Before the review starts, I just want to ask you to think about something for a second. Take any horror game, book, or movie. Think about "What makes X product scary?" Of course the answer is going to be different for everything (and every person!)
All of Our Friends Are Dead (or AOFAD from here on out)
is a 'sidescrolling horror' game, that is lots of sidescrolling, but no horror.
An average platformer that misses the beat on actual horror. So what's missing?
It's pixel graphics only come in a few colors, white, black and red.
An interesting style choice, that lends a very neat surrealist sense to the game.
It's 8-bit graphical style goes great with the color choices,
shining especially in the later stages. The aesthetic of the game shares something similar with Silent Hill,
using a 'decaying' world that becomes increasingly nonsensical as you progress, falling snow gives way to blood and writhing tentacles.
A world that becomes incomprehensible as you steadily progress, giving way to low beat 8-bit music that only slightly contributes to any sense of atmosphere.
Maybe though, this is where the game starts to fall apart, the fact that you know nothing about the game.
Why should you be afraid? You're playing as a character (mans?) you know nothing about, in a world that's similar. Imagine if a game like The Suffering was based on a similar principle.
Would the game still be scary if you knew nothing about your character, setting or why you were doing anything? Certainly, the occasionally disturbing looking enemy might give you a cheap fright
but the game would lack any sense of true horror.
As much as the game tries to send chills down your spine, or disturb with oddly designed enemies, cryptic text or strange surroundings, the game comes off less like
"What happens when an artist makes a videogame" (in the crea- 'artists' own words) and more like something an art school freshman might scribble about in a notebook.
Just because the game fails to be truly horror inspiring doesn't necessarily make it 'bad', It's still a fairly decent platformer just with wasted potential.
Much like Knytt or Seiklus, a lot of the focus on the gameplay is on more relaxed platforming, with a few trick jumps thrown here and there.
Enemies pose little threat, going down in just a few hits from your infinite ammo machine gun.
As stated earlier, a lot of the level design is based around 'disturbing' details, such as bloodied spikes or women tied to walls, an endless stream of moaning zombies.
Unfortunately, a majority of the deaths in the game come from being hit behind a wall by a projectile, or slipping a pixel off the edge of a platform when you land and careening into spikes.
Even with all of the blood, tentacles and bleeding hearts, there is hardly any tension from the actual gameplay and it really hurts the game.
AOFAD can be completed in about 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how long you take, even with the slightly nonlinear level structure.
You can certainly do a lot worse, but then again, we should all try to do better shouldn't we?
Game link:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=5395.0
Screenshot credit to AmonTillado26
