Reviews - Sanmei

On its head, this is a simple, short, and enjoyable game. More than anything else, however, I am incredibly impressed and pleased with the developer for taking the time to track down the bugs preventing me from playing the game. Cheers, MZ!

During my first playthrough, I did exactly as told and was rewarded with a lackluster experience. Wondering what the fuss was about, I reloaded and this time decided to defy my narratory overlord -- and that's when the fun began. I believe I found all six endings, and all but that fifth was well rewarding of the time spent finding it.

This is my idea of meta-gaming.

This is one of those occasions when I have to wonder if I'm playing an entirely different game from everyone else. The mod begins on a promising note, surreal and unnervingly bizarre. I felt like I was playing a FPS Silent Hill and I was loving it. Then, suddenly, I was asked to turn out the lights -- and Silent Hill went away to be replaced with Resident Evil. The transition was very sudden, literally with the click of a switch, and it never seemed to regain the Silent Hill aspects I loved. Maybe that's because I didn't finish the game, but I feel like I played through enough that I should have seen a change of flavor if one were forthcoming.

To say the mod is dark is an understatement. Without your flashlight, you're completely blind, and the flashlight in this game requires batteries, which aren't common and only add about 40 seconds' worth of power. Scarcity of resources becomes a huge concern very quickly as soon as monsters show up (which happens when you turn out the lights, and did I mention that lit areas are even more rare than items?) and you discover that most of them will happily take twelve bullets to the head before going down -- and being replaced by five more just like them. They move so quickly that using your knife on more than one monster at a time is suicide, and is difficult even for just that one.

To add to the frustration, backtracking quickly becomes a recurring theme as you push a button, then search blindly for the door that may have opened. Hours into the mod, I finally gave up due to this when a button failed to have any effect whatsoever. I backtracked through the small map and looked and looked, but eventually my flashlight went dead instead.

By that point, I had tweaked the console and enabled notarget because of the monsters and was playing in hopes of finding more horror. I didn't find that, but I did find invisible monsters with a ridiculous amount of health. That made me glad I stopped playing fairly, and that's just sad.