[AFTERGLOW: a mini-review series of my just-finished-this impressions]
Just finished this masterpiece.
I loved this game. Can’t think of a more nuanced way to express it. I’d played the majority of it several months ago, but the intensity of the stealth-based horror sections just wasn’t what I felt like immersing myself in after a hard days work, considering many other things eating at my emotional energy since then.
Finally committed and I’m really glad I did. I loved Frictional’s first game, Amnesia: The Dark Descent, but I have to say that this one is my heavily weighted favorite of the two.
The horror is strong and disturbing–and heightened due to a story filled with misdirection and perfectly vague and well-paced revelations–which makes the well-written and sometimes surprisingly intimate and touching story all that much more powerful. The stealth sections are sometimes so dread-inducing that it became hard to play for chunks longer than an hour or two.
That intensity coupled with the existential quandaries and implications of the unfurling dark science fiction story really made this a special piece. I’d go so far as to call it transcendent.
I say all of this as a huge fan of well-thought-out fusions of Science Fiction and Horror, but if that’s not a combo that does much for you, YMMV.
pml
patrick loveland 