izigame.me

Overall Rating
★★★★☆

Story
★★★★☆

Gameplay
★★★★☆

Graphics
★★★★★

Soundtrack
★★★★★

Sound Design
★★★★☆

Difficulty
★★☆☆☆

Bug free ?
★★★★★

PC Requirements
★☆☆☆☆

Replay Value
★★★☆☆



Strongly Recommended - ✔✔


After playing and reviewing The Witch House, I decided to continue my marathon of iconic independent RPG and what better way to continue it than to replay after so many years the silver medalist of the independent horror RPG podium: IB!

Here you play the eponymous hero of the game, an 8 year-old girl named Ib who goes with her parents to a post-mortem exhibition of a very popular artist named Guertena. After looking at a strange painting, she finds herself in a parallel universe where Guertena's paintings and sculptures come to life. You must therefore survive in this sometimes surprising and sometimes frightening universe where you will meet different characters.

So we start the game without being given too much information in the narration and this is already one of the strong points of this game : Most of the information is kept quiet. Unlike games where you are given all the keys to move forward and understand, where you can be disturbed by a scenario or elements that you don't like, Ib gives you the advantage of making your own story. The characters will give you some information, but it's up to you to interpret what you see. This kind of game has always had the merit of being considered incredibly original, and Ib is proudly part of it.

Your goal will therefore be to get out of this museum with cursed paintings. You will never know what wants to harm you but you will want to escape. Not to mention that your red rose linked to your life, loses petals with each attack by these monsters and that you cannot defend yourself... But you will not be alone in your quest : A very effeminate and pleasant twenty-something man named Garry and a little blonde girl with blue eyes named Mary will accompany you.

Having discovered and played IB for the very first time as a child, I had no idea that I was going to face a horror game. Because after all, with such 2D graphics, how can you be afraid of 6 moving pixels? Well yes, you will jump on your chair of surprise sometimes. The atmosphere of anguish is very present and very well transcribed.

Speaking of atmosphere, the vibe given to the game is very special, having sometimes made me feel deeply uneasy. The game really succeeds in making you feel like you are in a gallery haunted by the creations of Guertena, a somewhat... special artist? And this through the very many paintings filling the gallery, the books telling us the story of these paintings, the puzzles related to them and the emotions they can make us transmit (it is quite special and incredible to make us feel emotions through these processes). Horror is also used intelligently to contribute to the atmosphere. The character of Ib, so small in the middle of the gallery, whose gloomy atmosphere is very well rendered, makes us, in spite of ourselves, tense up on our keyboard. The enigmatic side of the game, also, helps to perfect this gloomy atmosphere wonderfully: no indication, no arrows, no path to follow, no tutor or mentor who guides us during the game, nor any scenario indications. This disturbing universe will lead you to be curious and never get tired.

For the gameplay : it's flawless for me. You should know that the vast majority of the gameplay is based on exploration and puzzles: The puzzles in the game are very interesting, tough but not impossible, allowing you to solve them while feeling proud of having accomplished them, very few of them rely on randomness not allowing you to go random and hope that it works.

The exploration is also good, you have to explore a lot to continue the game but that the exploration is not restrictive, that the game makes you want to explore, thanks to its secrets, its many paintings etc... Bonus, to support how good its gameplay is: when you have to restart the game to do another ending, it does not stop you, it is quite easy to start again. Because my god it is annoying when you can not solve a puzzle that you already know because you had to do THIS action first because otherwise the variable does not work (sorry it is a bit technical but that is how Rpg Maker works, the program in which Ib was made), Ib very rarely has these problems and it is really pleasant to be able to redo it easily to explore all the endings.

The aesthetics of the game are magnificent and original. At first terrified, we discover and delight in every detail of the story, which will gradually reveal the secrets of the world in which Ib is taken. The fact that the game is (relatively) short is ultimately an advantage when you want to replay the game to get another ending, because the outcomes are multiple. The scenario is very rich and has many twists and turns. But what you should remember the most is that you will be entitled to about ten different endings depending on the choices you make. So replay the game if the ending you got doesn't satisfy you, you will discover a new facet of the exhibition and new answers to your questions.

Ib is a game that moved me a lot when I was younger, a game that changed my vision of what a good video game is. A game that showed me that you don't have to play a Light Novel to have a good story, that you don't have to have good graphics to have an incredible atmosphere, that you don't have to make a love story to make a relationship between two characters very touching. The story has no major flaws, nor did I see any huge inconsistencies, which puts us even more into the game. The story is full of mysteries that are complemented by different special events triggered by different fairly logical sequences of actions and/or with the endings. We can therefore make connections on our own, guesses about the sequel or the mysteries, etc... which is really nice and makes us "enter" the universe of IB.

To come back to the different endings of Ib: they are also very good, leaving us with no bitter taste after having done them all, they are also accessible quite logically, so we can discover them without having really followed a guide but simply by our simple spirit of deduction (I personally had to look at a guide to do only two of them, and my god these endings are hard to achieve even with a guide which I find quite negative: having to talk 25 times to a character specifically at a time to unlock an ending. I say no: it is neither logical, nor intuitive, nor fun. Fortunately the excellent ending "A Painting Demise" makes up for these dozens of painful failures.)

I would like to add that the option in the menu to be able to visit the real exhibition is just so great and satisfying: Finishing the different endings and discovering each work of the game and its titles will fill the real exhibition and we will also be able to find the important characters of the game to chat with them. It's a small bonus, very satisfying for any collector (even more so when you know that you have to finish completing the exhibition to get the game's only achievement on Steam).

In short, Ib is an excellent game developed by a single person, which still beats three quarters of current AAA games. This is the perfect example of what is good in a horror/indie horror rpg and when I was younger, it made me discover a whole section of a genre of games that I did not know, the Indie Horror type Rpg Maker and I am very happy to have discovered it. It is illustrated by an excellent atmosphere, excellent gameplay and a very good story. Ib is striking, surprising, pleasant and will leave you with a very good memory. This game personally marked me, it touched me deeply, it will remain engraved in my memory like a thorn in my heart.