REVIEW : Rise of Insanity (PC)
There is no lack of indie, first-person, low budget terror titles accessible on Steam. It’s hard for a play to come into this genre and find a way to stand out from its rivals. Rise of Insanity succeeds to do just that though, gratitude to some amusing story twists and the handful of fresh ideas that it brings to the table. If you have played a lot of mysterious indie horror plays created by developers that are not native English speakers, then you already know most of what you are getting in this box. It is still one that you should check out though if you enjoy it when games twist with your head and you are seeing for a new way to feel that phenomenon.
In Rise of Insanity, you play as — somebody — who is straying around various areas trying to piece together a puzzle. Exactly who you are is never told to you explicitly, although the tale leaves you with ample hints to either figure it out or to make a guess with a high level of certainty. Along the way, you follow the work of a famous psychiatrist who has developed a controversial new therapy. One of his subjects has murdered his entire family — or has he? Are you the doctor? Are you the patient? Who is the game’s guilty party? Was there even a crime? The game’s story is full of questions that draw you forward through each section, trying to discover the answers. At a few points during the story, you may think that you have figured out what happened, only to experience a twist that subverts your expectations. The story is a short but compelling journey that keeps you guessing until you reach a big reveal at the end.
Like a lot of first-person horror games, Rise of Insanity keeps you unsettled and disoriented by shuttling you between dreamscapes, never letting you get your feet planted firmly on the ground. These sections often feel like actual locations, but there is just enough of a lack of authenticity in each one of them to give them the Erie feeling upon which this genre thrives. The game gets a lot of mileage, in particular, out of revisiting some locations a few times but changing a few of the details each time in a way that challenges your memory and messes with your head. There is a nice variety in the environments too. They range from a colourful greenhouse and the ordinary-looking home of the alleged murderer to a dark run-down hospital and a few bizarre dreamscapes. The realistic neighbourhoods feature late 1970s architecture and technology, which lends them a rather unique aesthetic. Overall, the game is attractive when it needs to be and it is ugly or repulsive when it needs to be. It is not an impressive game from a technological standpoint, but the visuals in Rising of Insanity are nonetheless an asset to it.
On a conceptual level, the atmosphere and story in rising of Insanity work well. That the sport can keep you occupied for most of its length is a testament to how well it works, because it suffers from a few issues that could quickly sink a lesser game. Almost each written note or piece of delivered dialogue has some kind of jarring grammatical or spelling error. That these errors exist in the written sections is understandable since the game was created by non-native speakers of English. To make matters worse though, the English voice actors still fully speak all of these errors. The story is a good one, but a better translation and voice acting would have made it a more immersive one.
Rise of Insanity features gameplay that, for better or for worse, is about one step removed from the walking simulator. There aren’t many interactive objects in each area beyond notes and recordings that provide story background and items that you need to collect or manipulate to advance the game. There are a few puzzles to solve, but most of them are very simple. You search environments for the object that you need and then you use it in that one area before you progress to the next area. Occasionally, you find a door code or do some button-pushing/level pulling type stuff that is typical adventure game fare. The gameplay isn’t the stuff of legend, but it is at least enough to make you feel like you are an active participant in the story and not a spectator.
REVIEW : Mayhem in Single Valley: Confessions (PC)
