Reviews - Darkfires

Review for the "demo" version, Esophagus.

Fantastic world-building and atmosphere, lots of really cool mapping and I generally love the idea of "religious gameplay". The music was amazing (save for a few weird moments). Several *really* creative scares/cutscenes.

Unfortunately the good stuff is kinda held back by several basic mistakes. Unintuitive puzzles, overly punishing encounters, some pointless running, and at times a general lack of direction make for a rather frustrating experience. The story is understandable, but the anachronistic wording is making it needlessly hard to comprehend.

I've seen those issues (in various combinations) crop up in the solo mods of many of the creators, so what I would like to see them do next is to finally consider the experience of a user playing the mod for the first time and design gameplay in a way that won't confuse the player out of their immersion.

Also worth noting, AI was used in this mod. I understand the voice-overs, but the loading screens leave a sour taste. I also suspect the issues with the writing might come from uncritically using AI to rephrase things.

I hope all of this won't come off as condescending, as I really think there is something here, just lacking polish in the user experience department, and I decided to inflate my rating as proof of that.

PS. Why is there a screen of a custom story description in the premenu instead of just displaying the text?

This is "The Room" of Amnesia mods and one of my all-time favourites.

Normally I wouldn't say anything negative about such a mod and consider it a fun little project.
However, the author boasted about it so much that I felt compelled to take him up on the challenge.

===IN SHORT===
Considering how long this took to make and how much the author talked about it, the final result is a let-down.
Respite is a single map with little detail, barely any gameplay and way too much reading.
It's essentially just a collage of easter eggs with some fanfics attached.
Which would've been fine if the mod wasn't advertised like god-knows-what.
However, there are some quite promising level design ideas here.
I think you can make something quite good if you focus on crafting a focused story!

===EXECUTION===
The map is rather poorly detailed, except for a few specific spots.
There is some creativity here that I appreciate, but you need to put way more effort into detailing and polishing.

The sound design is almost nonexistent.
Music fading in and out at a short radius feels odd and there are like only 2 other sounds in the entire mod.

I'm not gonna comment on gameplay since this mod is not trying to hide the fact that it's a walkig sim.

This mod features heaps of writing. It was way too much and too fast.
Extract the essence from your writing and your texts will improve drastically.
The graphic design of the custom notes was quite good though!

When it comes to being a tribute to Silent Hill, this mod is a mixed bag.
Many of the references aren't related to Silent Hill.
Some are cute, but would only fit in an original content mod.
There are a few references though that really don't fit in here at all.
As a result, Respite feels like a 40/60 split between tributing its author and Team Silent.

===MISC===
I can't find a way to put this nicely, so I'm gonna go fully biased for a moment.
Don't go on Discord and boast about making basic stuff with custom assets which were not made by you.
When the assets are most of the appeal, it looks like you're trying to take the credit for them.
It's as if someone gave you a cake, you placed it on a platter, put a cherry on top and told everyone at a party that you made the cake.
I was not the only one to be put off by this, by the way. Being humble where needed will make everyone way less picky about your work.

Nitpicks:
- In the start there's a long monologue playing over a note that doesn't have the matching text. It just doesn't work.
- Silent Hill movie posters in Silent Hill are cliche.
- The cinema banner looks like it is missing textures.
- Heaven's Night looks quite odd with the haphazard mix of a modern setting and medieval furniture.
- There are quite a few technical mishaps in the map.
- To quote you directly:
"Bloody Disgusting, Gameranx and PCGamesN have expressed their interest with the mod. Take the Moddb reviews with a grain of salt."
The fact that a few obscure news outlets mentioned your mod doesn't discredit the reviews. Or make the mod better either, which is what you implied.
- The mod is advertised as a "conclusion to the Silent Hill series". If anything, it's a post-mortem summary of loose ends.
- Spacing out the credits like that will make everyone skip them, not listen to the entire song.
- Four 1-page notes are more intersting than a single note with 4 pages. Break them up!
- There is a lot of unused assets in the files (and also some copies of vanilla files). Keep better track of what you use, because the download could be a lot smaller.

I hope this review doesn't discourage you, because that's not the point.
Hopefully you can take what I wrote to improve your design and writing skills as well as some "public relations" stuff, and make something great in the future.
Gonna rate it 5 - Respite is not much, but there's nothing overly annoying in it either. It's a decent first mod.

After my initial playthrough, I gave this a positive review on Steam, also giving it a 7/10. Now that I have cooled down, I must say that Rebirth was too disappointing for such a rating.

As much as I wanted to love this game, I just can't *not* notice how much it falls apart in many aspects.

Asides from a single area or two, the horror is alright, but fails to impress me. Definitely didn't become a horror masterpiece, as the advertising suggested. The monsters are functional, but the main enemy being a generic Rake monster was just lame. The other of the 2 enemies was fine, but the design didn't really stick with me like Dark Descent monsters, or anything designed by FromSoftware. To give the credit though, for that one map (the Fort living quarters), the FG magic was back at full force. It was super tense and I wish the entire game was like that portion. Although it wasn't without its issues, because for some reason there are 2 safe-rooms in there that are in no way separated from the dangerous areas. It's oddly jarring, I'm quite confused as to why they did that.

The fear mechanic that this game uses (a replacement for both health and sanity from the first Amnesia) punishes being in darkness way too fast, and because your light sources are ridiculously short-lasting, this system just distracted me from being scared. I had to focus on it too much to notice a lot of the scares. And the lantern was a joke with its short range and super narrow light. The fact that they made many areas of the game completely unlit for this kind of gameplay is embarassing. Making the screen pitch black without any lighting whatsoever is throwing the baby out with the bath water when it comes to horror.

The other 3 mechanics that this game introduces just make me sad. The laying prone mechanic can be completely missed. "Press X to touch belly" sounds like a joke, but it's real. I had no idea what it did for most of the game. The locket mechanic looks awesome but it's terribly underutilised. It's basically "press C to open door".

The game is also really linear, asides from one hub area. It often makes the progression feel artifical, as if you were being led by hand. I can't say it helped the horror aspect.

To throw out a bunch of positives; I loved the designs in many areas of the game. The alien world looks awesome. The voice actress of Tasi is just lovely and her work is probably one of my favourite parts about this game. Throwbacks to Dark Descent made me really happy and were super engaging and intriguing. Unfortunately, that can't be said about the rest.

The story of this game is a huge miss. In the second map, you get a huge exposition dump, after which I had pretty much the entire story figured out. From that point on, unlike in Dark Descent, I wasn't learning what happened, but HOW it happened. The game basically spoils 2 out of 3 most imporant aspects of its story right at the beginning.

Worst yet, all characters are cardboard cut-outs. Even the protagonist can be boiled down to a single sentence: "I am Tasi I must birth baby". The main antagonist is cartoonish and her motivations can be summarised as "I can't have baby I must steal baby". Since the game focuses on these two characters, you can imagine how engaging the story is. Furthermore, the baby is a textbook case of a MacGuffin. The fact that the game revolves around it was a stupid decision, because being concerned about a baby isn't something that will scare people who don't have children. The game can't make you care about it (or any other character, for that matter), so the whole plot falls flat as a result.
The only parts of the story I actually enjoyed were the alien lore and bits which expanded on Dark Descent's story.

Oh also notice how the game is title "Amnesia: Rebirth"? Well, Tasi's amnesia is mostly irrelevant to the story. Unlike in Dark Descent, it's just a cheap way of kicking off the plot. Furthermore, there's no rebirth in here. The game should be called just "Birth". I was expecting some sort of a grizzly story similar to "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward". But no, the story is basically about Tasi having a baby in bad circumstances.

The endings are all crushing once you think about what they imply, but I can't say that they didn't feel lackluster anyway. The game just kinda stops and that's it.

I wanted to love this game, I really did. But ultimately it's a disappointment. It is also not a bad game, but I can't say that it's better than "fine".

Disclaimer, just in case someone wants to use this review against me:
I usually don't review beginner mods or lower my expectations appropriately.
For this mod however, I got asked by the creator to review it, and without pulling punches.

Summary at the very end.

=========THE STORY==========

The story is pretty standard mansion stuff. Nothing particularly interesting or original.
When it comes to the writing though...
The story barely justifies the events of the mod, it had little connection to the actual levels and there weren't any mentions about who we are playing as.
I had to go back to the mod page to check that we were playing as the "protagonist's" brother.
That's not the way to write stories, because the player needs to have some goal in mind, which usually comes from the hero's motivation.
The lack of character motivations or any mentions of the hero made the entire thing feel out of place.
Lastly, this could work a bit better if it was told in an interesting way, but it's just walls of text.

=========ISSUES==========

Just off the bat, the description of the mod lists some technical issues.
Why not fix them if you know about them? They are mostly simple to fix.
The backgroubd image of the description is broken, too.

The mod starts without any context or introduction. You're just in a mansion without even a vague goal.

There is a locked chest at some point, but nothing clearly indicates that it's locked (no sounds or hints). It's quite confusing.

The mod has point-and-click style comments from the protagonist on some objects.
It's fine, but most of these don't add anything beyond what's visible or are random to the point of being goofy.

At one point you unlock a door by hitting it with a hammer. Silly in itself, but the animation was so heavyhanded it made me chuckle.
Still, at least it was a creative way of passing an obstacle rather than another key hunt.
Oh, also it's really arbitrary that you can unlock only that one door with the hammer but not any of the following ones.

Now, onto the underground part:

Placing a neon light on an object (lantern) is not the way to draw attention to it.
Put a normal source of light instead.

The chipper is obscurely placed. Looking for unfairly hidden items is not gameplay. I got it quickly only by pure luck.

You can collect a lot of tinderboxes, and they kinda come in handy in the cellar map? It's not very consistent however, many rooms lack any lamps to light.

The elemental puzzle was quite cool, it required some creativity - but it also required a randomly and obscurely placed object.

I got the bad ending - and it had like 3 minutes of waiting for a fade out. Just roll the credits, smh.
We already talked about the good ending being counter intuitive to achieve, so I will skip that.

=========MAP DESIGN==========

The general design is as generic as they come - poorly detailed maps with little creativity put in them asides from the vertical layout.
The mansion part:
All rooms look similar and have vastly high ceilings, which makes it hard to believe that it's supposed to be a home.
Also all rooms share the same floor, walls and ceilings, which is kinda off-putting.
Some of the ceilings are 10 centimeters above the walls, creating a gap.

The map is covered with navy blue lights that don't have any source. What the hell is that?
If you were going for moonlight, it's much more washed out and closer to white. And it needs windows to make sense.

The underground part:
Generic stuff, I don't have as many issues with it but there wasn't anything to praise either.
Kinda empty and repetetive.
The cellar is not lit at all. This is not how darkness works in games, you need a very dark light to do it properly.

Randomly assembled issue4s with the mapping:
- Carpets are placed randomly in perfect allignment with each other. Makes for a very unnatural look.
- Badly scaled assets
- Mixing assets which don't match (especially welders)
- The maps are filled with pointless rooms that don't have anything interesting in them.

Positives:
There are some creative elements here and there, mostly with creating shelves. This is what you should have done with the entire mod.

=========SUMMARY==========

Well, this was bad.
Of course it was a mod made as a learning process, but that doesn't change the fact that it really isn't worth your time.
There isn't much good stuff in it, and what's there is too little and not often enough.
Mods like this are why I tell people to not get invested in the first mods they create and instead start new, better projects after they are done learning.

I'm giving this a 3/10, mostly for these reasons:
- I really didn't enjoy playing this to be honest.
- According to my scale it should be a 4/10, but I played better mods which I rated 3/10
- It's at least not buggy or noticeably frustrating, so I can't in good faith rate it lower.

Welp, I think this mod will go down as my favourite one of all time. For me it was even better than Amadeus. Go and play this if you haven't already!

===============SUMMARY==================

Finally a mod which uses the weirdly unfitting eastern assets from Amnesia in a cohesive way.
I never thought I would witness it in Amnesia, but this mod has an...esoteric feeling to it that is really original and unprecedented. The story was kind of vague, but it works. It's probably for the better that it was kept simple.

The entire mod took me around 2.5h to finish.

===============UPSIDES==================

- Fantastic sound design
- Amazingly creative level design, probably the best I've seen in HPL2. I can't stress how good it is, even in areas which everyone else would leave plain and boring.
- Fun and creative puzzles
- Cool custom soundtrack
- Clear-cut progression path
- Actually encourages using tinderboxes (a rarity in mods)
- The glyph concept was ******* amazing, I wish there was more puzzles involving it. So damn cool.

===============SCARINESS================

The general ambience really spooked me out quite often. There are some clever jumpscares in this mod, but for me they often lacked build up to properly scare me.

The monster encounters were fine I guess, but I am desensitized to them so don't take this for granted.

For me, the scariness was just as I like it - enough to get me immersed, but not to be tiresome.

=================ISSUES=================

The shortcuts looping in on the level are awesome. But unfortunately they are too often left wide open with a long path preceeding it.
This causes pacing issues, because I explored the shortcuts each time only to realise I just have to turn around.

The "second act" (the plaza hub and the branching maps) overstays its welcome. By the time I finally got the 3rd artefact, I was kinda tired already. Fortunately, the later parts were so interesting that I wanted to play more.

Nitpicks:
- Sometimes the geometry intersections get a bit rough when using the bigger assets.
- A tiny amount of needless backtracking
- The mod had an instance of an obscurely hidden progress path (hole covered with planks without a hint)

=================CLOSING STATEMENTS=================

The people who made this did something amazing, furthermore being strengthended by the fact that it was made in the decadent era of Amnesia mods. Frankly, this was for the most part professional-tier content and I wouldn't mind paying a good few bucks for it under other circumstances.

Lastly, I have never been inspired by mods... but wow, this one really did it. Kudos all the way through.

People have rated this a bit harshly considering that this is a mod, not a ******* AAA game. Because of this, I am giving 10/10 to even out the rating a little bit because the rating it has rn is comepletely unfair given the level of work that the developers, one of which I HAVE TALKED TO, have put into this mod.

SIKE JUST KIDDING

Outstanding social commentary. Rest in pepperoni you-know-who. Was kinda wishing for more but I will take what you got

Masterpiece

You have a talent for creating very interesting maps. However, some of the puzzles are extremely obscure and require cheating or checking a gameplay to solve because they don't follow any kind of logic.

Or worse yet, they require you to notice something which is so hidden that it's just unfair and annoying.

You need to start asking yourself the question "If didn't know the solution, what would I think?". Or just have people test the puzzles and correct them or give hints if they get stuck.

Story was ok I guess.

6 - An okay mod with prominent issues, but has redeeming qualities.

Only play it if running around pointlessly for a long time doesn't frustrate you.

Ok, first things first - this version is much better than the original. However, it still has its issues, and then adds some of its own.

In a nutshell: This mod is okay, but 9 years after the game release there's nothing here which you haven't seen before.

Upsides:
• Decent+ level detail
• Above average lighting
• Fixes some issues of the original
• Pretty much bug-free
Downsides:
• A LOT of backtracking
• No ambience at all (bad sound design)
• Unintuitive puzzles
• Mediocre story with bad writing

―Level Design―
The level of detail in this has been significantly improved which makes the map look more lively, so congrats to whichever one of you did this.
Even though it isn't too original, it's really decent.
The lighting could use some more work, but it's still much better than most mods out there.

However, the level design hasn't improved from the original - it's still a singular sprawling map, which forces you to walk around way too much. Especially when the mod requires as much backtracking as it does.
Sidenote, the size of the map and the number of SpotLights bogs down the performance, you could use some tricks to make it better.

―Puzzles―
Many of the original puzzles have been scrapped in place of better ones, so that's good. However, most of them are still very obscure:
• There is zero hints to what put on the pedestal. I only figured it out because the required object was a custom entity.
• You still spawn items when you want which makes it confusing. It's an interesting idea to make the objects pick-up-able only when you know you need them, but it doesn't work for gameplay reasons - the player already has been everywhere and there was nothing there. Personally, I remembered about the jar but the string was annoying.
• The third button placement was bismal. There is nothing to indicate that it's there. I actually had to look into the script and the map file to find it. Remember this: looking for objects isn't fun when you have zero hints to their location.

―Scariness―
None.
The mod does not have any music or ambiance, so 95% of the time you just walk in silence. The rainy sound from the original has been silenced, which is realistic but anticlimatic.
Asides from 2-3 kinda predictable monster encounters, there were no other scares.

I took a look at the mod files, and it seems that one of the music files is just 5 minutes of silence. Also why are you using a custom class for the music? It doesn't seem to work.

―Story―
Nothing too interesting, pretty much just an excuse to do some stuff in a mansion. Also the writing is heavy (walls of text) and grammar is a bit poor sometimes. However considering the length of the mod, it's not much of an issue.

―Nitpicks―
• You included the vanilla music in the download again. You don't need (and shouldn't) do that.
• I found some voice acting in the files. If it was supposed to appear in the mod, it didn't and you should fix it. Otherwise maybe better to not include it
• Some bug which might not be your fault, see picture:
Moddb.com
[Don't mind the broken lantern, I forgot to fix an addon I use]

―Minor praise―
• The jar animation could be done more easily and look nicer if you used MoveObjects, but I gotta say it's pretty creative.
• You actually fixed the stuff which I mentioned in the comments. Good job!

―Final verdict―
As far as mods go, this is average, especially considering the fact that it's short.
As a remaster, it holds up - improves the original greatly, and is an indication that you have learned some lessons from the last time.
I'm giving it a 5 - "An okay mod with prominent issues" (see my blog for my rating details)