Maid of Sker Review (Winter)
Very weak horror game, story is kind of ok.
The horror game consists of stealth and only stealth, which is funnily enough can be solved by simply running through "scary" monsters. Literally it is just you memorising their movement patterns and then crawling through an expected-to-be free pathway. All of that is to find audio recordings of the story or get phone calls from a person in-trouble. No other methods to communicate the story were used.
The setting is a house, four medium-sized floors and one garden. You run through the same corridors because you found some key that unlocks something on the first floor. In the corridors there are monsters, through which you need to use stealth. Despite there being maybe 40 monsters, you remember the monster-you-are-about-to-meet movement. For those who like puzzles, there are none, as long as you can solve lever -> door mechanic.
Maybe other cool mechanics? No. There are only three mechanics: pull levers (through stealth) to activate doors, insert a key in the door, and one cool thing in the end that lasted maybe 7 minutes. If you remember the first horror games ever created, where the mechanic was "find 10 items to escape", here is absolutely the same thing. A very absurd thing is that in the end, there is a minigame, where you run with guns (which are not in the main game), kill all monsters and then escape. The gun mechanic is atrocious, which may be why it wasn't added, but the fact that they had an idea on how to improve it but decided to make the never-ending non-scary stealth is fascinating.
The story. It is weird. The origin of the horrific story was interesting, but how it continued seemed a bit underdeveloped. Imagine if Harry Potter franchise went like "there was once a boy, who secretly was a wizard, but didn't know about it, and then Hagrid came and they all lived happily. the end". There is no "Hogwarts" in the game.
Atmosphere is very weak. I mean, graphics are great, but the eeriness is manifested solely through (1) disorganised non-bloody non-absurd non-scary furniture (2) the same type of monster appearing a billion times. So, you know, you stare at a (relatively) very highly detailed candle, but get no sense of fear at all. The only scary part was not to die, just because the saving was a long time ago.
Finally, the ending. It was kind of ok too, the main character is given a choice. The twist could be hypothesised throughout the game, but at the end it became apparent when the main character is given a choice, and to unlock one unexpected choice, the main character needs to do something. Very not suspicious. The ending is just a video, whose content was nothing but ok. There was no "wow" effect.
So overall a very weak game. I wanted to close it at the start but decided to give it another chance just because it became just a bit more interesting. Yet, there was nothing worth playing. Conceptually, the game was a good try, but to be frank, who wants to stealth through same graphics and same calculable monsters for 8 hours without proper mechanics or just even a story. For the price of 25 euros it is just absurd. The game definitely caught much attention from graphic designers, programmers, I don't know, but the product just turned out to be unsatisfactorily. Price-wise it seems like the game wishes to position itself along other games like RE, outlast, the evil within, etc, but really comes on the shelf of "find 10 items to escape Slenderman".