Reviews - Contemplar

Buggy, nonsensical and full of cheap cop-outs.

Even if I overlook the times I was randomly glitched, unable to move until my batteries died out and I was given an arbitrary poorly explained/shown floating "insanity" death, the game has nothing to offer in the way of horror but poor startle-scares and screamers.

I'm all for suspending disbelief for the sake of immersion, but when some of the jump-scare is literally a tiny mannequin on a crucifix sliding in front of the camera like a flash motion-tween anchored to your face, and completely unexplained? It's hard to overlook. It's not really unravelling the mystery of the house when there are pieces of paper just laying around with the whole details on them, without any triggers to revealing them and no effort needed to find them. The dude lives there. The papers are sat around the house from day 1 in the open. This isn't a mystery, it's a farce.

The promise of "a new haunting every time, never play the same twice" is false in the most blatant sense. You can trigger many of the events manually just by doing something as complex as simply walking into the room it occurs in. Every game, from the first moments of day 1, if you walk into the garage the car will start on its own. Zero variation in this. The rest behave like they're attached to a RNG. On top of this, most events have no sense of timing, and it isn't unusual to have several things randomly trigger and overlap each other, making it impossible to focus on them. For example, you can receive a phone call from an associate talking about the haunting, but during this several other events can randomly happen, and you will be unable to attend them as you cannot pick up the phone and move with it (it's just a stationary object left on the kitchen table that plays a sound file when you answer it).

It had so much potential but the total lack of pacing or logic ruined any sense of horror or intrigue. It feels like I was given an alpha, not a game worth paying for.