Unknown Tapes Steam Charts & Stats

An interesting concept, but ruined by a really flawed implementation. Similar to other users, I can say the "noise meter" does not work. In all honesty, this is for the best as this is extremely gimmicky and not appreciated. In a game like Lethal Company or Content Warning, it makes sense to have the in-game proximity voice chat for immersion and to have some of the mechanics be able to have a voice component, but in this game, I really don't understand the point. I don't think the developer understands that people do not flamboyantly shriek into their microphones while they are playing videos games. If I know that the game will penalize me for making sounds into the mic, then I just won't make them. Or better yet, I'll just mute my mic? Problem solved. The layout of the maps is just really a mess and thoroughly unenjoyable to traverse. It's samey and confusing, the map you are given doesn't give an accurate position for you, it just tells you which "area" you are in. There is a massive amount of backtracking, in the way of find thing, find out thing is locked, keep exploring until you find a way to unlock thing, go all the way back to thing and unlock it. Which backtracking can be done well, but it is not done well in this game. Your sprint needs to be recharged if you use it up too much and the amount of sprinting time you get before you have to recharge it again is very short. Supposedly sprinting also causes noise, but I don't know because there is no sound meter. I cannot tell if the sound meter is an actual item you get later in the game or a HUD item that will appear if it is monitoring your sound already from the beginning of the game, and I do not care. But the point is, if you're sneaking, you aren't moving quickly, and if you're sprinting, well you're also not moving quickly. This makes relatively small areas time-consuming to cross. I am going to guess the cooldown on sprinting is maybe a design implementation to keep people from running from dinosaur encounters to kind of force you to be cautious and use stealth, but I'm not 100% sure. The controls are very simplistic, but could be done much better than they are. 'E' is interact I think, WASD, and 'Shift' for sprint, 'F' for flashlight (until it stops working...), and of course 'CTRL' is crouch. But map is still 'M' and you have an inventory that holds reference notes and this is accessed through 'I'. I would have preferred that map and inventory be closer to my fingers, 'Q' is unused, or 'R', or some of the lower keys like 'Z', 'X', or 'C' could have been used too. With so few controls, I just don't feel like the keymap should have me moving my hand when I don't need to. The game makes you manually enter keycodes after you find them instead of just doing it for you, and this can't be done by using your mouse to aim at the keys and enter them by clicking or something, you enter an interface where you move the reticle around to each number to enter it, and then to the enter button or the clear button to submit or to erase a wrong digit. But I play on a 60% keyboard with no arrow keys, and so I was also very unappreciative that you can't use WASD to move the reticle around to select the numbers. You have to use the arrow keys and enter. Again, people already have their fingers on WASD, this is a game on PC, to my knowledge there aren't controls that might be coming from a port of the game on console, so you should just be letting people navigate and enter digits without needing to move their hands, this is bad game design. WASD as a stand-in symbolically for arrows is fine, plenty of games do this, you will not get in trouble for following suit, I promise. And then 'E' could be enter digit only while in this interface or something like that. But there are much better ways to do this. The movement controls are also stilted. There is no jump, and crouching causes you to stop moving entirely as you crouch in place or stand up from a crouch. I get that in a game that's going for realism, people generally aren't jumping all over the place and you have to suspend your belief a little for the levels to work if the only wall preventing you from moving forward is just a Jersey barrier any normal person could easily climb over in real life. But not being able to move while entering or leaving a crouched state just continues to make this game feel even more lethargic than it's constant backtracking and slow movement speed even when you're walking or running instead of sneaking while crouched. And now, as I write this, I am at a point in the game where my flashlight no longer functions. Throwaway captions aside about how it "must have broken in the crash," (a crash that somehow you walk away from with no injury but that kills anyone else onboard) this was the last straw for me. Because of the map design and how [b]dark[/b] the game is, I can't find my way anymore. So, you are going to take away my ability to see anything at all in the game? That's it now, it's over because being able to see things is only an early-game luxury in Unknown Tapes? Even when I turned the brightness all the way up, everything is pitch black. Probably a draw distance trick, but now I can't finish the game because I literally cannot see where I am supposed to be going. And I feel like someone is reading this and thinking, "clearly you are exaggerating, you cannot find where to go at all?" I would have at least played the game through entirely before I wrote a review if I felt like it were reasonably possible, but in order to progress it seems like I would have to waste a lot of my time just blindly push forward into pitch black areas with no idea if I'm progressing or not and with no way to know if I'm even moving in the correct direction. I really just refuse to do this, I am not spending this much time an effort to work around a game's extremely deep flaw like this because there is no other option. There are certain landmarks in the game world that you can kind of see even in the dark, but [i]but every single one of them are behind those stupid chain link fences! There are fences everywhere at odd angles--fences that cannot be seen in the dark and provide no feedback that you're walking into them. Some of the places I need to get to are behind those chain link fences! But I can't see where the fences have openings in them where I can proceed because I can't see![/i] I touched on this earlier, but the awful implementation of the in-game map means you also cannot intuitively figure out where you are heading without light. The room I am in now that I had to backtrack to says on the map it is a building with 3 doors. This is wrong, the building only has 2 doors... And since the map marker doesn't show exact location or the direction you're facing, I can't even use it by proxy to orient myself in the correct direction to get where I need to go so I can carry on. I guess I'll... stop playing? I was looking forward to some tense dinosaur encounters, and cool dino designs, and interesting plot points, but the only thing this game seems to be able to provide is some dinosaur noises for you to wander around in complete darkness to. EDIT: OK, I also have to get this off my chest if I'm going to spill all this for a review anyway, but I did not care for the sound either. In the trailer, there was a part where I heard machine gun fire, but that isn't actually gunfire, it's the kind of chattering that the dinosaurs make. And then in the trailer you may have also heard a metallic sound, it sounds a lot like a pickaxe hitting a rock, or almost like something striking against a hollow metal pipe. That is apparently the sound of the raptors claw hitting the ground as they walk. Are the raptor's claws metal? That's definitely a metallic sound.

top tier. 100 percent terrifying. broke my mouse when the dino busts open the door walking out of the house. will buy a new one to continue playing. may need blood pressure medication

5/10 GOOD Jump scares environment / quiet mic parts uneasy noises BAD 500 keys, 20 magnetic card levels, 80 documents, 153 minutes of my life wasted This game could have been 1 hour long keeping the GOOD and Removing the BAD

Giving this game a 1 star rating. Gameplay definitely wasn't long enough for the price. I asked for a refund and wasn't given one because supposedly I played it for 5 hours when it is ONLY 2 HOURS TIME OF GAMEPLAY! 100% WOULD NOT RECOMMEND THIS GAME TO ANYBODY!

Unknown Tapes is a thrilling horror game that’s a must-try for any fan of the genre. The game is packed with fun jump scares that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Its realistic atmosphere makes every moment intense and exciting. If you're looking for a game that delivers both thrills and fun, Unknown Tapes is definitely worth checking out!

This game is a gem and if you're a fan of Dino horror, do not miss this. I very much enjoyed the amazing atmosphere, horror and exploration this game offers. Devs had some great ideas in this one and I'm very much looking forward to a sequal.

The game was a lot of fun to stream. Really like the use of the mic in some areas. The dinosaurs were unique, mixing the Jurassic dinos with some modern day dinos. The sounds were really neat and unique as well. Had a great mix of dinos from raptors, Spinosaurs, and Therizinosaurus. Not much of a soundtrack, but that adds to the horror I think. I did end up having to backtrack a few times. My first playthrough I missed 1 collectible. It was on the shorter side, took me 3 hours to beat it the first go. Hopefully the devs make a sequel.

I had such a blast playing this game! the jumpscares were terrifying - honestly I was just terrified the whole time - and the sound effects were phenomenal. Loved how many dinosaurs were included; I was so excited about the pterydactls. Thought it was neat how different tasks would require me to double back through the different areas. Game has a short playtime, I'd wait for a sale before buying it. I would highly recommend this game (on sale) to anyone who loves dinosaurs!

I played this on stream and loved it SO MUCH! So did my community! Took me back to the Dino Crisis / Jurassic Park days of my childhood that made me fall in love with dinosaurs. The story was so easy to follow that I could just immerse myself in the scary themes of being hunted, I really appreciated that. R.I.P Toby.

listen, if your looking at this that means you like horror and dinosaurs. just buy the game already!!