Reviews - Argoon

Level design is very good, puzzles make sense, detective kind gameplay as great potencial, in all a very nice demo, only problem, to short even for a free game so in all honesty i can't give it more then 7, but the developer has potencial.

My review

Pros:

Very nice level design, among the best i saw in Source.
Puzzles very well integrated into the levels and not very hard.
Perfect length for what it gives in gameplay.
The levels "story" that means the felling they convey to you is very nice.

Cons:

There's no real action on this game, there's some spots with some urgency and the potential for you to die but they are few and between, the majority of the game is walking around solving harmless puzzles, taking useless pictures, reading papers, hearing voice overs from the main character and phone conversations between him and his boss.

About pictures the camera unfortunately serves no real purpose, it has no real connection with the gameplay it fells has if it was implemented at last minute and the game was not made around it.

The story to me was average and the voice acting from the lead character didn't really helped to make it more enticing, has a non native English speaker sometimes it was hard to comprehend him because of the accent.

The save system is very simplistic and has the unfortunate potential to make you die in a infinite loop, it happened to me.

Made on the blender engine using blender and free. Fantastic graphics and inspired art direction, the first episode was fantastic this one didn't disappointed.

The good:

Nice graphics
very good sound effects
Very well made horror atmosphere
And well designed map
Nice way to catch attention on the player with light cues. No time was i really stuck.

The bad:

Very repetitive scares, that become more annoying than scary every time you die.
Taking out the control from the player to many times. Like turning the camera to the monster when you just wanted to run, (and so be killed) or making you walk reeeeally slow on a situation where you would never do that.
Usage of too many jump scares and monster on your face moments that just make him less scary by the minute.
Not many usage of psychological induced fear.

In the end it was a nice ride but it could have been a fantastic one, the potential is there. I recommend that the developer read the Frictional Games blog about how to design scares in horror games, coming from that guys the advice is gold.

Eric is a very good coder and has made a very nice engine, the code is clean and professional and the engine is as stable as rock. But unfortunately the tools aren't very artist friendly, they don't support multi screen setups, many developers use more than one screen so this is a major pita for fast work, instead of working almost exclusively on a 3D view it requires you to perform some tasks on the 2D orthographic views more times then what is desirable, the window where you pick and search for your models and game objects (called nodes in C4) is a very complicated and strange hierarchy tree like system, it should be much simpler then that, i will not mention other engines but theres much better implementations of this on other engines.

Eric is also a coder that tries to put too much stuff in the same basket, what do i mean by this, for example he tries to make all himself without using any other 3rd party software on his engine, for example the physics engine, Eric instead of implementing a already made physics engine, like the majority of his concurrents, he made his one, it makes for a better integration and support is true, but unfortunately it slows down the development of other important features, and the physics aren't that good, objects don't behave realistically, for example theres no self rotation when an object is flying from a explosion, and sometimes the character controller becomes stuck at the boundaries of floor geometries. Because of this Eric is slow at implementing more visible stuff, things that could make the engine stand out, HDR that is being promised for a looong time now but is being pushed further and further away, the grass system and the underwater capabilities that could make the engine really stand out are also still to be made, etc, Eric prioritizes stuff that don't really give much exposure to his engine and because of that, a very good engine is being brushed aside for engines imo much worse.