Quick Review: Only If

Only if… what?

I can think of worse places to end up in after a night of
drunken partying. The drunk tank, for one.

Developed and published by Creability, and brought to Steam on July 25th, 2014. This game is a first-person puzzle with a branching story. The plot is simple: After a night of partying, “you” wake up in a place you don’t know anything about, and find yourself caught in a series of unfortunate events. Let’s see… random people trying to kill you, going to scary and strange locales, getting embroiled in what looks like a greater plot… Eeeyup, we have landed in the works of Lemony Snicket alright – or perhaps not, because if we did, the game would be written better than it currently is. That, or we’re in the even insaner world of Lewis Carroll instead. Does it show that I’m making literary references because I have nothing to say about this one?

Battle THAT, Don Quixote!

Save for a couple of puzzle elements, this exploration puzzle game brings you all over the place, from a scene to the next – so long as you can survive each one… I personally got stuck in one scene where our character is crawling his way around, and he kept getting killed over and over by the hypothetical people talking nearby, having to restart the current sequence over. There’s hardly any rhyme or reason to the elements jumbled together here, it either gets weirdly psychedelic or grounded in a stupid reality. There are two main scenarios, following the first split in paths, and then a couple of possible endings.

Can't I just stay here?
That flaming windmill is too much.

Admittedly, I had a few laughs here and there when discovering some of the bonus achievements (there’s one if you eye the dirty anime poster for too long, another if you go stand in the chimney in the living room early on). Not enough to salvage the game. I think the reason I kept getting killed so often in the same area was actually normal, as the game’s devs advertise the difficulty (and ease of the protagonist getting killed) on the Steam store page. Not to mention how difficult it sometimes is to figure out what to do. It’s just… not very good, feeling more like a collection of 3D assets built into various scenes, then strung together. Points for effort, but overall it’s a somewhat poor creation. Admittedly, this is Creability’s first game, so I can understand the more experimental feel – like something one makes when they’re learning to use assets and game-building software.

For me, it’s a skip, but at least it’s free to play, so there’s nothing to lose in trying it (except maybe a little bit of time). If you do feel like trying it, that is.