ASYLUM

“Whilst the 00s graphics are charming and help to create a decently spooky atmosphere, the constant plot holes, 2D characters, and lack of gameplay mean that those feelings drip away very quickly.”

“Either different hardware or configuration was used to record different characters' voices and the result is noticeable and takes a lot away from the atmosphere.”

“Although the first few minutes are encouraging, reminding us of absolute masterpiece horror adventure game 'Scratches' (2006) from the same author, Asylum ultimately fails to reproduce the qualities of its model, with a lacklustre atmosphere, artificial progression mechanisms, weak puzzles, and a far too predictable scenario.”

“There's some interesting ideas here, which are let down by a weak narrative, clunky game mechanics, and a decidedly spongey ending.”

“Aburridisimo la verdad, no se como estuvieron trabajando en esto 15 años en teoria, texturas de la era de ps2, animaciones toscas, gameplay obsoleto con mecánicas viejísimas, sabiendo que salieron juegos mucho más aterradores como Outlast en todo este tiempo, la verdad es un escupitajo en la cara a los que apoyaron este juego. (Translation: Absolutely boring honestly, I don't know how they worked on this for 15 years in theory, PS2 era textures, rough animations, obsolete gameplay with very old mechanics, knowing that much scarier games like Outlast came out during all this time, honestly it's a spit in the face to those who supported this game.)”

“The game also has Duke Nukem Forever vibes to it: the vibes it gives are not as strong as those in DNF nor are they similar in content, tone, gameplay, story, or quality, but in the fact, it feels like a game that took 10+ years to make. You can almost see the past ideas they had, you can almost tell what video game generation parts of the game date from, you can almost feel the developers regretting some of their past design decisions and an overall vibe that it was released not because it was a finished game but because the developer was done working on it, just used the last few months to make the game as good as possible and move on.”

“It is offensive primarily in how it treats the protagonist's sanity, the secondary character Lenny (who is sort of a generic amalgam of untreated OCD ailments), and the 'high risk patient' - who is just a catch-all 'insane violent behaviour' character, including with a random pacification by harp music for no explained reason.”

“The music is okay, but doesn't reach the level of Scratches.”

“You are not alone in this place, the real isolation is missing and, let's be honest, the music from Scratches is so unique it's hard to reproduce.”

“Instead, lackluster visuals that are more at home on a PSX or in the Windows XP era, poor character model design, a story that never quite comes together very well and a really bad attempt at Lovecraftian themes.”

“Pre-rendered graphics are grainy and lack detail.”

“If you don't know this game has been in development for over 10 years, now I don't know the story of why this game took so long to be made, but you would think after so many years of development these graphic issues and small bugs would have been ironed out and fixed, yet they weren't and I couldn't help but scratch my head and just ask... why?”

“Now, if you miss out on information or a location throughout your journey, the puzzles can become quite tedious and prolonged as you'll need to make your way through the entire asylum in hopes of stumbling into what you missed.”

“I would have loved for a better execution of the Lovecraftian elements of the story, but unfortunately the game was too busy dragging on and telling its story entirely through long notes scattered around the huge map, which you will have to tediously click through back and forth, in often confusing ways, in order to complete mostly uninteresting puzzles.”

“Granted, everything is mostly laid out in a way that makes sense, but especially when backtracking, going through the hypercard-like interface is really tedious.”

“The game freezes when I enter a room sometimes.”

“It looks like a buggy point-and-click with lagging transitions between rooms, a lot of backtracking, poor textures, bad models, worse cutscenes, and even worse chase sequence (the only one in the whole game).”

“It's still rather buggy though, so save often with different slots if you buy it.”

“Game is fine, plays like an old-school point and click, but has some performance issues, crashed a couple of times, and felt very cliché at times.”

“So I’m locked to playing on my ROG Ally, where performance is decent, but I can’t play on my main PC unless I want to start over.”

“- Very bad performance on the Steam Deck.”

“As far as replay value, there might be some slight variations to some of the puzzles, but it wouldn't vastly change the experience.”

“It would be nice if the developers had plans to add more content, just to improve the replayability factor.”