Update Two Hundred and Forty-Five: 20 October 2018

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Wailing Heights sets up an interesting premise, then fails to deliver because of piss-poor execution. Finishing this game became a chore. The game’s central mechanics - of navigating a 3D world as a 2D character and of possessing different characters to use their abilities - are a pain to actually experience. The walk speed is very slow, making navigating the game’s modestly sized world feel as boring as walking across a 300-mile desert. There’s also no different sprite for walking ‘towards’ or ‘away’ from the camera, just the same awkward, slow shamble. The footstep sounds are faster than the animation, a final nail in the coffin to making it feel excruciatingly slow. There is a LOT of walking back and forth, too, just to make sure you get extra sick of it - you can only possess characters you’re right next to, so there’s a lot of schlepping back and forth and back and forth to this character and that character, over and over again.

Possessing characters is similarly aggravating - while the initial mechanic is cool (you collect their name, an object they love and an object they hate, then sing a little tune to possess them) that little tune is sung EACH TIME to switch into their body, halting the action for a half minute as you listen to the same snippet as you wait until you can move again.

The art is nice, but is frequently ruined by lazy shortcuts - things clipping into each other, just straight-up mirroring of sprites so letters are reflected, rewinding animations rather than just animating them both ways. The UI is really cheap-looking, and for how important sound is to the game, the mixing isn’t done particularly well, and you’d think they’d get more than just two voice actors. You can pick your protagonist’s gender, for all the good that does, but, of course, the game always assume you picked male. The game is buggy as fuck, especially in regards to achievements.

…

I really am struggling to come up with a single purely nice thing to say.

…

That one song that played in front of the Crematory is still stuck in my head, and I liked it.

I’d absolutely pass on this one, my friends. Nice Northern Irish accents aren’t worth this slog.

Next up: I need to break free! Madison picked this for me to play.

See you soon!