...when the darkness envelopes him. Literally a wave of darkness pulls him into a corridor with only a blue glowing orb to guide his way. He better move fast though as there is a nightmarish nothingness rushing in from behind. Time to escape!
Does it make sense? Not really. Nor does it make much sense that barging through the door in his escape leads Anthony to a lounge parlor where a guy broadcasting his voice through an old-school tape radio player is telling him off, demanding to know how he got into his house, and that he has about a minute to get out before the cops arrive. In fact a lot of this game's story will simply make no sense so much as feel like someone's fever dream put to digital space.
But if the payoff was worth it or even fit this motif, then so be it. Sadly it is not in this case and in fact the ending will leave you either disgusted or laughing in absolute disbelief that someone thought this was a good idea for a game's plot... most likely a bit of both.
4/10
Graphics: Only If is an old game. It is not the oldest thing I have played on this site by a long shot, but at closing on a decade old, any game is likely to start showing it's age and this is no exception. Still, the game looks clean for the most part, playing and showing it's story entirely from a first person view.
Unfortunately this is also a game with absolutely no cast in view. All you will see in this world is the world and objects within it... no people, no pets... in fact barely anything that actually moves. On the plus side this means no uncanny valley, but on the down it means graphically there isn't as much to to work with. Still this does work to it's advantage as well, letting the artifacts that make up that environment shine through.
6/10
Sound: There is very little in this game in the way music. Expect some high-tension strings and background notes to fit the area you are in, but other then a remix of "It's Not Unusual" at the very very end of the game, there is just not much here for music at all. Nor are sound effects going to save it. In fact outside of some shattering and gunshots, just about any sound you hear is ambiance and nothing to really write home about.
But the voice acting... that is something special here. Your character is a college-aged wise-ass who pretty much reacts to everything with the same befuddlement mixed with jack-assery you might expect... and it actually works to make him both annoying and believable. But he isn't the star here. It's the angry voice on the radio. Imagine the angriest New Jersey man you can imagine and you are in the ballpark and it's actually very very amusing to listen to. Just don't let the kids hear... he drops all kinds of foul language including lines that potentially could get a twitch stream banned. But he is definitely the highlight of this game.
8/10
Gameplay: While trying to occasionally pretend to be a first person horror game, in truth, Only If is really more of a puzzle game then anything else. You will find yourself moving from location to location, each of which will contain a task of some kind to complete before moving forward. What that is you will often be required to pay attention to the environment to find out. You may need to fix a door while avoiding mafia, or to find a specific exit and key to it. Most of the time, the radios will be you biggest clues due to the conversations with the voice(s) coming from it making them not only incredibly entertaining, but important to focus on.
This is also, however, a major weakness as you can't really begin to play until it's done talking. You see, this game wears it's indie status not just in the style of graphics popular among them in it's time, but in the way the mechanics themselves work. The game has no options once inside, leaving every single one of them in a generic launch window that opens whenever you start the game... and there isn't much. In fact outside of control remapping you basically get to select the resolution the game will run at and which of 5 presets in graphics you wish to use... and I have no idea how much effect those presets have. I've seen (and reviewed) games on this page that use this same panel and those options literally mean nothing.
But to get back to the point, one of the options a game like this could desperately use is "subtitles" since the engine is smart enough to tamper the volume of these radios with your distance to them... and there is no going back if you didn't realize it wasn't done and walk away early. Just like in real life, if you miss something, oh well...
But that isn't the only oddity. Before we get back to the game itself, we have to talk about the checkpoint system. This game will let you continue from any point you have already been to from the title screen, but you better have been paying attention when each starts because it does not do so with saves like most games. Rather, when you select to continue (chosen by which key you press, not by where you click or actually highlighting anything on a menu) you will be asked "Where did you last visit?" without any prompts on what to do with it. Hitting space, enter, or anything not a letter will simply bring you back to the main title, leaving me initially to believe this was broken.
However, if you type in the level name here, you will be brought to the beginning of it. While odd and even annoying in itself, this decision actually let me get around a straight up game-breaking set of bugs I will discuss in that section that together completely broke the game for me. Let's just say I recommend having a very specific walkthrough supplied by Steam's community section for this game on hand... not because you will need it to understand what you are doing, but because you may need it to know the level names and bypass parts of this buggy mess like I did.
But as I played I have to wonder how much these oddities are by design at the same time. The game does offer controls on the screen when they are something it doesn't expect you to have done before, which is nice, but there are times things are intentionally hidden from you as well. This game is, quite frankly, trying to screw with you the entire time, and to that end, I can definitely appreciate the effort. I just wish the devs didn't think themselves quite so clever... sometimes, they are and it's actually a cool effect on the total picture... other times, they are just causing the player unnecessary grief for trying to play.
7/10
Bugs: Unfortunately, this game did not run flawlessly. In fact what went wrong went HORRIBLY wrong, almost bringing the game to a screeching halt. If I didn't have a walkthrough readily available, these two bugs combined would have VERY early on.
- The Controls! They do nothing! I wish I was being sarcastic as I say this, but for one specific moment in one of the paths this game offers, it's simply true. For the first time in a long while, I need a spoiler section for this, so if you don't want this spoiled, skip passed the italicized section below.
Early in the game you will be given a choice: Save yourself, or save the girl you went to the party with, and if you choose to save the girl, you will literally skip half the game. Choosing to save yourself, however, will earn you a savage beating you will black out from. Waking up in a box, you will hear two mafia-type guys talking about your fate before being thrown into the river with some kind of explosion happening above you, holding the box down with the debris. But against all odds you will escape only to be hounded by the two men who are arguing among themselves basically if that just happened. At this point the game tasks you with crawling away unnoticed to safety while keeping from blacking out by sheer willpower. Unfortunately this is also the part that doesn't work. The game tells you "Press E to not black out" but it doesn't really work. Hold or repeatedly press the button, it doesn't matter. You likely will black out and have to repeat the same 30 seconds over and over.
The only way I could get past this was to skip the level entirely. In essence this broke the game... at least halfway.
- Your choice doesn't matter: And this was the other half of the break. There is a point very early in the game (in fact just before the first of these bugs) where you will pick one of two paths to play through and to try to get around this before resorting to looking up the codeword to the following level, I attempted to restart and choose the other path. It just didn't work, acting as if I had chosen the original. Now apparently if you look for this bug in the community section, this is a coding bug where the game never flushes out the session's choices until you quit and restart the game... not quit to the main level... the entire game. But without knowing that, this effectively killed the entire game for me without literally cheating to finish... and avoiding it requires you to skip half the game.
Score: This is one of those times the final score absolutely pains me to give. The story is frankly horrible with one of the worst cop-out tropes out there followed by a one-two punch that I think was trying to be funny but really lands flat due to how out of character with the rest of the game it is. (Seriously it's the kind of thing that would land in the show Arrested Development, not a mind-trip puzzle game with a dash of horror mixed in.) But until that point it's interesting and legitimately feels high stakes for all the chaos and confusion, making that ending a real shame.
The voice-work here is simply top notch, and while Anthony will annoy you with his "I know better then you" bullshit mixed in with a generally alarmed confusion from time to time, it's believable of a young man in a panic because his world in this moment makes less sense then a fever dream. And the guy on the radio is a perfect voice to match the insanity of the game. And the gameplay itself was actually quite good for a game designed to not be standard: the devs really thought through what they were doing with this game. But all of this is hobbled by a few game-bugs that REALLY needed ironing out before the game was launched. It's a pretty damning point when I have to tell you to cheat and skip an entire section of something this linear because it's broken and even following a guide won't help you.
So for as good as the game overall it is still broken... which means I have to rate it as low as I can.
0/10
System Requirements:
- Dual Core 2.2 Ghz CPU
- 2 GB RAM
- Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT/ATi Radeon HD 4770
- 1 GB hard drive space
- Windows XP (SP2), Vista, 7, or 8
System Specs:
- Ryzen 7 (5700X) 3.4 Ghz
- 32 GB RAM
- AMD Radeon RX 6650 XT (8 GB VRAM)
- Windows 11 (64 Bit)
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