In the indie studios, there is no fact that a marketer, sometimes one person does the whole game and this is his personal project. He has no external, and often internal limiters. There is nobody who could grab him by the sleeve and say: "This is already too much, let’s lighter". In 9 out of 10 cases, the game is a game settling at the bottom of Steam, but sometimes it turns out something that makes you out to the very bone. In addition, having played dozens, if not hundreds of indie there, I noticed that there is a whole class of developers who make one good game and that’s all-they just disappear. Their social. Networks and sites are silent forever after the release of one single project. As if a person closes Gestalt and goes further to live his life – Gamdev for him was only the opportunity to express what he had for a kind of therapy form. And today I would like to tell you about one such game and its developer Adam: Adam – Lost Memories.
Let’s start with the most difficult – with the plot. We can say that in the game there is at the same time and there is no plot in general as such and the fact that there are two plots in it. It sounds strange, let’s explain. Starting from the opening video, the author said in direct text that he created this game in order to show people what the child live in a family that falls apart into parts. And this is his story ..
Throughout the game, we will see Adam’s memoirs about his family, about his house, a ghost house in the middle of the forest. At first, we will wander in the vicinity of this house in the most inconspicuous weather, which you can imagine. We’ll climb into a hole in which Adam loved to spend time hiding from the surrounding unobtrusive world. Then we will get inside the house and we will be wandering along it. We will see the memories of the episodes of his life, his problems. But these memories are only a small part of the game.
Most of the action takes place in a certain underground laboratory. And the second plot is dedicated to this laboratory. It is served exclusively by means of logs on computer consoles scattered throughout the game. These logs talk about some anomalies that arose during excavations, about problems with technology, and strange visions of staff. Yes, it is difficult to imagine a more default plot in the game about the underground laboratory.
And you ask me: “And how, in fact, these two plots are connected?»And the devil knows him. They never intersect. They, in principle, do not know about the existence of each other. It looks technically: for example, you just go along some corridor, anxious music, hop growing, and you suddenly find yourself in an unacceptable place from Adam’s memoirs, pulling one lever there, or you enter the door, or just reach the script and, hop, darkening and you are again in the same corridor.
Corridor from the reality of the laboratory
The same corridor from the reality of memories
You might think that the game is bad and you should not play it. No, it’s worth it. It’s just that the plot is not the main thing here, this game is built around an emotional reaction to the events, and not around the events themselves. It’s like board games with friends – the point is not to win, but to have a good time in a good company. Stupid metaphor, given that I am talking about Horror, but I hope you have caught. In this game, the main thing is not the plot, but the atmosphere and production, and some more interesting finds of the author in ways to present the plot about which later. Just keep in mind – despite all the criticism that this game deserves, this is one of the worst horror that I played in my life, and I bought them, believe me.
Locations are the best part of the game. It’s just incredible what an atmosphere can create a correctly built level geometry, properly arranged light and competent sound. It’s hard to believe that all this is done by one person. Yes, the developer used ready-made libraries of 3D objects, textures and sounds, but how is it all located at the levels, how the levels themselves are designed that a person does not just sculpt everything as God put on the soul, but was engaged in a point design. Each corridor, each room causes discomfort and desire to leave it quickly, but each – in its own way.
Steam from industrial installations, rumbling industrial machines and fans create an unpleasant sense of limited information about space-suddenly there is someone there, but you don’t hear it because of the noise or you can’t see it because of the couple. And sometimes there is. Here are one of the most atmospheric locations that I saw in horror. It can be seen that a person who did them knows a lot about fear, his essence, and understands how to create it. Sterile laboratory corridors or a dirty basement – from all this goosebumps on the skin.
The game is quite https://sistersitescasino.co.uk/casinos/paradise-8-casino/ dark and usually this infuriates me, but there is simply amazing work with light and shadow, and it not only gives an aesthetic pleasure from the picture, but is directly used by the horror for its intended purpose. In no game, I was not afraid of darkness, here it moves.
It is important to know that the game was in the early access of Steam, and this greatly influenced the puzzles. Their complexity and complexity growing along the passage, as if the developer came to taste during the development. If at first we have to solve something elementary in type: select a piece of wire, push the barrel, praise this wire from ventilation key, then at the end we will already solve the chemical task of the level of amnesia-heated three substances at the right temperature and mix them to get explosives.
Many puzzles are tied to the plot and, as it were, are built into the narrative, for example, in the morgue we find not just Corpse, but My Corpse, and we need to cut it and get a certain object necessary for passing it from it. In the same place, by the way, we find a pack of photographs, among which there is both a photo with a code from one of the doors, and a photo of some house. Photos of the same house from different angles can be seen in one of the rooms where you need to guess the correct sequence of photos on the wall.
In general, the riddles are not complicated, and they are either utilitarian – pump out the water from a flooded tunnel, find a torn button, or are associated with the plot, as mentioned above. There are staging, making a very strong impression. For example, when we enter one of the rooms – there are no walls, no ceiling, no floor, and all space is filled with women in a prayer pose. It is worth us to reach the last in an impromptu corridor, it turns to us and we see that a board with the inscription Liar is nailed to her forehead, and they all suddenly find themselves with exactly the same signs on her face, but the latter will already have an inscription Sorrow and this is a password for the door we need.
By the way, returning to the question of what work has been done here with lighting, often it is directly involved in the gameplay. For example, during the passage we will fall into a meager labyrinth in a basement, at the end of which it will be necessary to remove the battery from the connector and take it to another place in order to include energy there, while the light in the maze will go out, and the battery will have to be carried in pitch darkness as a lantern, stretching out and illuminating it with it. And in the maze we are not alone.
This is not a pixel burned out
What is the game scary? The terrible moments are quite diverse here. Firstly, as mentioned above, the game scares the entourage itself. Locations are very different and do not allow you to get used to the environment, often replacing. There will be empty, half rotten corridors with dirt, on a knee, on which you will squish with a disgusting sound; and industrial species with roaring industrial plants, oozing steam, like freshly destroyed meat; Entire corridors from the mesh of rabitsa, extending endlessly in all directions, as long as the gaze is enough, causing you a feeling of complete insecurity.
Sometimes the game hit the full sur and you absolutely do not understand where you are-in the laboratory, your memories or somewhere else?! Many locations are pure Sillent Hill.
And the sound here, as if straight from Dead Space’a-you go along an empty corridor, as you hear that something has fallen somewhere, or someone screams heartily. In such a pressing atmosphere, even a corny running past the monster scares to a hysterical scream.
But there is not only this in the game, there are also very well -controlled staging episodes: for example, with a giant head of a flooding of darkness. And the chip is that at this moment you can’t just turn around and run away – you have a closed cage door behind, and you can only leave with your back forward, looking at the unknown leviatan wriggling in the dark.
In another episode, we will have to go in pitch darkness through a winding corridor only by the wires, illuminating them with light from the outbreak of the camera, and at that moment I almost threw the game.
Other episodes are implemented from a gameplay point of view. There is a mini-labyrinth in which only the edges of the entrance are lit to the next room, but what can you see entirely only after you enter the room. You know, you can’t convey that feeling when you do not want to go there, because you saw what is there, but you need and you go. Myself! This is a very interesting psychological effect – it is not a monster that jumps on you, but you yourself go to him, knowing that he is there.
I must admit you to something – I deliberately lied to you about the plot. More precisely, what I told you about the plot before that was my impression of it during the passage. The finale completely changes your perception of the plot.
Look, I will explain on an example, Roman Evgeny Onegin is not a book about unrequited love, she is not about the poet who was killed on a duel. Evgeny Onegin is an encyclopedia of Russian life. The plot in it is only an occasion to tell what they lived, what they thought about what our ancestors took care of you in the 19th century. And in this game the plot is just an occasion for the developer Adam Dubi to tell his story.
If at first a default plot unfolds on the consoles about a secret laboratory with anomalies and you need to get to the elevator to go to the surface, then at the end the game is already addressing you to the player, like Adam, Adam Take out to the surface, and the plot of the laboratory is completely dissolved in the plot of Adam, becoming metaphor. As in Gorky’s works, when the old woman Isergil tells you a parable at night by the fire, you initially think that this parable about people who lived a long time ago, but you gradually understand that this is a parable not about them, but about all of us, including about you.
The whole game is a metaphor. And everything in it is not what it seems. The elevator to the surface to which we go throughout the game, this is not literally an elevator, but an attempt to get out of all the hell into which Adam’s life has turned. Remember that corridor with women with signs of a liar on his face – this is the memory of Adam about the visit of the police when no one believed that he was subject to violence in the family, because he had no traces on his body, and he had to make them himself – remember the body in the morgue that we ourselves cut by a scalpel along the passage ..
Everything in the game – locations, puzzles, monsters – these are Adam’s memories of episodes from his not simple life. Puzzle with photos – these are photos of his house, real.
In the course of the game we find a rabbit, the same rabbit, only giant can be found in a secret Easter. Apparently he meant a lot for the developer, maybe this is the only toy that he had in his child. By the way, Achivka, who falls out for receiving the Easter Eastern Railway, sounds like: Bunny – I love you.
Locations pass into each other sometimes suddenly and without any visible logic. Here we are walking around the laboratory and suddenly we find ourselves in some caves, or sewage. All this is because they are not real, but we wander not in the real world, but in the inner world of Adam – the spiritual, eager for rzhai, knee -deep in the mud.
It is curious that the first room in the game in which we come to our senses is absolutely empty, and from the interior in it only a wheelchair. From here our path begins.
When I went through the game to be honest at some point, it was angry that the plot about the secret laboratory suddenly disappears, as if they simply forgot about it. The game began to seem like a crazy and vinaigrette from random levels. But when I went through the game to the end and I realized the author’s idea to me even uncomfortable for my emotions. A person literally turned the soul inside out, and evaluating his game on some standard scales seems blasphemous and not appropriate. It’s like sitting opposite the victim of rape and say: "Well, so history, on a trie".
In fact, I did not tell you half about the game for one simple reason – I want you to go through and feel it yourself, it was to feel it. It should be personal emotional experience. I want you to answer the question yourself: whose jaw we carry throughout the game in the inventory? She will find her owner as a result. Who were these monsters? And most importantly:
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