Festival on Steam “GAMES FROM RUSSIA”. Part one

I decided to spend an evening on demo games of our developers, to see what the domestic game dev is doing and whether it has a chance of success. Spoiler – yes. In fact, I’ve been communicating with indie developers for a long time and among them there are a lot of enthusiasts with sparkling eyes, but it’s not only my fellow countrymen who are developing games. Therefore, it is interesting to see if suddenly in some Mukhosransk there lives a team of creative guys who are right now working on a future masterpiece that will surprise the whole world. And I started acquaintance in order. Today I tested 4 games – Paranormal Records, One Way Home, The Renovator: Origins and Leak.

How will I evaluate and what to pay attention to?

Mainly subjective and emotional. Yes, there won’t be any deep analyzes of the narrative that I do on my YouTube channel. This requires deeper analytics, which takes more time. So these are rather general impressions from the passage. However, I will pay attention to the dynamics of the games and what they are based on. So, go ahead!

First game – Paranormal Records

First-person psychological horror inspired by Outlast. Impressions are mixed so far. I thought it was funny that the main character, Yaroslav, speaks English with a pronounced Russian accent. I realized that this was intended, the protagonist was born in Russia and he is filming a report in some abandoned American place. The idea itself is entertaining, but it breaks the immersion greatly. Such an accent sounds unnatural, since Russian-speaking people who speak English at a conversational level have at least an approximate understanding of the sound of English speech. They won’t pretentiously say “let speak from my hart”. And if at first it seems funny, then such speech begins to strain the ears, and a lot of compression is applied to the voice processing. If this happens throughout the entire game in the full version, it will quickly get boring.

In general, there are problems with the sound design in this project, which is detrimental for a game in this genre. The repeated steps of the hero begin to irritate and take you out of immersion. Of course, I don’t expect that in indie projects sound designers will record 200 variations of steps, as in Silent Hill, but at least 10 pieces with different timings would be enough. Screamers are too fleeting, the tension subsides at the same moment. Overall the game looks nice, but many small details break the immersion.

Second game – One Way Home

Action platformer in the spirit https://nongamstopcasinosites.co.uk/review/palm-casino/ of Little Nightmares. I couldn’t complete the demo, I got tired of it. I understand that the game was mainly made by 2 people, which was written about at launch, but so far this is a very crude demo. The main problem is physics, it still needs to be persistently balanced, since the main mechanics of the game are built on it, and if a key aspect is lame, then it’s hard to enjoy the game.

Like the previous game, there are problems with the sound design. In tense moments, the developers seemed to forget to turn up the volume, which is why the sounds that should be hitting your ears are practically inaudible.

There’s not enough narrative, in my opinion. Yes, I remember that Little Nightmares does not introduce the player to the course, but the dramaturgy there works on visual and audio perception. Little Six found herself in a world of big monsters, where she can easily be slammed, and there you can’t help but ask questions: “What kind of world is this?”?", "Who is Sixth?", "Why is she here?", "What’s happening?». It’s just a boy running away from zombies, without context or intrigue.

Third game – The Renovator: Origins

First person quest. The hero wakes up in an old Soviet house. Stuck, didn’t understand what to do, where to look for the door keys. The game is good and appeals to nostalgia. For residents of the post-Soviet space, there will be many familiar objects from the past; it’s fun to walk around and look at your surroundings, but nothing more. I hope that, besides nostalgia, the authors will try to surprise us with something else, otherwise the plot is not intriguing at all. I don’t even know what else to write here.

Fourth game – Leak

First person horror. Now this is interesting. There is a premise – to find a family, and the game directly meets the player with a hanged corpse in the house. The game mainly consists of screamers, but high-quality ones. Even if you already expect a scary story to pop up, it still manages to have an effect.

The sound design is excellent, the dynamics are excellent. The game does not leave you without tension for a minute, and even cheap tricks work. Well, riddles force you to wiggle your brains and move around, which only adds to the likelihood of stumbling upon some other joke. I don’t know how good the game will remain at release, how interesting the story will be, and whether there will be anything else besides good jump scares, but the prologue was directed by smart people.

Total:

Four games, mostly horror, all on Unreal Engine. It’s great that dynamic lighting works in the engine, and all the toys look visually pleasing. It’s also nice that modern horror films actively use a shaky camera, which adds tension. This was something that was missing in older games.

My main questions are only about the quality of execution, which is more narrative than technical. And no, I don’t expect more lore and plot from these projects, I’m rather interested in the presentation. How will developers squeeze the right emotions out of the player?.

I wonder what will happen in the next demos, I’ll definitely play and write more posts.