Brume Studio made their nightmarish horror game Hide and Seek in just fourteen days, but it'll creep you out for a lot longer. Trapped in a house and pursued by a madman, you strike a deal with a goat demon (don't ask questions) who promises to kill your pursuer if you can track down items with "cherished memories" and return them to it... before you're caught and killed yourself. Use [WASD] to move, holding left [shift] to run, and right-click to interact, hide, or talk to things, while left-clicking will let you blink away the hallucinations that can grip you. Through it all, you're being stalked by a killer, and when you hear him coming, that's your cue to run and hide or it's curtains for you.
So, yeah. Kind of like a less subtle Slender, but Brume Studios still makes it work surprisingly well. Though it might not make a whole lot of sense from a story standpoint, the concept and setup actually fits, I'd argue, with the whole surreal style, with the endless corridors and warped design capturing that vaguely disorienting feeling you get when trapped inside a nightmare. As polished as the presentation is, though, the gameplay is a bit rough around the edges. It's a bit too simple, and the slowness associated with hiding and blinking is maddening. Listening is a nerve-wracking experience on its own, since you need to hear to know when to hide from the killer, but since he stops frequently, it's almost too hard to judge when it's safe to come out, especially since you can't peep out from your hiding places to see if the coast is clear.
Despite that, however, Hide and Seek still manages to capture the frantic, over-the-top freakiness of our best bad dreams, and for its short development time, is a solid little way to spend a while making yourself jump.
I'm afraid I can't say I thought highly of this one. The sense of player agency in surviving is near nonexistent - your pursuer can just blink up to you as soon as he enters line of sight, you have little to no cue as to when to hide to avoid such, you don't know when to STOP hiding, there doesn't appear to BE a mechanic to avoid being killed by hallucinations (despite blinking being advertised as a method to do so), etc. The fish-eye camera is more disorienting to the gameplay than it is to the reality of the scenario. The aesthetic (and villain) are a bit less scary than a Hot Topic store. The controls are floaty and poorly responsive and the graphics are glitchy. It would be superb if at least it had originality going for it, but on top of all that, it's another wearying entry in the copycat rush of "get X items while hiding/fleeing from the bad guy" games. At least games like Eyes took a few mechanics and ideas of their own to the genre along with some tight execution (for a simple, independent game, anyway). There is absolutely nothing to recommend in this.
We'll have to agree to disagree Revvy. ;) We enjoyed the game for one made in just a few days as a campy fun horror game, and I personally had zero control problems or graphical issues.
Nothing wrong with that. Your opinion's equally valid. I'm hesitant to excuse a game's quality based on its development time, though. If a creator can't turn out something of sufficient merit in that time, they shouldn't be restricting themselves that heavily. Either they, or their concept, aren't ready for it. Control issues are relative and glitches are going to be unpredictable, of course.
It's not an excuse. It's an admiration. We enjoyed it as it was, and we also feel that it's impressive given its short time for the competition. :)
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