Reviews - The Secret of the Village mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent

Not scary but not bad for everything

10/10

10/10

10/10

Positives:

- Village looks sorta good

Negatives:

- Very laggy

- Puzzles often make no sense, or even if they do, there's no direction for them

- Cliché storyline that is never built upon aside from like one note (all other notes are puzzle related only)

- Trees have collision (big no no), you can jump over the gate at the fence at village spawn point after the intro and jump out of the map at several other places too (like next to the big building with the piano puzzle)

- Bad grammar, and for some reason, when I download the english version, loading screens and mod folder are still written in Czech

- Ending made no sense (nothing built up for it)

- Some levels have music at sound areas for some reason

- So many rooms and hallways are pointless and have nothing in them

- Clock arrows are very hard to move around

- Really bad lightning and billboard usage. There shouldn't even be any billboards, since it's night time

- Box in the village that should be static (candle on top of it) can be moved

- "Door is locked" message when door is already unlocked

I luckily had a friend watching me stream this that knew this mod already, otherwise I would have been stuck for hours. You say in the credits that some people beta tested this. I don't believe that. Or maybe they did but you didn't bother to fix anything they told you to fix.

In the gaming industry, being a tester is an actual job. You report flaws and work with the devs to solve said flaws. I don't expect professional testers for a mod, but I at the very least expect them to tell you when the maps are laggy, or puzzles don't make any sense, or when you have huge design flaws in your levels.

Let me give you a couple examples here to prove my point:

I arrived at the village. You overuse particles so the entire map is laggy as all hell. I pick up a bucket, which is empty despite it raining quite hard. I try to use at the well but it didn't work. I had to go a few meters to a different well. Only then could I fill it. How does this make any sense?

In the hotel I found a crowbar and unlocked a door with it. In this room I was told to lit the chandelier. That's it. Nothing else to do in that room. No hints, no directions, nothing to search for, nothing. Had my friend not told me to move on at that point, I would have been stuck here searching for stuff in that room for half an hour most likely.

I then found acid, which I thought I had to use on a rusty padlock I found earlier. No, had to use it on a level door, again without any hints aside from "I have to get this door opened somehow". I had a crowbar with me still, why couldn't I use that?

What else is there to say. There barely is a story here, and the tiny bit of story telling there is, is a big cliché. Half the maps are super laggy and looks dull at best, horrible at worse.

As an experienced developer, I know very well that not all bugs and glitches can be avoided. I accidently leave some in my mods all the time. Hell, I recently found a glitch in my own mod that I posted years ago, so I don't expect your work to be flawless by any means.

However, there is a line. A line, where it's clear to me the developer did not care to put the effort in. Just, rush to get it done and upload it. This is a perfect example of that.

I can't recommend this to anyone.

2/10 - Very bad

I've just finished this mod, and...oh boy...here we go.

Plot - The plot is extremely simple, cliche and just in general not interesting. (1/10)

Mapping - Very underwhelming. The village area was quite well done, but the rest is empty, bland and undecorated. (3/10)

Storytelling - Just some notes. That's it. And the ones that existed were unfortunately filled with typos, bad sentences and just didn't sound like something you'd read in a paper. (1/10)

Fear Factor - None. I was not scared at all the entire story (0/10)

Atmosphere - Literally barely any atmosphere in this story. It's terrible. (1/10)

Puzzles - Just your regular key puzzles, mixed with some other stuff. The puzzles were very confusing, since there wasn't a big supply of mementos. I was constantly saying "Is this locked door necessary? Or is it a miscellaneous door with no purpose?". Firstly, give mementos on the doors NECESSARY to progress. Second, add some extra text on the ones that aren't useful (most commonly people put in the text "It won't budge." because that's a 100% signifier its not used to progress the story). (2/10)

Bugs - Oh holy mother mary, jesus and 6 undercooked lambs in a kitchen, where do i begin with this... first, the items dont disappear after usage. Secondly, there are some SKIPPABLE puzzles. Thirdly, there is a staircase which doesnt have a plane under it, which causes you to see through the staircase floor. Absolute catastrophe. (0/10)

Lighting and Decals - Underwhelming as crap. The billboards look unnatural as crap, and there is barely any decals used. Also, the lighting is almost nonexistent, and the pointlights just look wrong. (2/10)

Score: 10/80. Review Score: 2/10.

There is not much else to say here. Everything in the cs needs to be worked on. Fix the bugs and the puzzles, most importantly. Without those, you will never have a good cs.

I finished this mod and I don't know when I've last been so frustrated over Amnesia.

Positives:

+Village was decent

Neutrals / nitpicks:

~Village was very laggy. This is a neutral because it is partially my PC's fault.

Negatives: (where do I even begin)

-Lack of direction all the time
-So many logical flaws I can't even write all of them down
-No character development whatsoever
-Cliché storyline (barely had a storyline to begin with)
-The note in the carriage glitched out of the map when I started the mod
-Trees had collision. I fell from the map three times
-Every time I loaded the village map, something was flying from somewhere all the time. What is that?
-Lighting was atrocious(horrible billboards, pitch black areas)
-Bad grammar. You really could not find anyone else to translate the mod to English?
-What was that ending? It made no sense. Almost as if you gave up with the mod
-Glitching spiders in the hotel which kept following me everywhere
-Why did the music in the levels come from sound areas in the editor? It made me laugh

Storyline: 2/10

Oh no, loved one has disappeared. Cliché. Oh no, can't find her anywhere, as if the protagonist even cared about her. 95% of the story happened in the intro anyways. If the protagonist does not care about anything, why would I? Not to mention the name Daniel which is beyond cliché in 2020.

Puzzles: 2/10

So frustrating.

I spent 80% of the mod wandering around wondering what the actual hell I need to do next. I found one house with a painting, a padlocked desk door and a stove. I could not do anything there, and following that I found a bucket out of luck as it had glitched to a ground. Managed to finish this puzzle after 30 minutes of aimless running, just to get a key to the house nearby.

From this house, I found acid. I obviously thought it would be used for the padlock in the previous house, but guess twice was it meant to be used there. Nope. Instead, I had to use it on a locked level door with no indication whatsoever. Why didn't it work for any other level door, but only that exact one? This makes no sense whatsoever.

The hotel part was nothing but a waste of time. I found a key, wandered a good twenty minutes trying to figure out where the key was supposed to be used (the key was labeled unknown - yeah great workaround in a mod with 25 locked doors around). I even left the hotel and tried everything after everything and nothing works. Turned out, 40 minutes later that the key was actually for the basement door. I got a crowbar there, and after I got attacked by four glitching spiders I started the guessing where the actual hell I need to use this crowbar.

Every door in the hotel is the same. Then how come, that the crowbar only works for one specific door that is no different from the others? This is a flaw. As if that isn't enough, guess what the room had inside? Nothing ^^

The only puzzle which made sense was a ripoff from Eldritch Cove. Well done

Level Design: 3/10

Very average. The village itself was nice, but everything else was not. Castle was empty, the lighting was absolutely horrendous. What is going with those billboards? The hotel was pitch black but for some reason the randomly placed billboards were brighter than the sun itself. How does that make any sense, considering that this was a mod in nighttime? Why were all the rooms and corridors with these billboards pitch black if they were so bright? The castle was empty and so were the houses. Very disappointing.

Scare factor: 1/10

No pressure, no scares, no monsters. No buildup, no terror, atmosphere, nothing was there.

Overall:

Very, very very disappointing custom story. It took me a good two and a half hours to finish when it's like ten minutes if you know what you're doing. Very poor pacing and overall puzzle/gameplay design.

2/10 - Very bad