Speaking of games I played last night, I haven't beaten it yet, but played
Motte Island for about two and a half hours last night, so some quick impressions.
Motte Island is a top-down flash Indonesian horror game. It's okay. It doesn't do anything particularly bad. When playing it, I wasn't thinking to myself there was any bad element in the game. But it also doesn't really excel at anything, just a few elements that I felt were good, but big parts feel like they're just not well-executed.
The story is a mess. Like, I haven't played a game with a story this much of a mess in a long time. It's not terrible, but definitely the game's worst point so far. It's just badly executed. The characters have some broken English, the story's pace is going way too fast, and interesting plot elements are undermined by this bad dialog and terrible pacing. And the characters are not interesting. The villain literally comes out and tells his evil plan early into the game, and then says outloud something incredibly stupid that basically amounts to, "I would kill you here, but we haven't killed strangers in a long time, so wait right here while I go fetch everyone so we can all kill you." Like, that's almost exactly what he says. He doesn't even imply it or anything, he just says it. And a lot of dialog in the game is like that, where they just outright say stuff, even if it's incredibly stupid they're doing so. Plot is as subtle as a brick on fire screeching out obscenities.
Which is a shame as the game does actually have a some pretty good music, pretty good drawn art to go with the cutscenes, and the game itself has a pretty good atmosphere with a pretty impressive 2D lighting engine. The in-game art isn't half-bad either, though I end up confusing some of the people you can talk too with objects (top-down angle, this one bald guy I thought was a lantern for example).
Unfortunately as its top-down the game is a bit more action-focused than I would like. And there's a few annoying things, like enemies that sometimes respawn when you leave and re-enter a room. Or weird design decisions, like regenerating health. And coupled with some bad level design.
But there are a few interesting ideas here, like when you die you drop your flashlight and have a limited time to go and try to pick-it up. If you don't pick-it up in time, or get hit again before you do, you get a game-over. Some sections go to a first-person, on-rails type gameplay angle. The enemies have been getting progressively more interesting as the game goes on, and some of the scares have legitimately got me. There's even a completely optional stealth mechanic that is actually fairly-well integrated.
But then it does stupid stuff, like too much back-tracking, or how it's really hard to sometimes tell what is something you can pick up in the environment, making them easy to miss, which is a big problem when hunting for key items which for some reason are much harder to spot than weapons, or how some of the level design feels uninspired...
It's not bad, but I can't say it's good either. It's kind of just okay, which is a shame as there's some things to like here, but it's bogged down by flaws that make the good parts a bit less enjoyable. Not to the point the game gets to the point of being bad, but makes it a hard title to recommend or to fully get into when playing.
Could be worth a shake if you're curious enough or like top-down horror games a lot or something, though.
), but the rest of us find it just funny for its chillout-ness, the simple joy of just driving around on a huge beast struggling to climb hills and stuck in the traffic of tiny mountain roads.
