Cleril
05-05-2010, 06:46 PM
After buying Brain Challenge I had 17 dollars left on my PSN account. What did I do with it? I bought Comet Crash, Brainpipe, and a recent FMV game called Hysteria Project. Now I was born in 1993 so I never even played an FMV (Full Motion Video, meaning real locations, actos, etc., little to no compute graphics) before, let alone a horror one. At the cost of 1.99 I'd say well, you'll have to read the review to find out what I say about it!
http://images.pandaapp.com/forum/upload/2009/05/13/1242200989.jpg
The story of the game is slightly diluted because of how it's told. To my knowledge you play as some rather unimportant character or at least that's what I got out of the story. The plot is better explained after you beat the game, where you read police articles and such about a scientist who was doing a research project known as "Project H" and a forest seems to be his base of sorts for experiments. Everyone who stated they heard odd noises and screams in the forest had no proof but they did have one thing in common, they were hysterical when releasing the information.
Nothing else has been explained about the plot per say but the end of the game has a "To be continued..." so it's probably a budget issue as this is an indie game. How does one play an FMV game though? Well in Hysteria Project's case it's played in two different gameplay elements, choices presented to you throughout the game (mostly whether to go right or left since the game mostly takes place in a forest) are chosen to determine whether you made the right choice or didn't, some choices have a time limit based on what's going on. The other gameplay element is basically a series of quicktime prompts that crop up every so often. They appear all across the screen and can be randomly either X or O. It's all about timing though the registering of these prompts is pretty strict and/or buggy. If you hit the wrong button you won't lose and even when you hit the right button you might be a millisecond off and you'll die.
http://www.pspminis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/hysteria-project-1.png
Yep, you will likely die a couple of times but it's a none issue since the game let's you retry. The worst part of it is having to see the same clips over and over. What is nice though is that when you die a text description tells you what exactly happened though it's not entirely descriptive and sometimes it gives you the wrong description (I blew up, how did I hear breathing before I died?). The horror surprisingly holds up okay. When the game starts it's really quite adrenaline pumping, then the horror dies a bit in the middle and picks up again by the end. I didn't exactly jump or anything but I got an adrenaline rush or two, bear in mind I've played Silent Hill 2, 3, practically all Resident Evil games, etc. so I may have tolerance. The scares are generally pop-out with some psychological bits thrown in.
The film quality is a little rough because the game is a Mini (under 100 MB) and on wider screens it can look like crap. However I thought it looked pretty good and the bad compression kind of gave the first person perspective of the game a kind of half-awake haze to it which made sense in context of the game. The sound is pretty good save for one particular grunt sound if you pick a certain choice in the beginning of the game, since it just sounds fake. The game has music and some other effects and they sound pretty swell too but don't expect a Silent Hill soundtrack here.
One downside of the game is the lack of freedom. There is only one way to beat the game and there's only a one-choice variation on how to get there (that is, based on what you chose to do at the start of the game, you may get a third option for one part, so very slight variation) but it's still the same scenes. If you make the wrong choice you die, most likely via an axe to the gut. After all, throughout the whole game you will be chased by a hooded figure with an axe. Oh, and some type of black fog that shows up for no reason, perhaps your character hallucinates, it's never explained though.
Okay, so do I get it?
If you have an iphone (it's on there too) or a PS3 then I'd say it's worth the 1.99 price tag. Granted the game leaves you with a cliff hanger but I doubt the later installments will be priced any differently. For 1.99 you get about a total of 40 minutes of content, 30 minutes of that is gameplay, the other 10 is reading the unlocked back story stuff after you beat the game. To compare that to the Heavy Rain DLC which is 5 bucks and offers the same amount of content, that's a damn good deal. I managed to scare my mother with it and that itself was worth 2 bucks, plus tax.
http://images.pandaapp.com/forum/upload/2009/05/13/1242200989.jpg
The story of the game is slightly diluted because of how it's told. To my knowledge you play as some rather unimportant character or at least that's what I got out of the story. The plot is better explained after you beat the game, where you read police articles and such about a scientist who was doing a research project known as "Project H" and a forest seems to be his base of sorts for experiments. Everyone who stated they heard odd noises and screams in the forest had no proof but they did have one thing in common, they were hysterical when releasing the information.
Nothing else has been explained about the plot per say but the end of the game has a "To be continued..." so it's probably a budget issue as this is an indie game. How does one play an FMV game though? Well in Hysteria Project's case it's played in two different gameplay elements, choices presented to you throughout the game (mostly whether to go right or left since the game mostly takes place in a forest) are chosen to determine whether you made the right choice or didn't, some choices have a time limit based on what's going on. The other gameplay element is basically a series of quicktime prompts that crop up every so often. They appear all across the screen and can be randomly either X or O. It's all about timing though the registering of these prompts is pretty strict and/or buggy. If you hit the wrong button you won't lose and even when you hit the right button you might be a millisecond off and you'll die.
http://www.pspminis.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/hysteria-project-1.png
Yep, you will likely die a couple of times but it's a none issue since the game let's you retry. The worst part of it is having to see the same clips over and over. What is nice though is that when you die a text description tells you what exactly happened though it's not entirely descriptive and sometimes it gives you the wrong description (I blew up, how did I hear breathing before I died?). The horror surprisingly holds up okay. When the game starts it's really quite adrenaline pumping, then the horror dies a bit in the middle and picks up again by the end. I didn't exactly jump or anything but I got an adrenaline rush or two, bear in mind I've played Silent Hill 2, 3, practically all Resident Evil games, etc. so I may have tolerance. The scares are generally pop-out with some psychological bits thrown in.
The film quality is a little rough because the game is a Mini (under 100 MB) and on wider screens it can look like crap. However I thought it looked pretty good and the bad compression kind of gave the first person perspective of the game a kind of half-awake haze to it which made sense in context of the game. The sound is pretty good save for one particular grunt sound if you pick a certain choice in the beginning of the game, since it just sounds fake. The game has music and some other effects and they sound pretty swell too but don't expect a Silent Hill soundtrack here.
One downside of the game is the lack of freedom. There is only one way to beat the game and there's only a one-choice variation on how to get there (that is, based on what you chose to do at the start of the game, you may get a third option for one part, so very slight variation) but it's still the same scenes. If you make the wrong choice you die, most likely via an axe to the gut. After all, throughout the whole game you will be chased by a hooded figure with an axe. Oh, and some type of black fog that shows up for no reason, perhaps your character hallucinates, it's never explained though.
Okay, so do I get it?
If you have an iphone (it's on there too) or a PS3 then I'd say it's worth the 1.99 price tag. Granted the game leaves you with a cliff hanger but I doubt the later installments will be priced any differently. For 1.99 you get about a total of 40 minutes of content, 30 minutes of that is gameplay, the other 10 is reading the unlocked back story stuff after you beat the game. To compare that to the Heavy Rain DLC which is 5 bucks and offers the same amount of content, that's a damn good deal. I managed to scare my mother with it and that itself was worth 2 bucks, plus tax.