God's Basement

Huge horror fan here, I've been playing horror games for a living for almost 5 years. I hope the dev reads this: (TL;DR short review: Very bad gameplay, decent story with some plot holes. This dev could create some interesting games if he wouldn't try to copy popular games. The name and the reasoning behind it is the best part of the game) (major spoilers here, long review) So, first thing: The name is absolutely great and the main reason I bought this game. God's Basement.. What could that be? I was excited to find out what the dev could come up with. I had some theories about the name, maybe there's something god created and locked away? In his "basement" ? In the end I was wrong but I think his explanation of the name is pretty good aswell, it's kinda sad it wasn't really important to the story except the first 5 and last 5 minutes. The actual story of the game isn't great and doesn't make a lot of sense. Why didn't you just give sleep pills to your grandma? Why did she kill your parents? The notes said the was "normal" before our 14th birthday, and our parents were killed when we were a small chil, so there are 10+ years between her STABBING HER SON IN THE FACE, 30 TIMES(!!!!!!!) and her starting to forget some♥♥♥♥♥♥ This wouldn't matter so much if the game play would be better, but it's very bad, sadly. Most of the time you just run around and spam doors until one of them eventually opens or something else triggers. I'm pretty sure most of the puzzles in the game are locked and can't actually be found before a certain amount of time passes. You need to wait a few minutes before something appears, or something happens. This gets EXTREMELY frustrating when you tried to interact with something, nothing happened and you then try something else for 10 minutes. Then you go back to the first solution you had and it suddenly works. Sadly, there are A LOT of situations like this one. You basically know what you have to do, but the game doesn't let you, or wants a very specific thing to happen. (You need to zoom into something you've clearly already noticed, or wait for a few seconds) When you thought you did the right thing, but nothing happens, but then it turns out you just didn't do it THE RIGHT WAY... Well, you're gonna be annoyed when the next puzzle appears. This totally ruined the atmosphere for me, and that's pretty unfortunate because the last 10 minutes of the game are pretty good. It's pretty clear that this developer is talented. Some ideas were great: Lying in bed while you hear your grandma leave her room, The name and the explanation were pretty good, The "annoying" part were you had to sort boxes worked, it was by brute force, but you got a good feeling why our character wasn't happy with his lif e. Maybe there should've been a part following this where you had to get food for your grandma and do a lot of work in your home, while a friend calls you and asks if you want to hang out? Something like this would've further nailed this into your head. I don't see how this game has ~80% positive reviews, but I see that the dev could make some great games. I guess a lot of the people reviewing this don't have a lot of experience playing horror games, and that's fine, but I think the dev wants to appear to a different audience than jumpscare bait casual horror players. The name and the story implies he wants to create something actually great, and I think he could. Just focus on a good narrative and ignore PT-style games, that♥♥♥♥♥♥is annoying by now. I would love to see a shorter game with less downtime and an interesting deep story. This is a negative review for me, but I'm still looking forward for more!