Reviews - Jormos

The very definition of average. Cheap scares, key hunt design, typos and an abrupt unsatisfying ending. At least it's pretty short.

Amadeus is a full conversion mod that has great pacing, mostly well designed monster encounters and well crafted maps (aside from a few flickering textures). The beginning builds tension with no monster encounters and hardly any jumpscares. The story is fittingly twisted and the two new monsters are quite scary.

I'm deducting a point because of that one piano puzzle. I hate music puzzles with passion. there were also a couple of badly designed monster encounters near the end, where you couldn't sneak past and had to wait for the threat to go away.

A Coward's Debt is a very atmosphere driven custom story with very few (but ultimately aggravating) monster encounters with a brand new monster and well paced and effective scares. Story is simple, but fits in really well. Level design is rather maze like and can be tedious to navigate, and lack of consumable items makes exploring pointless. The custom story also wasn't the greatest at conveying your current objective.

I've known about this custom story for a while, but only got to playing now. I'm glad I did. The Four Horsemen start strong with a narrated opening and fairly decent voice acting. Atmosphere is well build with very little reliance on jump scares and enemy encounters. Environments are well build with great pacing, but you sometimes get stuck into things. I even managed to click through a wall near the beginning. Another minor gripe is with stingy interaction zone with the thaler puzzle.

Destiny rebellion does many new things with Amnesia's engine, has some truly frightening moments, an interesting story and generally well build maps. There're even sections where you get to play as a monster (and you actually have an attack!) and weapons you can use to kill enemies. Unfortunately alot of the mechanics are either underutilised or gimmicky. Monster's claw attack for instance can only be used by going to your inventory and selecting the claw as an item (it's really not very intuitive). You can use it to destroy barrels and boxes (which never have anything in them), or destroy doors you otherwise can't get through. You very rarely get to use it to kill enemies, which you only get to do three times. You can carry torches to conserve oil, but the custom story gives you more than plenty defeating the purpose of carrying a torch (using the lantern is more convenient anyway). The weapons you can use are usually just given to you when you need them. There's also a shield, but you never really have a point in using it. You can even "grab ledges", but only thing it does is that it sends you flying upwards and you usually take fall damage. It barely gets any use with only one instance where you have to use it. There're plenty of optional areas, which purposefully clash with the main story. My issue with them is that most of them don't add any value to the overall experience. Custom story also feels like it ended abruptly with this huge castle, which you don't get to explore AT ALL.

But hey, I overall enjoyed it and it's apparent that a lot of work went into this. I'd feel bad for giving it any lower than a 9.

The original A Late Night Drink was a treat of a custom story full of original ideas and this mini-sequel doesn't disappoint. The Last Sip is a really interesting custom story that plays with your expectations and manages to be quite scary at times. My favorite moment is when you're trapped in a room with a huge painting (I'm not going to tell you anymore so you can experience it yourself). My only real complaint is that the custom story is oddly fond of taking the control away from you during scripted sequences. It tends to break the immersion, which you don't want in a horror game.

This custom story wasn't that great. It start out strong with well written description and beginning minutes. Things start going downhill after the first monster encounter, and that's my main complaint with this custom story. There are way too many monster encounter and none of them are well thought out. 9 times out of 10 you go into a room or out of a room and monster spawns. All you can really do is stay in or run back into the room and hide, there's no room to navigate around the monsters. This is just annoying padding in an otherwise short custom story. I even managed to break one of the encounters (that doesn't fall into the aforementioned trope). Sanity management is also awful. I spent half the playtime at "..." level sanity. It was so bad that I actually had to leave the game running (and take a **** break) to regain some sanity for an ongoing "escape sequence". Near the end I managed to clip through a tunnel while leisurely crawling through it (the screen shook) and I had to kill myself.

This custom story has some nice world building with its lore, well designed enemy encounters and it doesn't outstay its welcome without being way too short. My only real gripes are that there are some typos and gramatical error, and something more could've been done with the environments.

Short but sweet custom story that can be played through in less than an hour. Monster encounters were well thought out, keys aren't absurdly difficult to find and there were a few creative scares. What really stuck out in this custom story was the detailed writing. The two notes that I found are lenghty and enjoyable to read through.