[LEGACY] 12 Hours

Upon entering 12 Hours, you’re hit straight with that shitty indie feel and not to mention the long loading times. The screen shows some basic text with controls, but some of these controls seem confusing at first because they ask you to use the LMB to turn on and off your torch, but also to use it to attack… What? Nevermind, I’m sure it will explain itself eventually or make sense in-game.

You then start off in a corridor, no story as you are within a nightmare of the developer’s making. All that you can see will be the wooden floor, the dirty off-white walls, and the wooden doors. A very plain setting and not very spooky or endangering at all.
Each door you go through will land you in one of the random rooms that this game possesses, where all the items have the exact same spawn location. Random rooms, but all the contents of the rooms are not randomised, weird.
The red “blood” writing on the wall is extremely far from intimidating. Some writing is even supposed to be funny, but that completely devalues the scare of others! Whispering emanating from these walls, but it’s not subtle whatsoever, and for me, takes away some scare as the sound was clearly just placed on the wall.

The monster(s) you encounter (as far as I’m aware) is a homeless old man with a machete/butcher knife and a demon dog/human hybrid that I swear I’ve seen in some game before. These enemies will sometimes spawn right in front of you and, typically, not even facing you. They will spawn, more than likely, before you can reach/find a weapon, leaving you defenceless. The monster(s) can run faster than you and there’s no way to close the door to prevent them from attacking you (despite it giving you the option to interact with it) and there is no hiding mechanic. You just die.

On my last playthrough I was lucky enough to come across a baseball bat, which I found to my displeasure that as soon as I picked it up the torch went out. Baseball bats are two-handed weapons, and it wouldn’t make sense that I could hold a torch too, so that was fine, but now I have to fight the monsters in the pitch black with a baseball bat, big deal. Or at least it wouldn’t be if the game had not already put (from what I can tell) a headlamp on the floor. It told me to press G to turn it on, and it didn’t. It had a sign like a switchover sign with the button T, so I tried that. Nothing.

Obviously, the headlamp was put here with the combat in mind, so you could still see your enemies as you were fighting them. You technically still can, but you can only see their life bar. Oh, and the crawling monster had me dead before I could even get a second hit. *Shakes some salt.*

Pros:
— The game works. No audio or auditory glitches and no game crashes.
— Battery charge to battery finding ratio is sensible enough.
— Combat is actually combat and not just a horror hide and seek.
— Buttons (for everything except LMB issue) are set sensibly to global standard.

Cons:
— Monsters spawn right in front of you, sometimes not even facing you.
— If you don’t find a bat before the monster finds you, you’re fucked, as you can’t defend yourself otherwise.
— The torch is terrible, and the headlamp doesn’t work.
— There is no hide mechanic, and the monster(s) all run faster than you. No way to revive or recover.
— Randomly Generated Map sometimes makes the most stupid of corridors, some you can’t even fit into.

All images are just random rooms that I’ve walked into. None are linked by anything whatsoever. They’re purely rooms with different things in them.

Price: £2.89
Time To Complete: N/A
Achievements: None
Cards: No
Worth The Money: No. Do not buy it.

Honestly, don’t buy this game. If this game is bundled with another game, but you have the option of adding something else instead of this one, do it.
If you already have this game for some reason, play it. Play it and then let people know to avoid this as if it were quarantined.
This is one of the many games that makes people avoid early access and indie tags, and gives the general idea to AAA players that “indie” means “trash”.

Zesty Rating
1 Out Of 10.
The main suspect when it comes to giving Early Access and Indie a bad name. RNG Maps make for tight crawlspaces, no weapon to start despite the risk of being attacked, cheap, boring and dull. A must not play.


Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.

[LEGACY] Do Animals Dream?

Do Animals Dream?

The question that’s asked in the title of the game is not expanded on in the way you might think. The game is nothing to do with dreaming in the sense of what happens when you’re asleep, but more to do with hope and aspirations of animals.
Even so, that’s not really the main aspect of this game I procured from Keymailer this time.

You start the game as a daddy whale (not an alternate version of a bear daddy) discussing with his whale son about Mother’s Day… Or was it their mother’s birthday? Having a conversation about what to give her when- “WHAM!” harpoon straight into the kid’s head. The son starts crying saying that he’s scared and all you can pick from the dialogue options is super existential dread producing stuff like; “This is the way the world is.” and “It’s okay, it’ll be over soon.” and “We all die in the end.”. Each one of these dialogue options resorting in another harpoon being launched into the whale-kid’s body.

“I’m not going to lie, once two harpoons were in, I skipped through this. All I saw was the horrifying dialogue options that the father was saying in a horrible attempt to comfort his son but was just being very cynical and death-take-me” while the son was begging for help.

I saw the warnings for this game and I, like a dumbass, ignored them, brushed them aside as “Hah, how can a game like this, with these cute avatars, actually fill the boots that the warning it gave provides?”.
The game rightfully slapped me around the face right at the start and prepared me for what it held within.

This story is roughly about “you” who happens to be the whale hunter that more than likely killed the whale at the start. Your ship crashed into the island where you find a bunch of talking animals and the main focus is this sleeping lion who is actually poisoned. You set out on a quest to gather the ingredients for the antidote which you somehow know how to make and what to look for, and on your journey meet all the other talking animals of the island.

(I did miss a few animals as it was optional and at the point the game had fucked my brain up that much, I just wanted an ending.)

Through meeting the Chicken who was injected with things to make her legs more plump, but instead ended up falling off. A talking crocodile and a massive pig, you’re not only led to finding the ingredients but also a secret laboratory under a waterfall which hints to animal experimentation gone wrong a la Planet Of The Apes style.

Around halfway through the game I made a cheeky observation of the game, it felt like one of those Vegan Propaganda things that are made every so often. So for the entirety of the rest of the game, I found myself questioning it, is it vegan propaganda?
While sadly, I came to the conclusion that it is not, it verges really close to it. This thought of mine may have been because I was viewing the animals as animals, and not “people” with their personalities. Each one is going through something. Most have some amount of existential dread or such a bleak outlook on life, and those that don’t have either of those things are taking “ignorance is bliss” to a level where it’s just sad.
The lion is suffering the loss of his son, and because he leads the entirety of who is left, the loss of everyone else along the way too. An owl has been constantly berated and told that their hobbies are rubbish and that they should just give up. The chicken has such an overwhelming hatred for humans that it blinds her to (rightfully so) stereotype every human to just be the same.

(Edit: Conclusion changed. This is a vegan game. Maybe not propaganda, but I’m not entirely sure. However, I found this as this is what changed my mind.)

“You” yourself even have a whole existential crisis on the top of “special goop mountain” at full moon. It transforms into the mirror image of you, and you start going off about how you hate yourself, calling yourself names and just being so derogatory towards yourself.
(I have no idea how they managed to steal my inner monologue to create such a convincing “self-hate moment”, but I’m impressed.)

I’m still reeling from this moment. Even looking at it actually makes me really uncomfortable, as it hits really close to home. Regardless, let’s get some pros and cons.

Pros:

  • The game works well, no graphical errors or audio bugs.
  • A warning is given for the type of content within the game, a lot of the time, disclaimers are too obscure and don’t really address what is being warned about. This game does a fantastic job of making the player extremely aware of what’s to come, and it lived up to it.
  • Every single character is believable. Whilst talking animals are not the most realistic thing, the characters are for what they are. A suicidal ant, feeling the pressures of being small and gaining sentience being one of the most compelling parts of the game for such a small moment, yet it’s an ant, can you really draw emotional attachment to an ant? Console it? Encourage it to not give up? Or do you just squish it because it’s an ant?
  • The choices in this game do not have a big impact on the game at all, in fact, I’d say they’re meaningless. Which is a great thing. In a game like this where you are trying to cause and/or show how shit and meaningless these animals’ lives are, conveying that through the fact that nothing will change, regardless of what you do, is fantastic. Giving you no reward for doing the right thing, except the knowledge that you didn’t squish an ant in the best way.
  • The game is adorable. I saw in the reviews for this game that it’s like a horror mod for Animal Crossing, and despite never playing Animal Crossing, I couldn’t agree more. The art style and the animations really work lovely together, and makes for an outstanding contrast to the dark and horrible themes within. It was one of the sole reasons this game subverted my expectations.
  • The game was the perfect length. I don’t say this regularly, as the time of the game is not often a valid point in my reviews. This is maybe one of the few times I will say this, as it’s rare to get something so perfectly neat and tidy as this. The game was possibly about an hour long, yet it didn’t feel like it was an hour, I didn’t feel the time go by. I’d call that a “prefect wee game”.

Cons:

  • While the story was great, there were times when I did feel it was a bit empty. The entire game is focused around the interaction with the various animals on the island and nothing more. So if you are not a fan of reading dialogue or don’t feel yourself to bond well with video game characters, then this game will bore you to death.
    Apart from talking, the only other thing to do is to explore the tiny little map of the game.
  • There were two characters (I’m assuming) that I missed. Somewhere after talking to the “goop-me” there was probably an opportunity to find and talk to both a Turtle and an Angry Monkey. I had no clue where the game ended and as far as I’m aware, the game did not hint me to go and find them. By the time I’d headed back to the village, the game was in its ending phase, and I’d missed my chance to talk to everyone. An audio hint or verbal hint to go and talk to them would’ve been great, keeping it still entirely optional and open to making your own mistakes, but I feel I missed out.
  • I feel as though the ending was a bit abrupt, or just a little too simply stupid. Not a stupid ending, but the dialogue at this point felt weak and simplified. I understood the Lion’s motives, and the whole plan of luring people to the island, but it wasn’t such a huge, grand reveal as I feel it could’ve been.

Price: £5.79
Time To Complete: 1.5 hours
Achievements: 7
Cards: None
Worth The Money: Solid, Maybe. The 37% discount it had a while ago which put it to £3.65 was a definite yes. It’s definitely worth a play.

Overall, this game is a great experience for those who like to challenge their morals through talking to sentient animals. It has a great theme, and while the ending (that I got, as I bet there are other endings) was weak and unfulfilling, it was a great ride overall. I strongly recommend this game, whether you wait for a discount or not is up to yourselves.

Zesty Rating
8 Out Of 10
A wonderfully dark and gory story, ending in hardship, should you bring it on yourself. Cute style contrasting the gruesome nature of the game. And despite all your efforts in life, everything eventually dies.


Please bear in mind that this is a repost. There have been slight changes to the post such as spelling and grammar fixes, images added, and things generally organised in the fashion I'd like them presented.  Apart from that, the main context of the review has not changed, opinion has not been altered and everything is sacred. I look forward to writing for you all again.

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