![]() Every single cardinal sin is on display here. Sadly, if the clunky quick-time sequences, laughable attempts at horror and paranoia, and hands-off puzzle design keep the game in the realm of mediocre, the stealth sequences drop it into bad territory. It's handled alright, adding a bit of variety to the key-hunting gameplay, even if it does draw attention to the weak cone of vision the flashlight provides. By shining the flashlight on weird glowing spores, you can create pathways of green tendrils to get across dangerous terrain and bottomless pits. Sanity of Morris does fool around with at least one interesting mechanic involving a flashlight. It happens with every object that isn't a key to a puzzle, and it went from annoying to hilarious to annoying again by the time the credits rolled. There are jumpscares where John sees things that might not be real, but it mostly amounts to mundane objects you examine turning into skulls or spiders. There might have been grounds to paint John as an unreliable narrator, the story eventually cites everything from hallucinogenic gas to alien mind spores, but Sanity of Morris handles this with the subtlety of jackhammer. You don't see the official images, just a block of text describing what the images conveyed. You don't see the actual official documents, you read John's summary of them. Even here, there is a strong dissonance between the gameplay and thematic intent. There's even a timeline that helps keep everything neat and tidy. As you play through the story, John keeps taking notes in his journal, which includes everything from mysterious documents and images to voice messages found on old cassette tapes. This uncritical attitude even continues to the worldbuilding and horror. Please explain to me what exactly is happening again. There is no engagement, just tedious obedience. ![]() Don't worry if you missed something, because John will comment incessantly on where to go and what to do. There is genuinely no point in thinking, just grab all the key items and let the game solve it for you. For example early on you need a keypad combination to get into Hank's attic, but you cannot actually punch in the code – even if you've found all the numbers – until you examine something that flat out tells you the combination. On their own, there are solid environmental puzzles, rewarding you for paying attention, but in practice it feels condescending and trite. Things don't get much better when the puzzle and investigation sequences start. This shouldn't have gotten past the story's first draft. What could have easily been saved as a turning point in the story's second act is burned up before any sense of normality or uncanny dread has been established. Within the first five minutes of the game, John Morris is run off the road by a truck after passing the mysterious laboratory, crashes his car, and gets into a quick-time event chase sequence with a bunch of shady soldiers with nightvision goggles and stun batons. But pacing and atmosphere gets punched in the gut from the beginning and never fully recovers, ostensibly turning moments of horror or shock into farce and parody. It's why the X-Files became a household name: mixing together both intrigue and paranoia. On paper, this is not a bad set-up for a horror adventure game.
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