Baron Raymond Renald was a man of power and was greatly admired by his folks. He was considered one of the mightiest barons of all time which had caused inhabitants from several nearby villages to migrate within his field of power. A few weeks ago, Raymond suddenly vanished without a trace. Rumors got passed around, even horror stories. Some people claim he was murdered by evil monsters, but that is just plain nonsense to scare children, right? Others claimed he developed a severe depression after his mother's passing during the plague, and chose to take his own life. If that was the case, the servants of the castle would had already found him and reported it to the governor. Seeing that nobody has seen or heard anything of the servants though is awfully odd. What has actually happened to the Baron?
This Custom Story has no flaws as far as i'm concerned.
You have done the following well:
- Great use of Music/Sounds.
- Great Level Designs.
- An Interesting Plot that is just right.
- A villain!
- A story that doesn't revolve around "escaping" but "exploring".
- Great Voice Acting, really nicely done!
- Good puzzles, i even had to reach into a small section of my brain for the final one ;)!
- Detailed Castle
- New Ideas (The Portal)
- Monster Chase at the end was exhilirating
Personally i'd love to see a sequel, but please don't rush to bring it out as i would love to see another story with the same amount of effort and detail you put into this one!
Kudos to you my friend!
This mapping was absolutely AMAZING. I was visually tickled throughout the entire MOD.
The voice acting was also really good, with effort put into the script as well as the voice acting itself. Kudos to everyone who participated to make this story come to life!
I would have wished for it to be a little longer, though. Perhaps it felt short because I completed the puzzles really quickly and never got stuck, but when the CS actually ended I was a little surprised and confused.
A solid 9/10. I will recommend this to everyone I know!
Very good mode. For full walkthrough see my Youtube channel: Swankest CZ
Decent CS. But nothing out of the ordinary. I couldn't follow the story totally, it was quite confusing. The voice acting was very well done. Its rarely that I enjoy jumpscares, and here it was no different. Jumpscares are the lamest thing to fit in to create fear of some sort. I always find it more annoying than actually well-placed for a scare. It's a shame it depends so much on it, like most mediocre CS. Still I give this a fairly high rating because of the nice mapping and design. It was some original aspects to it and I really liked the cat and mouse play with the monsters. That is what was very well done i think. There was no over useage of monsters and the times you were encountered with them it was hard to avoid them. Also the puzzles were fairly innovative, not too hard but fun. Good job 8/10
Full review: Frictionalgames.com
Mapping/Setting:
I'll start off by saying I think you did a pretty decent job in this respect. It wasn't really anything awesome, or mind-blowing mind you, but I think you captured plenty of the settings quite nicely enough. I can see several places where you tried very hard to add variety to the maps, and I applaud you for that.
Also a lot of great standout moments in set pieces are really good!
The level design however has a bit to be desired, and I'll note a bit of that below in gameplay.
Scares/Atmosphere:
This was for the most part done VERY well, both atmosphere, and actual scares. Custom sound helped a lot in this aspect. The atmosphere was in certain parts absolutely chilling with moderate use of jumpscares as well as subtle happenings in the background.
Storytelling:
Maybe I didn't find everything, but I personally found the story incredibly hard to follow. I really had not too much of an idea what has happening. I could kind of guess where the story had gone, but not enough clarification was given to make it satisfying alongside self-interpretation.
The parts that i did get however, which were mostly in the front half of the mod I felt were delivered fairly well without too much glaring issues. For sake of a spoiler-free review I'll refrain from commenting on them for now.
Gameplay/Puzzles:
The puzzles I really enjoyed. They were mostly riddle-ly, and were easy enough for me to figure out by my own while still retaining satisfaction when I did.
The level I feel could get positively confusing at many times however. More than once I was completely disorientated from some hallways looking far too alike, and had to spend a good amount of time re-acquiring my bearings. It's not a huge issue though since it usually doesn't take incredibly long to do so.
Oil, and tinderbox placement was perfectly adequate I feel, and well balanced (If it was intentional that is)
This was really good mod, intense, exciting on all ways, puzzles were great and scares aswell, atmospheric maps and really good map design with really neat scripts.
Well done man! I liked the ending a lot!
Amazing - 9/10
very dark,very good,very atmosphere.
What an amazing custom story. I was a bit turned off in the beginning as I couldn't see the pipe t all in the total darkness, it could've been lighted better, but other than that it was great, great map design, great pacing, quite a few monsters as well, you don't encounter some of them, but nevertheless, this was a great custom story, oh and of course, the story is good as well haha. Puzzles aren't that bad at all, definitely give it a play.
This was a great custom story until I found a major glitch. When I unlocked the storage room to get the spare cogwheel, the Grunt ragdoll inside the closet jumpscare glitched very badly. The model/geometry was stretched out (Hard to describe, watch Part 1 of Markiplier's "Lost The Lights" playthrough; the same glitch happens to a dead body jumpscare that is launched out of a closet.)
When this happened, my game virtually froze for about a minute and then crashed. When I restarted it, the save file put me back in the Mansion Quarters map before I had even got the key for the wine cellar. When I went to get it back, the door for the top floor where the key is was locked again... and the hidden books to unlock it no longer worked. I could pull them out and push them in, but they didn't start the timer or have any effect. I left the level with some of the books in the pulled/out position, and when I came back, they hadn't reset. I tried editing the map file to remove the door completely, but I couldn't find the entry in the file, so I was unable to progress in the game.
I'm very disappointed, and despite that, I'm going to give it a nice "7" review based on what I had seen so far, and what I thought would have happened. Up until the glitch I was absolutely in love with this custom story. It was certainly very atmospheric, and kept me apprehensive from the moment I entered the castle to the game-ending glitch. I can see that other people didn't have this problem, so it's not a total disaster; you should be able to play through it to the end unless you get unlucky like me.
Edit-I decided to give this story another try. This time the ragdoll didn't glitch out, although I unintentionally caused another glitch through my own stupidity (running away from a scripted monster encounter without realizing that's what I was NOT supposed to do) that prevented me from running, and so I had to restart the game AGAIN. Can't complain about that, though, because it was my fault. My third playthrough went much more smoothly without any problems.
Overall I can say I liked this CS. The storyline was a bit hard to follow at times and I think it ended too quickly, but it was still good. The voice acting was excellent, which in my experience is very rare in Amnesia custom stories. Good use of music and atmosphere, and I liked the unique puzzles.
With my new successful playthrough of this story, I'm raising my rating from a 7 to an 8. It would be a 9, but I think it was too short for its quality. Still really good!
Good cs which had potential to be a lot longer one. Areas were big and fun to explore and puzzles included something new for me at least.
8/10 a bit disappointing ending.