Now that Dusky's here, it's a fine time to remind everyone that Dreadout's second (and final, I believe?) act is dropping
in two days~
Yup, I'm very excited about this. The trailer also makes it look promising and happy to see they are doing more than just making more the same. I'll be writing full impressions of Act 2 and DreadOut as a whole once that comes out. Act 1 for me had fantastic sound design and atmosphere, a surprising variety of ghosts and secrets (my favorite part of the Act 1 was if you went backwards to explore the town once it turned dark instead of just heading into the school, something that was completely optional), and its old-school style unforgiving crypticness to solve stuff (doesn't treat the player dumb, gives you enough hints and clues to solve what you need to do but lets you explore the school location freely as you figure it out). It also benefited greatly from pulling from Indonesian ghost stories, they have such colorful ghosts and supernatural beliefs, and no horror game has really explored it, and it's the first indie horror game I can really think of that models itself after Fatal Frame. It was obviously low-budget (which shows the most in the game's graphics), and on the short side (Act 1 was about 2-4 hours the first time depending on how stuck you got, but could be easily be beaten in under an hour fi you knew what you were doing), also with some hammy acting.
Here's hoping Act 2 is of decent length and surpasses Act 1 even, if it can bring the whole package of DreadOut together, it'll be an easy recommend to me for anyone who likes certain old-school horror tendencies, be interested in an indie-take on a Fatal Frame-like game, or want some good atmospheric ghost horror in their life. Act 2 is the second half of the game, the only other DreadOut thing is down the line they will release a paid DLC thing known as free roam mode, which will include all the areas/ghosts from the main game, but include some new areas (I think they prepared a few of these areas in Act 1, I notice there's areas you can see in Act 1 you can't visit, such as a farm and some business building), and include new ghosts and a number of objectives and missions to do (basically a sandbox horror game with supernatural points of intrigue to explore and such). The ghost includes the ghosts people who paid higher kickstarter tiers paid for, as well as including content cut from the final game (if you look at early gameplay videos, you will see a lot of areas didn't end up in Act 1 of the original game and at least so far don't appear to be in Act 2, but we'll see).
It looks like Act 2 may take place in where the dream in the demo takes place but expanded (the village area, the demo was later added to the main game in a patch a few months ago, though), in a subway/sewer system, in what kind of looks like a museum, be interesting to how it comes together but the location variety and a few interesting things (the dead baby enemies, the scene where she seems to be stealthing and one where she is carrying an umbrella) do make it seem there will be some variety in gameplay here.