Melancholy is a Point and Click Horror game made with Visual Novel Maker and HPL Engine.
It was short, but it was creative and new. A little buggy, but nothing unplayable. Not much story happening, but it was creepy. Sketchy download but a legit game.
In short: Incredibly great concept, but the execution of it left me slightly disappointed
Positives:
-Incredibly innovative. I have never seen anything like this ever before, and
most likely won't ever see
-Animations and sounds were both very good
-Great visuals
Negatives:
-Insanely short
-I needed a friend with me to help with finding the staircase. The arrow pointing
towards it was so obscurely placed it almost made me quit the game
-I confused the main menu button as the "go back" button so many times it's
unreal. It is not necessarily a good design to have that button visible at all
times, while the actual go back button only appears upon bringing your cursor
at its location
-No introduction for how to play the game. I had no idea if this was Amnesia or
not, kept looking for inventory and whatnot by pressing random keys here and
there. Turns out I only had to click on things to make them do stuff, but at
the point I found that out I had already finished the game with neutral ending
Still, despite the long wall of negatives this was pretty cool, if slightly frustrating to play. If those issues would be fixed, this would be a really nice little game. At this stage, I can only call it above average for simply what it is.
Score: 6/10
I did several scans with my paid antivirus + a full system scan after executing the executable and its clean.
This is a small point and click horror game based upon the HPL engine. It takes some assets from frictional games yet it still feels like its it own game.
What I liked:
- The atmosphere
- The ambiance/sounds used
- the look of the game (black and white goes well with it)
- the simplicity and several edings. Puzzles arent so hard, you just have to interact with everything will find it out.
What I liked to see improved/more
- The length, its really small and yes I understand that its made within a time frame, however it is still promising but the short length makes it difficult to fully immerge into it. I will certainly play it again if stuff is added.
- scares, although I appreciate most wasnt in your face scary. Again due to the length, there are just only a few thing to unsettle the player. if it were longer, the dev definitely could expand upon scares (e.g. entities appearing in rooms when you light it up and disappear)
- The interface, I had several times that I had to cut my video as the esc key just closed the window. Also in the beginning the return key which you think is return actually brings you back to the main menu. This is why many games have an "are you sure?" pop up.
- although not gamebreaking, i had some errors popping up once a while, but clicking ok several times made it go away and the game was still playable.
overall neat and small experience if you are an atmosphere/ambiance kind of gamer