Gray Dawn Review (Lia Tris)
The world's most beautiful religious lunatic simulator. You play as a priest who is very insistent he has not killed any children as he travels through a series of wild religious hallucinations. Given how casually morbid and gruesome religion can be, religious psychological horror is a genre with a lot of potential.
Though enjoyable, it was also quite flawed. Most of the parts were good individually, they just didn't come together well because the story is a mess. Given the protagonist not remotely reliable, this would have bothered me less were it not for some of the other issues compounding it. The last few chapters in particular were oddly choppy and had loading screens riddled with easily-catchable typos, leaving them seeming rushed.
The game's worst sin is that the overt "horror" elements tend to be silly rather than scary. The rain of frogs was at least biblical, the tentacles and the diving section (complete with obnoxiously limited vision) not so much. And that's not even getting into the wildly out-of-place xenomorph-egg brothel level, yes, you read that correctly. Pro-tip: Vaginas aren't scary. A lot of stuff is better off implied. Subtlety is a good thing.
Fortunately, most of the game did not involve the silly horror elements. Most of the game was beautiful and atmospheric. Gray Dawn is visually incredible (when it's not trying to be H.R. Giger or H.P. Lovecraft). Detailed, vibrant, and full of texture. The indoors environments are ornate, the outdoor environments lush. The season-changing mechanic was particularly cool. The main visual weakness is the people. They weren't distractingly bad anyway, and at least the traditional Romanian outfits were cool. Same goes for the Romanian buildings and furniture with their vibrant paint. The cemetery level was probably my favorite, it's based on a real Romanian cemetery and it's fascinating. The music and environmental sound help build an atmosphere which is at times almost hypnotic. The voice acting was not great, but at least the voices matched the characters.
I've seen it called a survival horror game, it's definitely not and I genuinely do not know why anyone would call it that. Gray Dawn either a walking simulator or a puzzle game. The puzzles themselves were quite simple, if often sparse on directions.