[Emu]

This game is driving me nuts.

The story, for what little has been revealed to me, is interesting enough to keep me playing, but the gameplay makes trying to find out what the hell is going on a chore. Whenever you're attacked by enemies, you're literally swarmed; every hallway will be filled with little melting children in tuxedos. Thankfully I have a pipe weapon now that can hit 2-3 at once, although combat is so ganked as to just make it less painful to simply run away... and then I encounter 10 more in the next room.

The enemies are extremely repetitive, and that's an understatement. There have been four varieties of enemies. Three of them are the little tuxedo children in different flavors: Normal, rat-headed and bunny-headed. The rat- and bunny-headed individuals are sort of creepy in their own right as they tend to be related to the game's current theme. The other enemy I've encountered has been a boss, a strange fellow who seems to be a teacher that attacks with one of those old fashioned pointer sticks and beats the fuck out of you while you stumble around in vain attempting to aim for him. I died against him and shut the game off for the time being.

The game is permeated by graphics errors that are forgivable but sloppy, like shadows appearing through walls, or cast onto the wrong wall, or not cast at all. Or when your dog companion tries to ascend stairs and begins walking in place. Camera angles range from surprisingly effective to painful; occasionally your character will be able to run so far away from it that you can't tell exactly where you are with respect to it or other objects.

On the plus side, the children are relatively creepy, and as predicted, the fat one is indeed the scariest. The music is still repetitive but good enough to be tolerable. There are lots and lots of creepy violin themes, and that creepy string pluck from older horror movies.

As I understand it, the game's creator, Atlus, has released basically nothing but RPGs over its career, and its newness to other genres comes out painfully clear in this game. It's trying to be heavily story driven while having Silent Hill's constant on-your-toes action. As well, the most detailed part of the game seems to be the menu screen, which is unfortunately also probably the most entertaining part. It has a chalkboard-looking setup and a lot of cute-but-eerie drawings that have interesting quirks about them and probably some significance to the story that I haven't found yet.

I'm determined to give the game a full chance, and my girlfriend seems to enjoy it a lot. So hopefully I'll be able to make it through it.