I was pleasantly surprised and impressed by this game. Despite flaws, I would say it's certainly worth a download.
A simple premise executed beautifully. Curve Digital created a game that could be played by all, while also not making it so simplistic that long-time gamers would be bored.
The story to the game is that you are a government-installed landlord. The totalitarian country you live in is in wartime, setting up the dystopian society it strives to bring to your living room. You have two children, a wife and an entire complex of tenants. You are responsible for the actions of every single one of them. Your goal is to spy using cameras, peeking through keyholes and questioning all of your tenants regularly. If they do something illegal you must either report it or hide their secret, but if you keep it a secret you can use it to blackmail them. With that said, every decision has adverse effects. There are good and bad outcomes for every decision and your decisions can change the outcome of the story, keeping the story rather dynamic.
Visually, I was initially disappointed. However, as I played and really analyzed the game, I really realized that the minimalist design in the game really added to the aesthetic they were creating. The game, as I mentioned, was set in a dystopian society. The strictly black and white coloring to the characters really added to that darker tone the game sought to create.
I don’t really have a single knock about the story or the gameplay itself, other than the difficulty. I played on the harder of the two difficulty options and still really didn’t have a problem completing the story fairly unhindered, so the game surely could have been made more difficult. The biggest complaint I had with the game, albeit a small one, was when you died. Once you died, the game told the story of your death and you’re expected to go back and try it all over again. It took quite a while loading back to the main menu, then it gives you the option at top to “Continue Game,” where you would assume you would click in order to try again, right? Wrong. If you click that, you take about 5 minutes (seriously) to load back to the exact moment you died and it replays the death sequence/animation and the narration of your death. So then you go all the way back out to the main menu where I realized I could go down to load game and load a previous checkpoint. My knocks here are the load times themselves and the menu setup that would lead most people to essentially die over and over again. I think once you die there shouldn’t be a “continue game” option until you load a previous checkpoint and back out again. I think that is just a menu design flaw.
The Blissful Sleep story is included in the Complete Edition and I thought it was a pretty cool continuation of the game for those who could successfully complete the main story. I would, however, say that if you are going to have free content included on your game, make it different enough from your main content to be worth it. The bonus story took me approximately 20 minutes and the result was a foregone conclusion from the very first few minutes, so maybe that was a little sloppily written and added to the game.
Overall I was very happy with the game, as I honestly wasn’t expecting a whole lot from a developer who I had never heard of. Curve Digital has been around since 2005 but when I looked through their roster of games, I recognized not a single one. So cheers to them for this release, I very much look forward to see what they put out next after this success.
