600Seconds ~The Deep Church~ Reviews

First and foremost, I think it's best to remember that this is StudioGekko's first title. So know going in that it's not very complex, not very long, and may be prone to jankyness. All that in mind, I still had plenty of fun with the game. Item placements are not random, so learning the layout of the church and location of everything was really fun. I like that there's no text or story to read and that I can just make my own assumptions about what's happening, though maybe a little more to see would've been nice. After my first couple of unsuccessful runs, I thought I was done with the game but I found myself coming back to it the next few days to learn more and give it another shot. Combat is unfortunately a tad easy, so after a few deaths to simply learn about enemy attacks/patterns you should have no problem beating it fairly quickly. I've gotten ~20min victory in that would've been shorter if it was possible to end the exploration phase earlier. Unfortunately I've never actually seen the final cutscene due to a consistent crash at the end, but I can tell from the achievement stats that others aren't having the same problem. The devs are still updating the game and have even fixed a minor issue that I pointed out to them, so I'll just wait for another patch somewhere down the line. I think it's important to experience these truly indie games. So despite the issues I've had with the game, I still totally recommend it.

More than any other, I think the word "odd" describes 600Seconds the best. More compelling than the sum of its parts, 600Seconds combines exploration with a fairly short and straightforward third person shooter adventure through a church. Exploring the empty church in the waking world for items for ten minutes before your siege in the nightmare seemed, at first, an unnecessary and kind of obnoxious feature (ten minutes is a long time!) though it does help set a certain kind of mood, but after dying in the nightmare once or twice the interest was made more clear to me. The church at first appears impossibly weird and confusing, maybe even randomly generated, but both the items and the layout are the same every time. This is important because as you progress through the nightmare, which forces you onto a (mostly) linear path, you become more familiar with the various rooms, which then increases the interest of the initial exploration section, which feeds further attempts at the action section because of better/more gear and so on. It's really a pretty clever model and there's a lot of stuff to uncover, so much so that the 600 seconds went from feeling too long to too short, as I was always looking forward to the next attempt at exploring for the Shining weapons or other hidden stuff. Unfortunately the action side does not fully hold up its end of the bargain. It controls and handles quite well, despite feeling a bit odd at first, and shooting is fun. All of the weapons feel powerful and are enjoyable to use. Aiming feels weird at first but you eventually get a good feel for where shots will go, and the distance at which you can trust your laser sight. There's a lack of enemy variety, but the various scenarios created by enemy/obstacle/room combinations give it a pretty good variety I feel nonetheless. The biggest flaw I think is that it's just simply not very hard. This in and of itself isn't a bad thing, but the game features no difficulty options whatsoever, and since the basic difficulty is fairly gentle, this means there's never a place to put your superior scavenging skills you'll develop over time to use. An unlockable hard mode with a more difficult enemy arrangement for the church, maybe with greater enemy aggression, would be a really excellent addition. As far as bugs go I've experienced a few of varying severity. If you melee attack towards a climbable vine you'll grab it from far away and can then climb up and down not attached to anything and climb below the world and drown. I had an unfortunate death to this, though you can rectify it by climbing up til you reach the "top" and then fall normally. After the credits my game seems to softlock, leaving me no option but to close the game, which I'm not sure is a bug or not but is pretty weird nonetheless. Performance is pretty bad as well, my PC is far in excess of what I'd expect to be necessary for this game and my FPS is all over the place, and the total lack of ANY graphic settings whatsoever doesn't help. There was a patch just today that seems to have improved performance a solid amount however. I really enjoyed my time with this game and despite the few issues really just want more. It has a unique mood due to it's protagonist and Cthulu influences alongside the total lack of music and just how the whole game kinda looks, it has solid action, and it has a lot of hidden stuff. It's not perfect, but none of the issues I have with the game are severe enough for me to do anything but recommend it if you can stand a little jank and a lot of weirdness.