beard ひげ @beardalaxy@gameliberty.club

it kinda sucks when i go on instagram to catch up with posts from my friends and family and i see literally only random ass algorithm reels like wtf is this shit

Yo dudes the Supporter Pack for my game is on sale right now for $5 for the autumn sale!
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3057330/Gods_Disdain/
https://after-midnight-games.itch.io/godsdisdain

This is concept art for the main character of the horror game I am hopefully beginning work on at some point in the near future. I got this done all the way back in like... 2018. Fuck man.

Apparently, this bug I was referring to might be caused by turning off motion blur. So, I guess if you are going to play the game before this gets patched you should try toggling motion blur on if you see this issue occur.

I'm recommending this game with two extremely big caveats.

1) It has some serious tech issues that did actively prevent me from enjoying the game in some parts. Wait for a patch, wait for driver updates. Hopefully it will be fixed by the time this game goes on sale, which will be a perfect time to buy it. I'm not just talking about poor game performance, though that was an issue, I'm talking about weird shader issues that fucked with some of the important cutscenes and even a crash that seemed to make things perform far worse than they were beforehand. For right now, play it on PS5 if you can instead. Maybe you'll have less issues with a more powerful system than mine too, but I can't say for sure since people with 5090s were also getting crashes right at the beginning of the game. It's really unfortunate because this holds back what would otherwise be a fantastic game.

2) This is not a Silent Hill game. This is its own thing completely. There are similarities here and there, but it is much more apt to say that ƒ is inspired by Silent Hill, like many other games that share those same similarities and themes. I really wish that the game could have been given its own title, because it would have helped it stand out so much more. If not that, I wish it would have been connected to Silent Hill in a much bigger way. This game takes place before any of the other Silent Hill games, and it could have been the genesis for what happens in the future, but they went a completely different route and it is really its own story entirely.

With those two things out of the way, yes, I do recommend the game for anyone who is wanting a survival horror game that has a really wild story with a Japanese theme. It really does scratch the "Fatal Frame" itch quite well, to be completely honest. If you like both Fatal Frame and Silent Hill then this game will be right up your alley for sure. It never gets into combat so much that it becomes a Resident Evil type of game and running sometimes is the better option. The audio is fantastic, the graphics look amazing when they aren't glitching out, and there were some moments that had me truly awestruck. It's not SUPER scary, and it doesn't have quite the same vibe going on as other Silent Hill games, but I did still enjoy the setting well enough.

As far as that combat goes, it's pretty hit or miss. There are some combat moments that are really awesome, some that had my jaw on the floor even, but a lot of the time the camera really works against you. When there is more than one enemy on the screen, that camera really does not work well. The FOV is very narrow, which makes sense for a horror game, and that leads to very frequently not being able to see the enemies or environment around you. Trying to dodge out of an enemy's attack only to get stuck on some railing or wall and then attacked does not feel great. It doesn't help that a lot of these areas are really cramped, as they are in horror games typically, and the camera is constantly sliding along walls and getting closer to your character which makes it even harder to see what's going on. This is why, beyond technical limitations, fixed camera angles can be REALLY good for horror games especially, but even action games if you want some fights to take place in a particular area and have an interesting setup for them. Leaving fixed camera angles behind entirely is a poor choice, and I vastly prefer the SH2/SH3 method of camera control where it strikes a great balance between the two modes.

There was a decent amount of enemy variety, with the enemies all having a second variation too. Most of the enemies I found kind of annoying to be honest, but I don't know if that's because the enemies were actually annoying or the combat was just annoying because of those camera issues and the fact that the enemies are all really spongy. I think enemy health pools could have easily been reduced by half and I would have been happy with it. I was playing on "Story" difficulty too, which is kind of funny because the only other difficulty is "Hard." I would not recommend playing on Hard if Story was already quite a slog. I feel kind of conflicted about the combat because like... I enjoyed playing the game, but I was also routinely annoyed by it. Kind of strange.

Weapons have durability, and there are only melee weapons. In basically every survival horror game out there, you have guns that have ammo and can be used at range with higher damage, and then you have some melee weapons that you'll use to conserve ammo but at a risk to your health. It is all about managing all of your resources. In Silent Hill ƒ, for a typical playthrough, you can carry 3 melee weapons and all of them can degrade and break. Nothing long range. It kind of removes the aspect of feeling like you're in control of how you survive, right? It feels like you're just along for the ride with whatever the game decides to give you. The biggest choice you'll ever have to make is whether you want to replace a certain weapon with another one you find, or what weapon you want to use a precious tool kit on to repair it slightly (of which I only found like, maybe 5 or 6 in the entire game). Even worse, when I ran into the only time all of my weapons actually broke, the game just spawned in two more for me. Is there even a point to having weapon degradation when you have no way for the player to engage in the combat without them, so you have to spawn in weapons anyway? It seems like an idea some guy had in a board room and then they never wanted to remove it. I'd highly recommend just playing with an infinite durability mod while making sure you don't equip any Omamori (the game's upgrade slot system) that give you boosts based on your weapon durability.

Where the actual survival management gameplay comes in is the upgrade system. You can trade items that replenish your Health, Sanity, and Stamina for Faith Points. Maybe that's what the ƒ stands for? Faith? Anyway, you use those faith points to upgrade your stats, upgrade how many Omamori slots you have (up to 3), and receive random Omamori that will give you a different special benefit. You will have to be really picky with which of these options you decide to upgrade at any given point, and you will have to forego some healing items in order to get the most out of it. I decided right from the beginning of the game, practically, that I wasn't going to use any of the Sanity features because it just didn't really interest me, so thankfully I was able to just pour all of my Sanity items into getting more Faith Points. I ended up with a pretty good kit. So there is a unique element to the "survival" aspect of survival horror in there, it just feels a little undercooked for the genre. This is much closer to an action horror game than a survival horror.

The audio is probably the only thing that is recognizably "Silent Hill" other than like, there being a lot of fog and "trauma" or whatever. The sound design is FANTASTIC and the soundtrack is done by Kensuke Inage and, of course, Akira Yamaoka. You can 100% hear his Silent Hill stylings in there all the time. It's great too because it's like a blend of the Silent Hill style and traditional Japanese folk music. Hearing those smooth guitar riffs right alongside koto, taiko, and Japanese choirs is awesome. I felt like Mr. Yamaoka might be losing his touch a bit because SH2's remade soundtrack seemed really stiff, but ƒ's soundtrack is proof that's not the case. This might partially be due to the collaboration as well, but either way I'm very happy with the soundtrack. I do still prefer the soundtracks for the original games because there is something just entirely otherworldly about them, but this one is still fantastic.

Now, for the story. It is wild. It is absolutely insane. I think I understand the main plot, but I'll probably have to go searching through a few explanation posts and videos to fully grasp all of the intricacies. What's on display for your first playthrough is honestly confusing as fuck and doesn't make a whole lot of sense in a lot of parts, but you can sort of piece a few things together. There are 4 endings (plus one joke UFO ending, also a good Silent Hill nod), and you can only get the first one on your first playthrough. The second and third you can get on your subsequent playthroughs, and you can only get the fourth if you have achieved the second or third on yet another playthrough. So it does require four playthroughs to get every single ending, which is asking quite a lot of the player to be honest. The game is about 10 hours long on a first run, but I suppose that subsequent ones would be a good deal shorter. I do wish that you could achieve endings 1, 2, or 3 on your first playthrough, and that the conditions for getting them didn't revolve around only a couple of items, but I do still understand what they were going for. I ended up just watching the endings on YouTube, but I do think I'll play through the game again regardless, which is saying a lot honestly because I don't often do that with games.

Without spoiling much, the worry about the game being feminist propaganda or something like that is pretty unfounded. The game does take place in an era where, especially in Japan, women obviously didn't have as many rights and still had to fall in line with very strict roles, but also during a time where things were beginning to change. It's interesting to get a little glimpse into that time period here. On top of that, though, Hinako's family is just pretty fucked in general so it isn't just all about "boooo men bad, feminism!" especially because there is a strong male character here with Shu, Hinako's best friend since childhood. Every character is pretty heavily flawed in some way or another though, so yeah... I never felt like I was being talked down to or anything like that.

Beyond that, though, I think Hinako's core struggle is something pretty much everybody can relate to. Having a lot of societal expectations and navigating all of it while growing up and then entering adulthood is really hard to do, especially if you lose people who were your rocks as a result of those societal expectations, and you aren't wanting to just play along. I certainly related to that feeling quite a lot. The story that they wanted to tell does really seem like it pretty naturally fit within the time period they chose, it didn't feel forced at all. It does make me really interested in what something like this would be like in the modern era, though. It would probably be extremely political though, so I don't expect any AAA studio to touch something like that and even if an indie did, they would get a lot of pushback I'm sure.

Anyway, all of that is to say that I did really enjoy the story. I haven't ever read Higurashi, but from the Japanese horror media I have experienced I can tell that there is a lot of that sort of vibe going on here too. It's extremely mystical and symbolic. It is exactly what I like from Japanese games, for them to actually be Japanese games.

All of that being said, of course this still isn't really what I want out of Silent Hill. I'm really hoping that Townfall brings back the classic Silent Hill experience and setting in an awesome way, because so far the series is in an even weirder place than it was once Konami started giving the development rights away to western studios in the late 2000s and early 2010s. You have a remake of a lightning in a bottle game that is still good, but not anywhere close to what the original was. The rest of it just doesn't really relate to Silent Hill at all, and ranges from shit quality to meh quality to great quality. If I'm recommending any Silent Hill games to anyone, it is still going to be 1-3 and then they can explore the rest of the franchise if they want, because this is not what Silent Hill is. My roommate said "I don't know anything about Silent Hill" and I told him that he could play ƒ and still know nothing about Silent Hill. Unfortunately, that does impact my score of the game a little bit, and I can't really help that. I can't look at a game that is called "Silent Hill" and just not take into account the fact that it has nothing to do with what I love so much about Silent Hill.

Don't get me wrong, this game is still fantastic and I did really like it, but is it Silent Hill? Does it still give me the same feeling to play? Hell no. It is probably the farthest removed the series has ever been and I really wish it would have been called something else. I got more of a Silent Hill feeling playing The Evil Within 2, honestly.

Oh, I almost forgot about the puzzles! Yeah, they are actually really forgettable and are definitely not the main focus of this game at all. The fact it has puzzles period is kind of funny actually, because at least half of them are the exact same puzzle with a different riddle attached. You basically run around and find amulets and then shove the amulets into a door in the right spots and then something opens up. If they aren't amulets, they're keys or keepsakes or something like that. The structure is the exact same thing every time. There are a few puzzles that REALLY stuck out to me in the school section of the game, being a slide box puzzle and a locker puzzle which actually had me writing down and decoding cyphers on a piece of paper. It wasn't anything CRAZY, but it did feel really good to write down puzzle stuff like that. Other than those, though, honestly the "puzzles" were laughable at best and felt like they were mostly only included so that the game could more justify being called "Silent Hill." This is nothing compared to some of the highly memorable puzzles in the other games, or even other games in the genre. It did also seem like the puzzles really just completely fell off in the latter half of the game, because there were much more unique ones earlier on and I thought they would continue in that fashion but as soon as you reach that halfway point it's pretty much all action from there on out.

Anyway, yeah, good game, not a Silent Hill game though. Wait for a sale, because by then hopefully the awful graphics bugs will be fixed and maybe there will be some mods to help enhance your gameplay a little bit. If some coding wizard came down from the skies and put fixed camera angles in the game, I also think that would elevate this to a 9/10. Seriously, the camera is rough and does NOT work for this kind of game. Maybe if they dialed up the action more and showed prompts when enemies were attacking off-screen and decreased health pools for enemies and bla bla bla... yeah just not this game.

If you read this whole thing... thanks, you're cool. I'd love to hear any thoughts you have or answer questions about the game. If you've played it, let me know what your favorite part was.

#beardgamereview