Once again we find ourselves at the end of a game picked to show off for Extra Life, but turned out to be a single sitting game. In this case, we sat down to a class project that looked like it was going to be an intriguing little horror game to play for the Halloween holidays.... I was hopeful since I have played other school project games that not only left me ecstatic, but hyped to see the game read a full release (incidentally since they treated it as an update, that game is back in my backlog now). This time, however, while I can appreciate what was attempted and even achieved, it didn't hit nearly as well.
Story: Welcome to 1801, a time in human history a lot rougher to live then we live today. Back then going to school was a luxury for the rich since many children, in order to help the family survive, would have to give up such a dream and go get work as well. You and your brother are two such children who currently live in the dorms of and work at a textile factory. But there is something odd about this particular factory. Kids working here occasionally just go missing. The management look the other way in most cases and claim the child either found a better place to work or just couldn't take it and left... but when your brother is one of those kids, you simply don't buy it. (Especially as he seems to disappear in the middle of the night.) The next morning you begin looking for him.
From this point you will play the roll of Idony in her quest and quickly find yourself dealing with more then normal means... for this factory has a dark side... literally. And due to an artifact, you will find yourself able to transfer between them at will.
Unfortunately, outside of this basic idea, I can't really say much about the story of this game... at all. The search never really takes center stage, nor is the opening cutscene clear about what's going on. All it makes clear is you are going to work as a little kid in the Industrial revolution before you wake up in the middle of the night to begin the game. If you didn't read it in the description of the game, there is nothing to clue you in you woke up because your brother is missing, and it will be random luck if you manage to open a window to start your search, not having a clue why you are actually up (or having read it and now looking for any way to begin your search). And it only gets more obscure from there.
Even the ending just... isn't really much of a payoff.
3/10
Graphics: Honestly I have to give the game a lot more credit when it comes to graphics than story, because it honestly looks pretty good. You will play Idony in a first person perspective, and while nothing here really looks real, it's never meant to. Rather there is a lot here that looks more like you might be walking around a set inspired by Tim Burton's stop-animation works. The world is drab, and muted... it's even a little bit grimy and warn in. You will see other kids (and one adult) standing around and populating the place, but they look almost more like dolls then people by their very style. I might even go so far as to suggest this was by design to show how interchangeable the workforce at this time would have been.
But then you use the artifact to enter the "dark world" and everything changes. I more want to call this the "evil world" then dark for here the colors are vibrant as all hell, often looking as much like a ferver-dream funhouse as they do like anything else... not that this takes away from the disturbing elements here. Faces stare blanky from all surfaces while arms reach out from anywhere and ungodly horrors live in the walls. It's frankly hellish in design and I can do nothing but approve of what they did here!
9/10
Sound: This, I can not be so kind about. There is just incredibly little here to work with. Most of the game has no music, leaving that for just opening and end credits... but there is also very little ambiance here either, leaving a lot of the game to you only hearing your footsteps (which due to them never changing despite what you are walking on, will fade away and not even be good for a creepy vibe).
Outside of this, you will basically be limited to occasional sound effects from picking things, up, completing a puzzle or getting an item, or "hmms" from anyone you speak to as their text plays below. None of this really varies either.
Oh don't get me wrong, there are occasions you get more sound then this, but not a lot, and most of it just establishes you are outside or the like. There is just incredibly little here for a game that wants to last a few hours.
4/10
Gameplay: In essence, Into the Dangerous World I Leapt is a first person engine carrying a point and click adventure. You will wander around, talk to characters, and collect items you will use in puzzles to open new places and progress the story. However, for all the sense and ability of the game to connect itself together, there is little to clue you into what you are supposed to do and leaving you lost as often as not. You will most likely fumble from one scene the the next, looking to see what makes sense to use where and in which world, or even where you may have the option to go. It's kind of a mess in this way.. and that's before you get to the major issue a lot of point and click games, have: moon logic.
Simply put the times what you see being a clue to what you are supposed to do are the minority. You need to get inside the developer's head to see what they were thinking, more so then many of the most infamous point and click games of old would make you do this. That is not particularly surprising as this is a school project that had to be finished with just 10 weeks for class, but when you add to this that you are expected to play the entire thing in a single setting and the frustration levels are going to rise. You may well want a walkthrough guide for this one (as I will admit to using after the came crashed twice to not waste the chance I had to see the rest of it, but more on that in a second).
5/10
Bugs: This game actually ran very well... when it ran. Unfortunately there is a game-ending bug in this one, for in the dormitories for whatever reason, this game is prone to crash. Now, if the game was designed so you could save, maybe this wouldn't be as big a deal since if you had the patience, you could reload and try again till you get past the point where you need to complete a puzzle there, you could finish the game without restarting it completely. But the game does NOT have this function, so if this crash happens you are going to have to quit the game and start again. Not that the game makes that easy. For me both times this happened, I saw the game freeze before the screen went to my desktop with an error saying it lost the D3D device... and I had to close the game via task manager before it would let me have control of the desktop (or draw Steam's windows) again. When I finally got past the issue, I did so without OBS running to stream anymore, so either the two programs didn't like each other, or as I said, I got lucky.
Furthermore, the developers have no intention of fixing this. If you look at their Steam discussion page for this game, there is a closed thread for finding bugs, and someone reported exactly what I saw where I saw it, and a similar build to my own PC (little better CPU... little worse GPU). In the very next post (and 1 week later), the devs closed it saying they were basically done. Considering this is a class project, it's both a very impressive job and not something I can blame them for being done with. But when I can reliably crash the game and I'm not the only one, I can't let that cloud how I judge the game.
Score: As a class project, this is simply amazing, and I can only hope the devs got top grades for putting something this ambitious and thought out together from scratch in a mere 10 weeks. But as an actual gaming experience, I can not be so kind. It has atmosphere, but it has no clear reason for anything going on... and that goes for the puzzles, the moment-to-moment of the story, and even the rather odd ending. Add to this the massive bug that will remain and stop many gamers dead in their tracks, and I just can not recommend this one... free or not.
0/10
System Requirements:
- Intel Core i5 8400 running at 2.89 Ghz
- 8 GB RAM
- NVIDIA Geforce GTX 1050 ti
- 5 GB hard drive space
- Windows 10
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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