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Subtle Horror Gone CrayCray

  • Kylaila
  • 11/17/2016 06:36 PM
  • 1379 views
Hello and another review for this little game.
Likely inspired by horrorgames like Imscared, "Party 2!" is a shortish (half an hour to an hour?) exploration based horror game. You will get a few things popping up in and out of the game interacting with the experience, and you enter a "party" that starting from the title screen you knew was beyond sarcastic (I feel the stark clashing font helps to make it seem less genuine).

This is a review for the updated version with the save file wipes removed.
I myself did not get any virus warning.

Looking it up, there is only one point where I felt a wipe would make sense, and seeing how it used to be I may not have wanted to finish it. So yay for that!

At one point you need to start the game new to enter a new area. Since before that you could continue off the existing save files and did not have any indication of needing to do so, I first repeated all endings and got multiple bears before I realized I needed to do this.
It was slightly confusing but I could continue easily. So that's a nitpick.


In "Party 2!" (for two, with two) you are in your house and your sister is visiting, or haunting you, to be more precise. That's about it, and doesn't it sound like a jolly good time!


Setting the tone. I don't like this family reunion.

And similarily, the main game comes in two big parts. One in your house, setting the tone, and one being a deconstruction of a few things. I myself really really enjoyed the first part, and the second felt soon like only a chore to me, and a sometimes painful one at that. It is a true ending of sorts, tho a long road compared to the others.
I really loved the atmosphere and the small dosis of jump scares and changes of the first half and actually would've loved to see more of that.

It is a simple waiting and exploration part. You circle back and forth in your house, notice small changes and maybe follow the notes a certain friendly someone left for you with happy greetings and wishes.

Now, that is simple and straightforward, but the thing that made this so enjoyable for me were two great touches.

One, a record player playing soothing music.
Two, light switches in every room.

I liked the simple house descriptions as well, but I really enjoyed those touches. There's only really 4 small rooms, one space at the house entrance, and a small basement.
Now, knowing something bad is about to happen, seeing that something about a trauma and a family relationship is being hinted at by the books, it all made traversing the house very tense. I felt walking around in the hopes of finding out what it actually is made for a subtly tense atmosphere. I sometimes actually almost scared myself playing with the light switches.


Clearly you must have noticed something is going very wrong!

The background music blends in with the environment, and if you are further away from its source, it becomes dimmer and fades more into the background, whereas you hear it at full volume in the hallways and the room it is placed in. Lovely.
It made for this really creepy atmosphere where it was soothing the atmosphere a little bit, but at the same time made it worse as well. I didn't know if I wanted it to be playing (you can turn it off), but that hesitation made it fun. I kept it on, because I like background music. Others may not, who knows.

As it continues the first jumpscare really got me because it was so unexpected. The game closes and resumes as simply as it never happened and this is a trend the game follows with the many bigger changes that follow.
There is a notice that will pop up you need to use as a code, among a few other things, but it soon becomes a routine.

Continue. Break. Load, continue .. interact with the new thing. Input code if you got one (this is thankfully easy, and there are no puzzles either), be returned to the title screen, resume game, have a chase scene, be thrown out again, resume game at yet a different point with a slightly more distorted title screen.

There are one or two things that break this routine and they have a nice impact because of this, but a lot of it feels really .. dull, and more annoying than anything else. The rooms are made as "fake" as well and are not intended to be a clever deconstruction of anything and as such are neither pretty nor particularily useful either. Hints to what is actually going on come only again very late.
It is just noise. There are one or two chase scenes you will not be able to complete right away as you need to guess or find out the right path, or can't react fast enough, but the fact you repeat it endlessly and feel safe doing whatever does not really help to make them feel scary.

It does not help that there are many sections where the music will not only become a noisy mess, which is fine, but also painfully loud. You are warned about "music getting louder or quieter" on the page, yes, but it should say "adjust music volume to your liking immediately once it changes, lest you want your ears to bleed" .. my ears still hurt even doing that. Since it then continues to a point where I need to put the volume up again a lot, I later opted to simply take my headphones off (which was also tough because I had to time this with an escape scene) - and it was still loud to my ears.
This difference is too big. You can use volume differences to great effect (and the starting point did that well too!) but the sound itself carries the feeling already. It doesn't need to be physical torture to get the point across.
I like my ears, my hearing and I love good sound design.


Check. Nice!

If you then followed it all you come to a room with more creepy hints and ideas that just focus more on the twisted relationship between the two siblings, and make you wonder (or at least me!) what actually happened between them in the past.
I did not find the answers particularily fulfilling or interesting, but I thought it was a decent ending to the entire lineup.

Now that's just my inner focus, but I personally thought there was going to be more details to their relationship and what that trauma is supposed to be.
But it came down to a sister going cray-cray crazy and being "broken" and loving and killing which is disturbing in its idea but felt a little shallow.
It also felt .. unrelated to all we have been seeing, in a way. Things go wrong, she is toying with and killing you too. The end. The game is broken too maybe. *shrug*

I did find the scene where you woke up injured disturbing though and would've loved to find out more details about how or what happened to me. Or .. let that have some impact .. on anything.

As a sidenote, why do we pick up a pickaxe when we THEN pick up a knife to eventually kill her? What is the pickaxe for?


I feel a lot of people would like this because it has a lot of unexpected twists and turns visually and in terms of gameplay. It is like a cross of "Hello.. Hell...o" and "Imscared" gone wild with the concept. Imscared has a lot more subtlety in that regard, and "Hello... Hell...o" is generally less horrorcentric as well (and also less erratic).
At the same time, I feel the latter "horror" focus of this game was almost entirely lost on me and it ended up being an annoying chore and mild torture on my ears. Thus I am puzzled on how to rate it. It certainly left an impression for better or for worse.

Did I enjoy playing this game? Yes, I loved the record player. It was .. interesting.
Would I recommend it? Not to everyone. If you want something pulling your attention for a while, go for it.
A lot of horror games are about a "strong" experience one way or another, and I feel this game has that. There is a lot of room for improvement but it does get that job done.

Posts

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Hiya there!

Thank you for the review, it's a shame you didn't play it a little later, you would have been able to play the updated version!

Oh well!

Thanks again!
You're welcome!
And more updates coming? What do you plan on tweaking?
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