You are ----------. You are a scientist working on inter-terrestrial travel through anomalies named "Rifts". One day after an expedition into one such Rift you wake to find some of your memories erased. You cannot remember your name nor can you remember your work on the Rift you travelled to. You hear a distant rumbling which seems to be coming from below you and as you listen, it gets louder.
Positives:
- Creative storyline
- Pretty long story
- Challange
- Many endings
Negatives:
- Not many effects of any kind
- Not very scary
- Really confusing, not enough indication where the items are
- A lot of rooms are pointless (nothing to find in them)
- Level design is pretty bland in some areas
- A few flaws
What to improve:
Some maps are very well made, beutiful and creepy, but some maps are bland and plain boring and pointless. A lot of the maps are much bigger than they needs to be.
It was really frustrating to have one item missing and have no clue where it is and you have no choise but to either look in the editor/ask for help or look through every single map.
You could add a few more effects. Scares, particle effects etc.
The orb that required a payment could be pushed to the floor by other objects, like a chair and then be picked up.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed this story a lot untill I stopped finding items and had to run around in every single map in every single room, trying to find something useful.
It's a really nice story, but way too confusing.
7/10 - Good
I was truly enjoying first this mod, but after a while I was getting depressed, bored lack of exciting gameplay, maps are fine and nicely done, but missing a lot of detail like in the hub, cellar, sewer is just really long hallways with bland design. Dungeon sections in some places there are really empty and dark as hell, puzzles are pretty frustrating and too challenging in some points. I understand there must be "not too easy" ones, but many of them are pretty hard and what I see from other comments they don't like it because it's "Too hard and boring, It has to be in my opinion a lot of fun when it's challenging.
I mean all the maps are designed nicely, but many ones are WAY too big with long hallways and then I see the lack of effort here, which was disappointing. Well there are good points too, atmosphere some of the places, complicated and nice puzzles, but lacks effort here too.. usual.
Overall, it was nice experince, but I think you rushed way too many maps like "putting more effort with detailing" and lazy design some places, because couple of maps "boxlights are directed wrong and then I seened many places flickering walls, textures" not saying this is bad thing. It's just you have to improve a lot from designing and make it more interesting and reduce size of the maps, my gameplay ruined many times, because I wondered everywhere too many times, with no sign of finding almost everything. Storytelling is really good and well written.
Pos:
- Long
- Puzzles
- Atmosphere at times
- Story
Neg:
- Hard puzzles and really hard to find any clues at times
- Not that scary
- Dark places, really small amount of oil
- Too confusing and hard to progress at times
- Lack of detailing
- Big size maps
Not bad, but not that good either. Need's a lot improvement, still!
Good, but frustrating at times - 6/10
Pretty good mod. Although level design isn't top, storyline is very good.
I must say, starting off I thought I was really gonna hate this custom story, I was digging the lore and premise up until then though, but I actually really came to like and enjoy it, it's certainly not without its flaws though.
I'll warn ye right off the bat that it's really easy to miss important items in this story, so expect to refer to a walkthrough if you notice you're missing something later on. (I missed the red rod as it was hidden high up on a shelf with a few boxes around it, and missed one of the black orbs because it was covered by books)
Let's start off with the beginning, mainly the Prison and the Sewers, these sections SUCK, something should be done about them, absolute corridor simulators, and that's not a compliment, they leave a really bad taste in your mouth.
Thankfully the custom story redeems itself, but love it or hate it, it's a giant fetch quest! You explore an absolutely huuge mansion, which will consume most of your play time. I think this story took me a good hour or two to beat, not 100% sure, so make sure you have time!
I loved the concept of the orbs and them having their own personality, the lore behind the rifts is excellent as well. I do think the orb gimmick falls flat though, since you're given an underwhelming "carrying the orb protects you from its effects" excuse. I think this is a missed opportunity, it would be pretty awesome if the orbs effects would kick in over time at random, although I realize this would take a lot of time and effort, just my opinion though.
Not much "horror" in this story, although I think it's nicely spaced out, since you aren't spammed with monsters and jumpscares.
Honestly the maps are too big, I think it would be beneficial to everyone if you'd scale them down a notch, and this ties in with my complaint about the early sections of the custom story as well (the endless corridors) and cut off a lot of the running simulator aspect.
It occurred to me fairly quickly that this mapper absolutely loves labyrinths (which is my explanation for the **** ton of rooms and corridors in the story.)
Anyways, to conclude, the endings are honestly pretty underwhelming after all the work you put into beating the story, which is unfortunate, but hey at least there's even endings to begin with and not the "to be continued" trope. Not for everyone obviously, but if you like long lengthy fetch quests, with an interesting story, this is for you.
It was a long and great mod!
I loved spending my time with it. :D
What the ****?! You even ask why only 1/10? You ask after creating the sewers? Tell me, you were bored when you were making this CS, right? Otherwise I cannot explain why the sewers are hectares big. There's no way you cannot get lost. The dungeons were similar, but were OK. After successfully finding the water flow levers I found a note that said pull ---- lever ---- ---- ----- and middle levers --- the combined value of the left side is 5". What for god's sake is that? And it looked so good at the beginning, the storyline idea and everything, and you screwed up the whole custom story.
Alright, I'm back to review custom stories
And I'm starting with yours
I had once tried to complete this CS but I didn't managed to. I'll get to that point in a second...
But today, I've decided to give it another try and I finished it. So here comes...
Pros:
- The level design. I enjoyed the details of the maps and all the lighting in the Main Hall. in fact, I must say I liked the main hall the must.
- The "sidequests". I liked the idea of pieces of orb asking you to do stuff and also how each one of them had different personalities and powers.
Cos:
- The level design. While the maps were very expansive and detailed, there are two major problems with them:
1) They are too confusing. the dungeons, the east wing, the passageways, the sewers... all felt like mazes. It becomes a chore to look around for stuff when everything is so confusing. I left the 2 rods outside the receiver to last and found that there was one part in the dungeons that I didn't even had explored yet, containing the trinity rod and one note. Another example would be in the cellar, where you're supposed to find 2 notes about some war and I found the 2nd part first and the 1st part later.
2) Low lighting. self-explanatory really, I had to go around with my lantern on must of the time because I couldn't see anything. Tinderboxes offer little light so they aren't reliable.
These 2 problems together are the reason why I couldn't finish this CS the first time. Stay with me here but if you make many maps like mazes and give little oil to the player, as well as making nearly every map too dark, you can see that all of that is going to be a disaster.
I tried to explore every nook and cranny of the map and I found myself with low oil very fast. The maze structure of the maps made me go in circles very often.
How did I fix this? simple, I bumped the gamma to 1.5. That combined with the fact that I was playing the CS for the 2nd time allowed my to finish it with lots of oil to spare so maybe bumping the lighting of the maps might just be enough.
- The monster encounters: there was only like 4 of them? and half of them were against the water monster. 1 brute and 1 grunt. I felt it was too little. Considering how big the maps were -despite their confusing structure- I would have added a lot more of encounters just to keep the player in their toes.
- Finding some stuff: some items were very hard to find, such as Red rod (found by accident after looking in that area for the 4th time) and the stone chipper (had to use the level editor). The confusing structure of the maps doesn't really help and as I pointed out before, I found the blue rod in a area of the dungeons that I didn't even knew it existed so we're not talking about lost items in the middle of rooms, we're talking about whole rooms being hidden in the middle of the map.
Final verdict: 8/10
I enjoyed it in general but I still needed to cheat (level editor, bumping the gamma) and needed two tries to finish it.
I thought this was a very good custom story. The story was good, it had some challenging puzzles and it was very big. It could have used a few more scares. I hope to see more from you.
This is a huge dungeon :(
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD IT IS SOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! DIFFICULT -.-