Reviews - CheesyDeveloper

Positives:

- Creativity, like using entities in clever ways
- Some areas look really good

Negative:

- Other areas look terrible
- Lighting is terrible most of the time
- Monster looks like a giant children's toy. It's silly
- Puzzles are poorly explained
- Look for keys and other items in obscure places
- A lot of backtracking, and I mean a lot
- Tinderboxes are pointless because there are almost no rooms where tinderboxes
are useful

- Lack of batteries for the flashlight
- Story is poorly explained and all over the place
- Lots of characters mentioned once and then never brought up again
- Lots of texture glitches and bugs
- Why did I have a lantern in my inventory at the end? Where did that come from?

Nitpicky:

- While not linked to the vanilla game, it's still unoriginal to use Daniel and Alexander as names for your characters

Fun detail:

- Author left in a part of a script that wasn't working correctly and wrote in the script file "If you figure out what's wrong, please p.m. me on the boards 'cuz I'd really like to know the answer as to why this part isn't working properly". I hope you got help from somebody. I thought that was quite adorable

Conclusion:

To be from 2011, I suppose it's "alright", but it's not a mod I would hang under the Christmas tree.

3/10, barely
Bad

Positives:

- Very good level design
- Creativity
- Spooky encounters

Negatives:

- Story is terrible
- Grammar is awful
- Bad pacing
- Map name bug
- Electric pig enemy is so annoying

Summary:

Story:

One major problem with a lot of mods, some of my own old mods included, is copy pasted concepts from Amnesia or other games without any understanding of why it works as well as it does.

In the vanilla game, Daniel drank the amnesia mixture to deal with the shock and guilt in order to stand a chance of stopping Alexander. What is the purpose for Maxwell to drink the amnesia mixture here? Really? The pigs have yet to escape into the world, right? Unless you get the bad ending, they never do. And Maxwell and the others didn't know what the core was capable of, so... what is the reason for Maxwell to forget his memories here?

Just because the vanilla game does it does not mean you have to follow a similar plot.

The rest of the plot is close to a copy paste of the vanilla game also, or otherwise extremely cliché "Oh no we found some artifact and it's killing us all now". This concept cannot be interesting any more. It has been used to death.

Grammatical mistakes every once in a while is one thing. In this mod though, reading a sentence without grammatical mistakes happened occasionally. I used to not bother much with grammar either, but as I have grown older, I have learned how unproffesional poor grammar is, especially when reading is a big part of a mod/game.

Like for christ sake dude, you wrote "Mawell" in the bad ending credits instead of "Maxwell".

And please don't write things like "U" instead of "You". To friends sure, but in a professional environment (like while writing a letter, essay, story for a mod, etc) it's very silly.

Pacing:

This mod is terrifying. You used the monsters very well here, same with music and overall level design. However, you used monsters way too often. Do you know why the vanilla game have several safe hubs? Because meeting monsters in every single map all the time makes them annoying and frustrating rather than scary.

It went from being scary to me saying "oh **** off already" when the pig spawned in for the hundredth time with no break in between.

Other issues:

Your map names must have unique names. Giving them basic names can cause them to clash with other mods, which it did for me. Suddenly, a map from a different mod loaded in. Since you did not add any autosaves (despite the starting screen while starting this mod for the first time said it would) I was forced to restart from the beginning after playing through a fifth or so of the mod. This is a classic beginner mistake.

In the future, name your maps something unique. For example: "Amnesia Secrets Storage". Or "AS Storage room". Anything that is unique to your specific mod.

The electric pig causing the screen to flicker is extremely annoying. I know that isn't your fault, but I wish you wouldn't use it. This is especially annoying for people with autism or other disorders that may cause light sensitivity. This enemy model is just awful.

Conclusion:

Level design is really good for the most part. Good music choice and overall scary. Puzzles were a bit too basic to begin with but got better later on. This is unfortunately somewhat ruined by a terribly cliché story with grammar so awful it completely ruins the immersion as soon as you pick up a note.

I can excuse some of the issues as beginner mistakes or personal preferences, but the story is inexcusable and is holding this mod back a decent bit.

7/10 - Good

I gave this mod a rating five years ago. Back then I gave it 5/10 because I liked the creativity and good scripting but despised how the story was just a copy paste of the vanilla game, as well as multiple maps being taken from other mods. I still stand by pretty much everything I wrote. However, after replaying it recently, I found out it was actually worse than I remember it.

One thing I complained a lot about in my review back then was the score itself and how so many people are giving this a 10/10 despite pointing out the various bugs and other issues, or just ignoring them. I used a walkthrough on youtube to stand a chance against the many confusing puzzles. That youtuber found multiple bugs and was so bored with this mod that he kept dying over and over again because he tried running past monsters instead of hiding like he was supposed to and still gave this mod 10/10

I don't like to claim things are dodgy, especially with reviews since I am a reviewer myself, but when I see things like testers, random users and youtubers giving a flawed mod like this 10/10; I wonder.

Positives:

- Some creativity
- Competent scripting for the most part
- Some neat looking areas, but unfortunately too few and far between

Negatives:

- A lot of bugs, some of them gamebreaking
- No failsafe for most puzzles
- Copy pasted story from the original game
- Notes are often way too long
- Puzzles are incredibly vague

- Copy pasted areas from other mods
- Huge part of the mod consists of long, empty corridors and backtracking
- Unenthusiastic voice actors
- Music that doesn't fit

Conclusion:

While some levels are quite creative, too many of them are unfortunately copy pasted elsewhere or extremely bland. There's a difference between being inspired by someone else and outright taking their work and using it as your own. I saw remakes of some vanilla game maps and some areas from other mods like The great work. I found more areas than I did years back which makes me question how much effort you put in to each and every map in this mod.

The story is basically copy pasted from the vanilla game, with Alexander (opps, I mean Marius) getting killed in the orb chamber, finding pieces of said orb while talking to Agrippa (opps I mean, what ever he was called), the shadow hunting you down, even some notes being edits of the notes from the vanilla game.

Puzzles are so vague I had to look up a walkthrough on multiple occasions despite playing this mod before.

Here are some of many examples:

- I thought I had to throw bombs at the worms only to then realise they don't respawn (the bombs that is). I could not open the hatch and had to reload a save. I brought a bomb the second time but it didn't work. It was glitched. During the third attempt it finally worked and the hatch opened

- I was apparently supposed to know I had to put random books from one shelf to another with no clues

- I was apparently supposed to know that clothes that are always used as a static decal can be used as a bandage here (which makes no sense by the way. You had to use peroxide on the clothes to avoid potential infection. Problem is, I was in sewer water already. The wound was already potentially going to be infected)

- Buttons I had to press in the teleport worlds which were tiny and had the same color and texture as the planes they were attached on. I couldn't find them without the walkthrough. Or rather, I could with enough time probably, but I could not be bothered to keep searching after a while. Just imagine being color blind or having any other kind of visual impairment. One of the hatches I unlocked with one of these nearly invisible buttons got stuck, too. The youtuber I watched had the same issue

As a last example:

- The water cliff map with the kaernk. You can barely run from the water monster here and it's very unclear where you need to go. Both me and the let's player struggled a lot here. You then need to throw an arm near some rocks in order for the kaernk to break said rocks to create a walkway for you. There is a hint here for once. However, the arm can get stuck between the two rocks easily and it's not clear exactly where it needs to be thrown. At least you had a failsafe here and respawned the arm when I died

As a last thing to point out, the music is sometimes quite unfitting. Like Rayman 1 OST - Deep In The Caves. I love Rayman, but that game is a 2D aventure game. It doesn't fit a 3D horror game in the slightest. Though, weird choice of music is the smallest issue in this mod.

Final words:

I would not say this is the worst serious mod I have played. After all, I played something even worse not long ago. Though, this is not far behind. It's worse than I remember it. That, and I have learned a lot more about design and how to write more thorough reviews now. So honestly, it's a 3/10 this time around.

3/10 - Bad

Positives:

- School looks slightly better than the rest of the mod. That area is coincidentally created by someone else

- Hoover buddy is sorta funny (though, half the fun is making it glitch around by throwing stuff on it in the house)

Negatives:

- Story is poorly explained, as if it requires us to know about the persona games before playing this

- Level design is ugly, random and lacks any kind of artistic consistency

- AI is broken (gets stuck a lot, doesn't chase you when they should sometimes, etc)

- Poor sound mixing (sometimes, the volume increases by 500%, blasting your ears)

- Bad jokes that makes no sense (like going to a bathroom with a male and female sign on it and getting slapped by a girl because you walked in to the "girl's bathroom", or maybe because the door wasn't locked. Not our fault either way)

- Unenthusiastic voice actors

- Bugs everywhere, way too many to list in one review (one of the worst bugs was losing hoover buddy through a crack in the level, which required me to reload a save)

- 2D character models with no animations mixed together with animated 3D character models

- Monsters stay aggressive if you lose and respawn during a battle (and sometimes without a restart) leaving you with barely enough time to perform the dance moves, while other times the AI is so slow there's no challenge at all

- A lot of frustrating platforming with objects. The engine is not well-designed for this

- Annoying music with short loops

- Characters have Japanese names, speaks English and some signs inside the school (chemistry lab for example) is in German. Where is this taking place?

- A lot of references to umbakarna, claiming he's the "godfather of modding". These references breaks the tiny bit of immersion the mod could have hoped to give and comes off as ***-licking

- Protagonist decides to steal money from a locker to buy a drink instead of just getting some water, or drinking the identical drink I already had in my inventory

- The writing and dialogues are so cringe (like using "xD" a lot. Do not use "xD" in a professional mod, just don't)

- Nonsense notes, like the cleaning lady complaining about having to clean up after students (you know, one of her actual job tasks) and leaving the note of her complaining about it for everyone to read

Conclusion:

Oh my god. I can't believe this, I just can't.

This is the pit. This is by far, the worst mod I have played, ever. I have played and reviewed over 200 mods, and this is the worst of them all, because at least troll mods and other poorly made mods stops after half an hour at most and makes more sense than this most of the time.

I can appreciate the effort to try something new, truly. It is creative to be an amnesia mod, no doubt about that. But it fails in every aspect. It fails in level design, sound mixing, gameplay balancing, AI, everything.

I have never been this frustrated over a mod before.
I will finish with this question: Gyazo.com

1/10 - Pointless

Positives:

- Good level design overall
- Good monster encounters and pretty scary overall
- A lot of creativity

Negatives:

- A lot of flickering textures
- Poor testing and bugfixing
- Theme of the story is old and cliché and notes often repeat themselves
- Some puzzles made no sense at all
- Text sometimes disappear way too fast
- Some odd puzzles, like the protagonist somehow knowing he needs to climb a pipe to reach a key despite no hints of this

- I'm not sure how tying a string to a table and a door and pulling the table is going to break said door, but okay
- Chipper appears beneath the rubble after breaking the wall. Easy to miss. Why not return it to our inventory instead?

Summary:

The story itself isn't bad, it's just not trying anything new. The story about different worlds, orbs and portals is so overdone at this point. It is extremely difficult to make it interesting at all.

You really need testers next time. They can tell you things you as the mod creator don't think about. You know what text says and where everything is, but other people playing this for the first time won't.

Here are the biggest issues in the mod:

- Some parts need invisible barriers to prevent players from jumping over/through obstacles and leave the map.

- A lot of flickering textures found. I can excuse a few, but there's a limit. This mod has way too many of them to ignore.

- The ladder puzzle made no sense at all. I previously dropped down a large shaft and took no damage at all. The fall where I had to place the ladder was way smaller. So small, in fact, that I could ignore the ladder after placing it there, drop down and take no damage what so ever. Not to mention how weird it is to place one part of the ladder, then somehow connect the other one to it with tar. It was completely unnecessary.

- Reloading a save in the map with the prison bar part you had to remove broke it (could no longer remove it).

- Doing puzzles in the "wrong order" in several maps will break the mod completely and prevent progress. This is the biggest reason why you need testers. You must always try and see what happens if you change the order of objectives and never assume players will do things exactly as you did.

Conclusion:

Level design is creative and well made. Same with the monster encounters.
It's rough around the edges but I can clearly see a lot of effort here.

Do not take all the negative points too harshly. I think you have great potential and I want to see you improve, because despite all the bad things, this mod is actually quite enjoyable.

Good work, recommended.

7/10 - Good

Positives:

- Incredible eye for details
- Atmospheric
- Great pacing

Negatives:

- Boring story
- Meh voice acting

Conclusion:

I actually loved the pacing here. You rarely interrupted me with boring puzzles.
It built up tension quite well. You seem to understand the fear of the unknown. You did not go with the same old grunt and instead tried to make your own scares.

The story is unfortunately boring though. You can not make stories about eternal life, sacrifices, guardian, artifacts or anything vanilla-ish interesting anymore.

In regards to the voice acting, take it from someone with many old mods, some with horrible voice acting.
If horrible voice acting is used a lot in a mod, it can severly mess up the immersion. While the voice acting here is very "meh", only a couple of scenes actually have voice acting at all. It wasn't overused, and didn't ruin the entire experience for me.

As a final note, I don't believe you made this in 10 hours. I just don't.
It's too long, too detailed, too well done in general to be made in just 10 hours. Unless you used pre-made assets from your older mods or something (which is fine to do), but if you made this from scratch in just 10 hours, then you either eat and **** level design because this is incredible in that case, or you're lying.

Overall, very well done

8/10 - Very good

Positives:

- Creative aspects
- Looks good for the most part
- Good use of sound effects at the outdoor maps
- Started off pretty creepy

Negative:

- You stopped caring much about sound effects after the outdoor maps, unfortunately

- Design is poor, apart from looking good, with puzzles being blocked off with objects or hidden in complete darkness and nearly impossible to find if you run out of oil. This mod isn't generous with oil, so that can become quite frustrating

- Weak, average story we've seen in hundred other mods before

- Apart from the outdoor maps being spooky with the sound design, the remainder of the mod just isn't scary, especially since you used a vanilla grunt. You can't make that scary anymore. The moment I realized the vanilla grunt is the threat here, it stopped being scary immediately

Conclusion:

I actually really liked the outdoor maps. They looked nice, you used creepy sound effects, as well as changing ambiance depending on the environment I was in. Very well done in general.

But after that, it's like you stopped caring. Puzzles were mostly, finding something hidden behind random objects for no apparent reason so you can unlock the next area. Sound effects almost stopped existing in the indoor maps, and you decided to unfortunately use vanilla grunt, which in my personal opinion, being a bit of a veteran in this game, is an immediate atmosphere killer.

I don't remember much about your first mod, seeing that I rated it many years ago, but, while you probably improved a lot since then, this mod does nothing new apart from a few neat ideas here and there. It's not bad, but it isn't that great either.

5/10 - Average

Positives:

- Pretty good tension (until it was ruined)
- Clever use of music

Negatives:

- Using vanilla doorways and custom walls looks really bizare. I understand there are no doorways for that specific custom wall, but you could easily make one yourself without much effort. By mixing things that clearly don't match, it makes your mod lack artistic consistency

- Tension was unfortunately ruined by jumpscares and lame references to youtubers
- Story isn't really noteworthy. It's basic

Sidenotes:

- It felt like not being able to use the axe at the beginning was a wasted opportunity. It would have been cool if I could break boxes with it to get extra, hidden supplies for example

Conclusion:

I have seen some mods lately that tries to be good and silly at the same time, and it just doesn't work.

It started off genuinely good. It was dark, lonely and you used well fitting music. I felt isolated.
Then halfway through, it suddenly turned in to a "joke" mod, with a jumpscare and silly pictures of Bizzeplayn and XiaoXD

You can't be serious and silly at the same time in my opinion. It's one or the other, because the sillyness ruins the tension and atmosphere.

Had this mod been maybe a little longer and you committed to making this in to a good mod, it could have been a great experience. The potential is here.
Or, the other way around. Make it silly from start to finish. Choose a theme a go with it.

As it stands now, it's not silly enough to be funny, and it's not good enough for me to recommend it.

5/10 - Average

Positives:

- A decent look alike to Silent hill locations
- Story is kinda alright

Negatives:

- Over 2.6GB large. The Super_secret folder takes up more than 800MB of space. It's not even secret because you don't need a password to open it
To put this into perspective, the vanilla game requires 2GB memory and 3GB Hard drive. Just remove the "secret folder"

- No ambiance what so ever in the dining area
- Some overlapping textures at a couple places
- Levels lack any sort of details. You added furniture, but completely skipped the detailing part at most areas, making most of the level feel so empty

- Why are you referencing yourself and your creations at some places? I'm not sure how horror VR is related to Silent hill either. If this is a Silent hill tribute, maybe focus on making it look like Silent hill?

- The outside ambiance is a 2D sound and not 3D, which makes no sense in this context
- You glitch badly if you touch trees lol Gyazo.com

- Music will fade out very suddenly. Example at the heavens night. I hear it loud and clear at the stage, but a meter in to the bathroom and I can't hear it anymore. Music always restarts whenever you get out of the range and go into range of the music again too

- Area outside the bathroom's window is a stretched plane, which is too close to the window so you clearly notice it Gyazo.com

Conclusion:

Meh.

It's an alright Silent hill look alike. Just, everything besides that is not very well crafted, and you added a bunch of uncessessary references not related to Silent hill.

Decent work.

5/10 - Average

~ Regards, The Crusty Dusty

Positives:

- Working autosaves
- Occasionally creepy
- Good grammar for the most part, with only a few mistakes here and there

Negatives:

- Once again, a large amount of vanilla assets included, making the download file way larger than it needs to be

- The "mature" subjects are approached without any maturity at all
- Basic story that never developes in to anything unique
- Weird level design, and not in a good way
- Poor balance between story and actual gameplay (I spent half the playthrough reading notes)
- Every character is voiced by the same person
- Lack of good suspense. Always intense music even when nothing is happening

It started off alright. I went in to this abandoned "factory" and I thought it was genuinely creepy and interesting. Then the notes arrived.

You guys never seem to go beyond a basic plot device. You think of something basic, like "antagonist is a cult leader... that's it".

The story never evolves beyond this basic premise. The antagonist is insane, because he's insane. It's a religious cult that want's to cleanse the world of the human race because wars are bad or what ever. Character development here is non-existent. Each character, apart from the antagonist, has one note dedicated to them. You have three or four interactions with Evelin, most of them just directions from her, and this is apparently enough for them to care deeply for each other and fall in love.

That's not enough for me to care about these characters.

Felix, the antagonist, is the only character with some kind of story ark. Unfortunately, most of his notes boils down to "**** humanity. I will rape and murder them because they deserve it" and very detailed descriptions of how much he loves to rape victims, written by someone I believe to be young and recently discovered pornography.

On top of the notes being cringe inducing, the same person voiced every character. I can excuse amateur voice acting for mods. I don't expect professional voice acting in free mods. However, someone that can't voice act very well that tries to voice a character of the opposite gender or age is a different level of cringe entirely.

In my mods I made back in the days, sure the voice acting is mediocre as well for the most part, but at least I asked females to voice act females, and people that knows how to make childlike voices to voice child characters. Unless you know what you're doing, trying to voice a child, the opposite gender or a character very different from what you typically sound like is rarely going to sound well, and certain characters in this mod were cringe to listen to.

The second biggest elephant in the room for me is the weird level design.
I went in to a prison section only to find a single note and nothing else. It turned out I didn't have to go there at all. So, why did you keep that part locked? I went in there after unlocking the door, expecting to find a puzzle related item, but I found nothing. Why would you lock off an entire, relatively large section of the map if there's nothing of importance in there? I went around here for quite a long time, expecting to find something.

The lightning outside. Every outside map have either pitch black areas, or very bright areas. I suppose you meant to light the map using the moon light, however, the moon, while emanating a bit of light, is nowhere near strong enough to affect the lightning on such a large scale.

You also overuse snow particles, which made it lag when I looked up, which I kinda had to do while getting up in the tower.

At the last forest map right outside Felix's hideout, you made the skybox pitch black, but the fog white. It looks very odd. It should either be all dark, or you need to do a middle ground. Make the skybox dark grey and the fog the same grey color, for example.

Conclusion:

The story is written by someone that tries to bring up a mature subject, but really don't know how to. Writing "I touched my balls. Omg her tits are amazing, I'm gonna rape her so much mmm tits tits" is extremely cringe. I couldn't take this story seriously. Everything else is basic at best.

Oh, and again, why do you include so many unnecessary files? You're really not doing yourself a favor by doing this. I know people that won't download really large mods to begin with.

It also:

1: Takes longer for us to download it
2: Takes up more space on our computers

I have a mod at least twice as long as this and with more voice acting and more custom material. It takes up 707 MB on my hard drive.

Your mod takes up 1.38 GB. If you only included necessary files, it would take up at least half of that.

3/10 - Bad