10mg: Sealed Estate Reviews

little horror game 57/100

Incredibly tense, not going to sleep tonight.

This is a great short game with a lot of atmosphere and style!

Is this... the best use of text effects I've seen in a videogame? Quite creepy for a copypasta! Good immersion; definitely a good Halloween game.

So many nice little details packed together into this micro game, that conveys an excellent and cohesive experience.

This is a kinda interesting puzzle game. I liked some effects that made it hard to walk straight. Those were really neat. Something you try to walk into a lot has a weirdly small hitbox. Would have felt better if those were larger. Worth it as part of the bundle but not on it's own.

This has a really striking visual style that I don't think I've ever seen before, and is genuinely unnerving to play. The atmosphere works just right despite how it presents itself, so it's a nice little horror game to play if you want to feel creeped out.

A very nice atmospheric puzzle-y game. The plot is basically a textbook creepypasta game plot, but the visuals, sound design, and interactions are really novel and interesting, and it's a perfect game for Halloween.

I was not expecting a game intended to be over in 10 minutes to overstay its welcome. I got tired of walking. I got tired of flashlights charging.

I purchased the full 10 Minute Game Collection and am going to play them in the order they appear in my library. That means this is #6 of 10. Know in advance what you are getting. As the collection title suggests, a ten minute game is not a triple A title. It is a short game-jam-esque proof of concept / working prototype / execution of an idea. At least that's what I'm going to infer from first impressions. Sealed Estate is a small self contained narrative driven surreal horror experience. There's probably a genre title that sums that up succinctly, but that's what I'm going with. The basic premise is this; you have crashed your car and you seek help in a nearby mansion. Why oh why do people crash their cars right outside the weird old country mansions? Crash your car in a city people, you are so much closer to help and useful services. Honestly. Naturally, the mansion is not filled with helpful people, but rather with nightmarish creatures seeking your corporeal annihilation. Anywayy, gameplay is a curious mix of Wario Ware style scenes intersecting a top down exploration action puzzle. The mini games if they could be called such, come unexpectedly and will have the player frantically following on screen prompts to progress. These range from steering a car to barricading a door and are largely presented in a crude hand drawn style which somehow adds to the sense of urgency. The larger top down exploration game has a graphical style similar to Ape Out: minimal, clean, spartan. This is then projected through a filter of nightmarish glitching and discordant resonance, with the screen elements shaking and vibrating like a barely contained animal. Add to this the disjointed thoughts of the protagonist being displayed in a large chaotic font and the overall picture is quite striking and unsettling. The story is told through notes and televisions which is hardly a new approach in this type of game, but remember this is a game designed to be played and completed in around ten minutes. This is the best quick way to give lots of information to the player. Of course said information is obscure and cryptic, and open to interpretation; but that's all part of the fun. Sound design is basic but perfectly suited. Plenty of footsteps, whispers, static buzz and things going bump in the night to keep tensions mounting. The soundtrack consists of choral hauntings and ominous industrial tones which could almost be interpreted as music or the intense humming of evil. While I did largely enjoy the game, I do have a few gripes. 1) A total lack of options. 2) No way to quit the game, except for the old fashioned way. 3) My mouse look locked up before I completed the game, making finishing unnecessarily difficult. This may be a feature as opposed to a bug, but it was annoying nonetheless. All in another fine addition to the 10mg collection, and certainly a much different tone to the other games in the collection so far. Without doubt the best ten minute horror experience I've had outside of a dentist surgery.