Often, you'll have to position the camera to line up objects in the viewfinder to create shapes or patterns that turn into objects when you actually snap the photo. It's not that these puzzles are necessarily hard to figure it out it's just hard to get them to work. This compounds the problems associated with the game's asinine puzzles, most of which require you to use your camera phone to take a picture of something in the environment in order to trigger a cutscene, unlock a door, or receive a clue to another puzzle. So you end up wandering back and forth trying to find it - which you never will because it's not there. So the game will nag you that a useful item or clue is nearby, but it might be on a different floor of the building. What isn't fine is that it also seems to work through floors and ceilings. It works through walls, which I guess is fine since it can let you know that you need to go into a nearby room. There's a blue vignette effect that indicates a nearby item that is designed to work as a player aid, but sometimes it can be a hindrance. It doesn't help that so much of the game looks the same, so it's easy to get turned around and confused (or outright lost) when the camera wigs out on you.
The camera loves to pivot around when you go through doors, leading to temporary disorientation as you try to figure out which direction the character is facing. Gameplay is less a mixed-bag, and is more universally terrible. The difficult-to-read signposts and lack of any sort of in-game map just exacerbates the sameness of the game's environmental design. Only two rooms in the entire building had unique decorations (a teacher's office and what appeared to be a biology lab). The school building was particularly bad, as all the classrooms had the same desks, chairs, and backpacks sitting around. It is very easy to get lost in a few areas of this game because so much of the environment looks the same.
That mood rarely lasts though, because you'll turn a corner and find repetitive environments and flat textures. Some of the environments are decent, and there's the occasional well-placed lighting or particle effect that helps to set a mood. But what's presented on screen is often only passable for a PS2-era game, and there's very little artistry or detail in the majority of environments.
It's an indie game, so I don't expect its graphics to impress on any technical level. The ghosts and monsters themselves actually get better development and depth, as each one is given a thematic backstory, and its aesthetic design attempts to represent that theme - with varying degrees of success.ĭialogue and voice-acting might have been going for deliberate camp, but ends up just being bad. They'll disappear for the majority of act 1, rendering the game's futile attempts at early character-building moot, and likely leading to you forgetting that they ever existed until they reappear later. Don't worry though, you won't have to put up with them for long. I'm not sure if it's a matter of poor translation, cultural disconnects, or if it's a deliberate attempt by the developers at camp, but the dialogue and voice acting is cringe-worthy. And they sound almost as stiff and robotic. The main character, Linda, looks and animates decent enough, but the other characters all look incredibly stiff and robotic. The opening moments of DreadOut set the bar pretty low for what was to come. Each death progressively increases the time it takes to get back into the gameĪ Fatal Frame wanna-be that fails at almost every level.Weak atmosphere and ineffective jump scares.The central mechanic (the camera phone) is prone to malfunction.
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