you know objectively that what you saw in there was real, because it interacted with the environment, and possibly actually killed you on another playthrough.

there are some pluses- the plot does have potential. it needs some serious editing, of course- something to ensure that we feel sympathy for any characters we learn about would help, but it is a neat concept. and i do have a certain weakness for media that has a spooky asylum and doesn’t go for the “whoa they’re CRAZY isn’t that SCARY” angle. i can see what this game was going for, but imo, it’s not really there yet.

but hey, no jump scares. i was expecting some because of, you know, all that walking, but aside from a few little blink-and-you’ll-miss-it things, nothing to jump scare-y, nothing too gory.

as a side note, i looked up the steam reviews after playing, and the dev responded to all the questions about the plot (that you could only find out about by googling the exact right phrase) with basically “all the information is in the game! :-) it’s supposed to be about you figuring out what happened on your own!” and, like, no, dude, if you’re going to make it so difficult to basically randomly guess what you need to google, don’t pull that “just guess more random phrases!” stuff.

i give this game a 4/10. some ideas have potential, but pretty poorly executed

#Hey now hey now now sing this corrosion to me #corrosion cold winter waiting #bad horror games

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