REVIEW : A Cyberpunk Ghost Story (PC)
Benjamin Widdowson tried to mix a futuristic, Blade Runner meets Ghost in the Shell metropolis, with a tiny bit of Cantonese flavoured paranormal activity, but back when Cubed3 got an opportunity to try what the creator had to offer, it was hard what to make of it, as the demo experienced was just a small sample that didn’t provide plenty to ponder on, which was quite probably why its Kickstarter funding failed. Quite sometime after this small bite, and after a next attempt at acquiring a budget, it’s time to taste the finished product: the survival horror adventure.
There’s no point in here for the survival of any cyberpunk components. Being a fan of this distinct brand of science fiction, this critic doesn’t complain, he just mentally pulls his hair right now. It’s as if the maker of Sense: A Cyberpunk narrative just added all that in the intro just because he simply wanted to, without any distinct, practical reason.
Maybe the aim for the neon-lit shops, improved, ultra-busty NPCs, and sci-fi tech like holograms and such, was to Build a powerful contrast with the paranormal horror that will be experienced after this half-hour-long, tutorial introduction reaches its end. It seldom achieves that by showing flashes of the dazzling and bright, outside environment from inside the darkness of the Chong Sing Apartments.
Anyways… the adventure begins and it’s crucial to note that this often plays exactly like an adventure, despite the presence of some baddies that can hunt you down. Mei-Lin must examine this decrepit block of apartments, communicate with the world to gather items, like, say, a key, and then start using those items in special spots, like, for example, a door. This example wasn’t used unintentionally. Sense: A Cyberpunk Ghost Story is, for the greatest part, a very simple deal.
What will give players a headache, and a moderately painful one, is that this uses one of the most critical systems in the genre: to be able to pick an item or use it, you first need to “trigger” the possibility to do so, by finding a particular reason. This translates to Mei-Lin going back and forth between scenes, with the fun factor decreasing with each secondary spend in backtracking and in trying to “allow” the use of a certain hotspot – and it’s not that something will happen during all this coming and going. While some ghosts shamble around, for the most part, this will be a lonely experience that’s more concerned with frightening you than putting you in danger.
Note that the environment is Sense‘s best aspect. The atmosphere, while mundane, and wanting variety, have that something is wrong here look that’s typical in horror. Ghosts appear in the corner of Mei-Lin’s cybernetic eyes, and her PDA’s camera can seize even more in the game’s many dark corners. Usually, despite the lack of decent funds, this is visually appealing, with the – pretty neat – 2.5D style working in unison with the shadows born from Mei-Lin’s torch to bring this world to existence. Extra points for the use of a Cantonese theme, that’s a fresh take on the genre, and which fits like a glove with the ‘haunted house’ vibe on offer.
The problem here is that this is a portion that’s hard to “read.” Should Mei-Lin keep on pushing the lift button like a lunatic? Should she just wait? It’s difficult to know, and that can happen with other mechanics as well. Take the trinket stated before. To use it, she needs to get proximate to an opponent and push a button in a QTE style to evade the ghost’s one-hit death touch, but this can hardly fail, without really feeling as if it was your fault. This grows even more vexatious way later, where Mei-Lin gets the means to protect herself, with the “fights” feeling completely weightless and irresponsible, leading to even more failure and wait to detect the bugs.
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