Plastomorphosis Steam Charts & Stats

You know when you read comments like, "This is for REAL fans of the genre"? ... Well, this is for hopeless devotees of the genre. There's some good stuff here, but it's not... an experience I'd actively recommend outside those fixed cam lunatics such as myself. Setting-wise, what we have here is a mash of Half Life 2 and Silent Hill 2. Imagine if Wallace Breen's administration had resulted in City 17 turning into Silent Hill. Our hero arrives in a city gripped in a plague that has transformed its populace into malevolent mannequins. Why? Oh god. There ARE answers but... it's just boring, self-important, waffle and pointless technobabble. It reads like poorly backfilled worldbuilding. What's worse, the tripe is heavily back-loaded, culminating in a pointless to-be-continued. Do not go into this game for the story. So... the environments, then? Do we go into this for the environments? Ehhhh... The first level or two is set in a metro station and it manages to be almost entirely without character. Saturated in the game's signature red, white and black, the grim mood quickly gets played out - this is a very one-note subway station, with none of the humanity or humour one might associate with this kind of pedestrian thoroughfare. The next level... ...actually, before I go into that, it's worth mentioning the general visual treatment: There's points in this game where you feel the developer has never met a post-process filter they didn't like. And at the same time, you kind've have to admire the devil-may-care, haphazard fashion in which they've mashed dithering together with a smeary, smokey layer and unyielding bloom to create something that actually has a perverse charm to it, a grimy, slimey-yet-textured miasma you're forced to push your character through that, if nothing else, doesn't really look like any other game I can remember - and in my book, you get points for finding an unusual visual treatment. (On top of this, let's throw on some scanline distortion, chromatic abberation, colour crushing and fish eye distortion. How do you define your cuisine? Just mush up all the meats and fish and veg and smother them in every sauce. I see...) Credit where it's due, however - some great use of smoke particles and (I think?) volumetric effects. Back to the environments. After the subway, the player is met with a delightful surprise - we break out into an open-air area within the warehouse/industrial sector of the city and, actually, it's quite a treat, initially. Maybe it was just the fact I'd been crushed into the subway for ages before, but the gloom of the industrial dystopia brings a lovely frisson of freedom and exposure - the rain is unending (and excellent), the lighting is neon and aircraft and trains can be heard whooshing past. It quickly returns to an endless procession of the same red, white and black corridors, but at least an effort is made to change things up. Something similar can be said for a late cornfield environment - a great change of pace, before settling into the same old trudge. Unfortunately, once you've seen the initial signature 'biome' assets in a new level, well, you've seen it all - everywhere looks the same. At least the game furnishes you with a map for the first few levels - before plunging you into identikit corridors with no map and infuriating patches of marshy ground for the final leg. At a number of points, the dev wedges in some hamfisted references to Skyrim, Half-Life and even Doctor Who. Your mileage may vary - but I felt these moments worked against the thin atmosphere the game had managed to establish. There's some nice fixed multicam throughout the game, with some nice long shots and free-ish trucking camera. Unfortunately some areas are slathered in spinny pan camera (lock your cameras, devs!), the player avatar is often allowed to leave the current camera without switching to an appropriate view, view transitions with 180 degree rotations and tracking pan cameras that bump up the stairs with the player character. Eeesh. There's also a tendancy to render doorways / intersections almost invisible through poor use of lighting and signposting. In it's favour, though, the game is willing to add some first person sequences to break up the fixed multicam - which I definitely appreciate. Controls are mostly okay, but combat is broadly awkward and uninteresting, with some infuriating uncancellable animations on the player character while dealing with teleporting enemies. Especially watch out if you're using a controller to play, as some puzzle inputs will only work for the D-pad and not the analogue stick, and one safe-opening puzzle is impossible to complete with a controller (as far as I could tell). The sound design is often atmospheric and effective, and music enhances specific moments - but there's some very disconcerting sounds for some enemies (the mannequins in particular). Some puzzles are obtuse, but there's more than a few which are thoughtfully constructed and provide a nice break from the onslaught of zombs and maniacs. Why play this? Well, I'm kinda determined to play all the fixed multicam games available on Steam. So perhaps we should ask, "Why play this [i]if you're not a freak[/i]?" Some nice atmospherics. Cool scenery changes. Well-concieved puzzles. ...It's rare that I wish Steam allowed for ratings other than Recommend or Don't Recommend, but here we are. A 45% game if I ever saw one.

Can't re-bind controls. Auto refund. It's 2025 people, ffs.

The style was amazing, i really dig the vibe. Definitely felt a ton of dread while playing this game. My only compaint is dealing with the shadow guys in the fields was kind of tedious, but otherwise i had a good time.

The most dangerous enemies in this game are the fixed camera angles. The camera often suddenly switched and I got disorientated because I needed to adjust to the changing controls. There was a boss fight where I died more often than I bothered to count because the switching camera kept making me run right into the boss. But the game aims to be a retro horror game and the fixed camera angles are what makes them special, therefore I'm giving the game a good review.