The bootup sequence for the game takes forever and it’s unskippable. It’s not like it has a lot of stuff to show you or anything. It’s more like you’re watching a three picture slide show controlled by an old man who keeps falling asleep in between frames. Just click on the shortcut and go see what’s on TV while it finishes jacking around.
I started this game months ago so I don’t really remember the initial premise of the plot so I’ll just paraphrase/fabricate it. You go to this haunted house in the English countryside to watch it while the owners are gone. As you move along, you learn more about the history of the house and why it is the way it is. There is a singular demon in possession of the area. This aside, there’s really nothing spooky about the house. It just looks like an ordinary house that people are currently living in with electricity and only slightly outdated technology. The outer extremities like the workshop are only in a bit of disrepair. If there’s one thing I’d take from the other game, Scratches, it was the spooky-ass house. They could have really used it here.
So you do what you always do, explore and look for puzzles to solve. The movement consists of clicking through mostly static first-person prerendered views. There’s no fine movement or views available. You just have to deal with the game’s prescribed number of steps it forces you to take and whatever directions it allows you to look. Often times you’ll see things that you’ll want to interact with in the corner of one view and have no idea what combination of directional clicks is required to get you in front of it. Most of the time though you essentially walk past whatever it is and then turn back around to face it which is stupid.All around, you find countless items you can look at but can’t pick up. This is because you have to do everything in order. If the game hasn’t told you that you need a bowl yet, you can’t pick up the fucking bowl. It was this aspect of the game, (which I hadn’t figured out yet,) that caused me to take such a long hiatus from it. You see early on I was trying to build a fire in the house’s fireplace but couldn’t. I took the kindling from the basket next to it and set it in the fireplace. Then I went outside to get the logs I saw near the axe. Alas, I could not pick them up. Building a fire was the only thing I could work on and the game wouldn’t let me so I stopped playing. I thought it was broken. You’d be surprised at how many adventure games have some stupid bug in them that makes it impossible to progress any further. When I researched the issue on the internet I found out what the problem was. I hadn’t yet listened to a message on the answering machine telling me to build a fire. Seriously? Of all the irrelevant shit… And it let me put the kindling in but not the logs? So I’m aloud to build HALF of a fire? What’s with that?
A habitual problem in the game is the overabundance of reading material. Books and books and papers and magazines and e-mails and more books. Just pages and pages of journal entries, scientific discourse and Celtic legend. I maybe skimmed the first five words of every paragraph and pushed it aside to forget about it. Unless the text is dialogue from characters speaking in the game or short little snippets of notes and news clippings, I’m not going to fucking read it. Figure out a better medium or a more succinct way of establishing back story and plot development because this shit is like pulling teeth.The key to breaking the demonic curse involves these four elemental orbs that you have to create… from scratch. At certain points in the game you uncover documents which pertain to a specific legend and basically have a shopping list of objects that you need to get and combine in a specific corresponding elemental place to create the orb. Pretty much it involves trying to remember if any of that shit you weren’t allowed to pick up earlier resembles items from the list and if you even remember where the hell it is. Of course you’re just going to try and pick up everything while looking because let me tell you, some of these stand in objects are a real stretch. In one you have to find a cradle but all you can find is a printed picture of a crib. When you toss it in it turns into a real cradle. I mean if I can literally just put in a fucking picture of the object, why don’t I just go on Google Images or get out the encyclopedia and get everything in five minutes sitting in a chair?
There was another one which required a mouse. Now I knew it had to be a dead mouse from the cat since he kept bringing them in and I kept accidentally picking them up. Then I’d dispose of them in the toilet because they were useless and I didn’t want to have to look at them all the time in my inventory. Surely this was the sole purpose for those stupid dead mice but no. Do you know what I actually needed? A computer mouse. Yes, a COMPUTER MOUSE. So don’t use an actual mouse in a ritual that requires a mouse. Use a modern day device that is CALLED a mouse for no more reason than because it very vaguely resembles one.
While making the water orb you have to mix the correct items with various water samples that are labeled things like ‘joy,’ ‘duty’ and ‘hatred.’ Now beforehand you had to label these test tubes and then fill them at a spring in the yard. Ignoring the obvious question of how/why can the samples correlate with nebulous things like emotions, how did I know what intrinsic qualities the water would have before I gathered it? Second, how in the hell did all these samples gathered at a single water source organize themselves in the correct test tubes?When making the wind orb, it’s impossible to find where you do the spell. The other ones were obvious. Put it in a fire. Put it in a hole. Put it in the water. But how do you put it in wind? The short answer is you don’t. Somehow you’re supposed to realize that the couch in the living room that you didn’t even know you could sit on, you’re supposed to sit on and do everything on the coffee table. In this one you’re supposed to mix tonal sound recordings with the items. So try this at home; go get your piggy bank and place it on your coffee table. Then play some music. At some point when the correct note is played, it should turn into a real pig.
Even for a fantastical magic spell, I don’t get how this is supposed to work. You're just combining a bunch of ordinary things together and getting gold from air. It would be like going to your uncle’s ranch for the summer and then trying to make magical shit by mixing various weeds from his garden with random personal affects you found in his bathroom by throwing them together in the pool. It doesn’t make ANY sense. That’s like something a seven-year-old would do. In fact it reminds me of how I used to mix random food and spices together and then liquefy it in a blender. Why? Maybe in the end you wouldn’t get a ‘fire orb’ but what you’d have was the most putrid and vile concoction anyone’s ever seen. Just one whiff of the watery humus-textured rainbow goo and you’ll be gagging into your open palm. It’s absolutely wretched in your nostrils but what does it TASTE like? You must taste it! You know it will be a highly regrettable experience but the substance is inexplicably alluring. It is the forbidden fruit and you can not resist. I don’t even know where the hell I’m going with this anymore so back on topic.
At the end, you finally get to use the orbs to banish the spirit by placing them on the correct tombstones in a cemetery. You have to find all four Rhiannons (Wait there are four? News to me.) and place the orbs accordingly based on their zodiac signs. This is the most finicky place as far as moving around and trying to look at the things you want to look at. But the worst thing of all is that in order to know most of their zodiac signs, you need to have read the correct articles of monotonous papers you’ve found. No, sorry. The only thing you’re going to get me to read for that is a walkthrough.
