Steam Horror Game Roundup Part 1 - Anna

[RightClickSaveAs]

I impulse bought a few games on Steam because of the sale, there were a few small horror titles I'd always been curious about but not enough to buy them at regular price, so I figured I'd drop off a review for each as I play through them.

The first one is Anna, which was $2.

This game comes with the original and extended editions. I played the extended edition, which says it has an improved control and inventory system as well as some reworked and added puzzles.


Short review: This is an ambitious horror game with some great tension and themes that is bogged down by some incredibly frustrating puzzles and mechanics. Give it a pass unless you like difficult inventory based puzzle games, or want to use a walkthrough for most of the game.

Score: 3 freaky mannequins (out of 10)


Long review:
The game irritated me from the point of installation because it made me put in the product key, which isn't completely unusual, but then also made me register another account for the launcher using a valid email, which is unusual. I now have a Kalypso Launcher account which I need to sign into every time I play this one game, so on top of being through Steam, there are two different types of copy protection right off the bat for a game that cost $2...

This was not a very pleasant experience from a gameplay standpoint. I enjoyed trying to piece together the story, but the mechanics of that process were painful.

There are some great moments of true horror that don't rely on jump scares, a lot of them involving mannequins, which are inherently pretty terrifying. There are also themes throughout of woman's role in history, and men's obsession with and persecution of the ideal woman figure.

The puzzles are pretty much all inventory based, and of the kind where you need one specific item to do something you should be able to do with one of your other inventory items. At one point I had an axe, some kind of woodworker's tool that was basically a long pointy stick with a handle on it, and a blade for cutting wood, BUT, instead of using one of these perfectly good tools to unjam this door or whatever it was (I've forgotten the puzzle already) I had to go find an iron bar. A plain old iron bar, that was shoved into a nook on a wall for some reason. Also, it's the kind of game where the objects you need to find blend in with the environment really well, so when you get stuck it's not apparent whether you missed something and need to go back and scour the room again, or you just need to figure out some harebrained combination of items you've already picked up.

To make that even worse, the interface and controls were aggravating. You can hit Esc to exit most interfaces, like the journal, but when you have your inventory up Esc does nothing and you have to hit the inventory key to close it. So you constantly have to switch back and forth between hitting Esc and hitting the inventory key, because you'll use the inventory a lot, and it drove me up a wall.

I got an hour or so into the game on my own, then found myself in the situation I hate, which is wandering back and forth in the rooms I'd unlocked so far with only a vague idea of what I was supposed to do. So at that point I pulled up a walkthrough and finished the rest of the game by following that. And I'm glad I did so early, because there was no way I would have gotten most of the puzzles that followed.

There are a few good guides up on Steam, so you can get to those without having to alt+tab or have a second monitor. The game itself comes with a hint system you can set to turn on after a period of time, or when you hit a key, and this was helpful for the puzzles I tried to work out on my own, but on a couple of occasions it gave me clues for a puzzle I hadn't gotten to yet.

One of the ambitious ideas the game uses is this interesting but confusing system where as you explore, you gather clues called “Intuitions” which are added to a separate inventory like items, and you can combine the right intuitions to figure out the story. It's really hard to figure out how it works though, and the game doesn't help you at all.

There's also a sanity meter, which is actually implemented pretty well, but is yet another confusing game mechanic in practice. It's hard to tell that's what it is, and the things that cause you to lose sanity seem really random and difficult to guard against.

I did like that there are multiple endings. Losing all your sanity results in one of these, and I love that rather than a "you died, game over" screen, it gives you that option and you can consider the game done at this point if you choose. Also, there's a great ending where you can just go “No thanks!” and turn around and leave the house at the beginning after going in, like every horror movie protagonist should do. There are also some great, unique horror moments that never feel cheap and are sometimes pretty disturbing. I was just too confused most of the time to really appreciate them.

I don't know, for some of my complaints, maybe I was supposed to read a manual or something, but who does that anymore? I don't know if the game even has one.

[matt]

Thanks for writing that up! It seems like it's worth skipping - for the DRM annoyances alone... While I play a lot of games with walkthroughs, it seems like even with a walkthrough it'd still be really frustrating especially with the poor inventory controls...

[RightClickSaveAs]

It's a shame because there really is a lot of potential, and some truly good scares. The extended edition definitely has an improved interface but it was still a pain to use.

One example of a scare is fairly early on where (spoiling this in case someone still wants to play it for themselves)
you go into this woodworking room that has all these shoes hanging from the ceiling. As you poke around and pick up a couple things, there are suddenly a couple mannequins sitting on the floor. The player character makes a note of that, then if you stay in the room a certain amount of time after that, they suddenly disappear, and as you stand there wondering what happened, there's an outline of a wooden hand slowly reaching across your screen, like something's reaching around your face from behind. Then you lose some sanity and everything goes back to normal.

[matt]

Hmm... That sounds cool! It's a shame the game didn't turn out so hot.