izigame.me

This game has such great potential! During the first half, the pacing is excellent, the combat is a lot of fun, the story is interesting, and I enjoyed the voice acting too. There's so much fascinating meta-game to this and I want to recommend this game, but I can't.
At some point, the references to Silent Hill and Resident Evil went from endearing to imitation. The game's plot is too close to a subplot from Silent Hill 2, even down to the symbolism, choice of allegory, set pieces, and metaphor. (Specifically, Amanda is Angela Orosco, the walls of Amanda's room are the walls of Abstract Daddy's room, Amanda's house being burned parallels Angela's obsession with burning her family, and Amanda's insistence on killing players of the game who don't hear her story / Amanda's dad's choice to commit suicide line up a little too close to Angela's suicidal ideation. Given how much the game relies on allegory, it leaves too many holes as you progress, like -

* Who paid Stoker for his research and why?
* What is the parallel of Lorelai with Amanda, if one at all? Why the maid outfit?
* Why this particular time or location?
* Who are these monsters and how does that relate to the tragedy of the family?
* Who are the protagonists of each game and how do they factor in?
* What is this giant monster that chases you everywhere towards the end?
* Why is there a graveyard in the backyard of the house?
* Why does Stoker live in a big-ass house with a bunch of empty rooms?
* Why is there a school setting at the end? Is that nod to Silent Hill 1?
* Is the massive system of caves relevant to Stoker's research? Is it a reference to Penumbra? Is it a nod to the third act from Nightmare of Decay and / or Signalis?
* Why does the music shift to something to the style of Akira Yamaoka at the end of the game when all of the music up to that point was different?

And that list is by no means exhaustive. When the themes of the allegory become too unstable, and these plot holes aren't answered, it starts to feel like the morgue puzzle was lifted directly from Silent Hill 3 rather than a respectful nod, that the hedge maze wasn't just lifted out of RE4, or that the main hall of the mansion and the textures on the walls weren't directly taken from RE1.
Unfortunately, where the game actually landed symbolic connections felt too on-the-nose as well, like Stoker is researching a "seed" to revive his wife, later insisting that you "receive his seed." Where Stoker is a scientist who believes the ends justify the means, Amanda's dad is a depressed alcoholic who struggles to find redemption. In other words, it doesn't land that Amanda's dad rapes his daughter in order to bring back his wife, rather it seems he does it because he's angry, depressed, and bitter. It felt like much of the game's setup was intended to land as symbolism or metaphor, and sometimes it gets close, yet far too often this setup devolved into inconsequential details rather than an explicit part of the story, such that everything in the second half lands as surprising rather than clarifying. When you bundle all of this with the fact that the inventory system, save system, art style, several game mechanics / obstacles, and many of the puzzles come straight out of Silent Hill 2 and 3, it starts to feel more a Silent Hill fan game, or a patchwork of 90s survival horror plots and mechanics, rather than something that stands on it's own.
One of the most frustrating parts of the narrative shows up in a puzzle: the Tree of Life game. The core of this puzzle haphazardly paints Indigenous peoples of the Americas as set pieces for the game: they become "demons" / "hellspawn," serving as the primary enemy for the protagonist, a Spanish conquistador, whose entire mission is to take a seed from a hallowed tree in order to save his captain from wounds inflicted by the very same people. This tree of course is ironically from the land of those they've colonized and genocided, and this is all after the captain asserts that the "natives are untrustworthy." This all plays into lazy stereotypes and tropes of indigenous people being bloodthirsty and / or haunted ghosts, so when the use of this setting had no significance to the greater narrative, this whole section felt gross to play, hitting too close to the actual colonization and genocide faced by Indigenous peoples in America and worldwide.
The game is not particularly stable either. The pacing can be a total slog and some of the mechanics are frustrating to navigate around. I no-clipped through tons of meshes, no-clipped out of the world, got pinned to the wall by enemies more than once, or reloaded saves where state from gamplay after the save persisted. More than just a few times I had monsters attack me through walls, or somehow no-clip through the wall, float in the air, and continue to attack me without the ability to fight back, forcing a reload. As cool as the metagame elements are, it makes saving in this game awkward because your progress is relative to the game you're playing in the game. You can't reload in many instances without dying or restarting the outer game, and because how saves line up across the meta-game, it's hard for the limited saves mechanic to contribute to the skill ceiling. The pacing issues are particularly noticeable towards the end, where if you die, you have to run through so many caves to hide from the monster, or backtrack through the Kafka-esque connections of your home and the mansion. Lastly, the fact that monsters will always revive and never truly die like in RE1 / Signalis was a fascinating mechanic but a missed opportunity. It's not clear how to navigate around this mechanic which limits the skill ceiling, and far too often, many of the monsters could all revive at once and trap you, where you had no hope of winning.
The game is missing some accessibility options too, like supporting custom keybinds for all actions. For example, because my keyboard is ergonomic and non-QWERTY, I could only play the game by changing my keyboard firmware to bind keys in places that the game expects.
The high-level of this game is awesome and endlessly fascinating, and the game has such a strong first half too, so I get why so many folks love this game. However, the characterization of Indigenous folks was deeply problematic, and because the second half are facsimiles of games I've already played, it was disappointing to see so much potential narrative and allegory become inconsequential, relegated to plot device taken directly from the material of inspiration.