Horryefieing: High-Rise Steam Charts & Stats

A good game in itself, or rather a good prologue. I've been following the project on social media for a while and was really looking forward to the release. €8.79 is a hefty price, but I'm happy to support indie developers if I enjoy the game enough. First of all, turn off the annoying VHS filter and adjust the controls. I know it's based on the GZDOOM engine, but wtf is that weird early 90s key layout? Anyway, the first few minutes of the game started off well and were very atmospheric. I immediately loved the simple pixel graphics and the sound. I was surprised that you could interact with so many objects at the beginning (not so much later in the game). But interacting here just means making a comment about them and nothing more happens. For example, you can't turn on taps or anything like that (a shame). You briefly explore your room (saving on typewriters, as is usual in survival horror, awesome!) and the floor and, while talking to other residents, realize that you are trapped in the building. I love this kind of interaction with NPCs and knowing that something bad is brewing and that you are all facing enormous problems together. The atmosphere is very dense and a mystery quickly builds up around the entire event and location. You immediately get an oppressive feeling and it shows once again that mood is not dependent on graphics or elaborate motion capture alone. Gameplay, a good story and coherent sound and music are enough. You immediately think of films like Dance of the Demons 2 (aka. Demons 2) or Evil Dead Rise. It doesn't take long before you have your first confrontation with an undead. The fact that your neighbor goes on a miserably long monologue while the zombie is approaching is stupid but okay. After that, everything goes wrong and you get your first weapon. In good survival horror style, you start fighting your way from objective to objective, solving puzzles and managing consumables. The screaming, the music and the environmental storytelling are so good that even with the graphics they give you goosebumps. That, in short, about the best part about the game. I played it on medium difficulty and spent an incredibly long time on some sections and had to repeat sections an embarrassing number of times. By the time I failed again, I had learned them all by heart, speedrunning style. Ammunition is scarce at first, but is distributed relatively fairly later on. Healing potions are in extremely short supply. Which wouldn't be a problem if one hit didn't cause massive damage. The worst thing, however, is that there are hardly any save options. If you die, you have to repeat endless sections. In the spirit of old survival horror classics, you'd think, but what makes things even more difficult is that you can't skip cutscenes and a certain enemy type makes it mostly a matter of trial and error. This is so frustrating in the long run. You can easily complete the game in under an hour (which doesn't justify the purchase price as much as initially thought), but it took me four times that time because I kept failing at the end against the aforementioned random enemy type. What was incredibly annoying, even in the short playing time, is that there are parts where you can only progress by killing hordes of undead. This is just lazy game design to stretch out the playtime. What will hopefully also be improved in the full version is that the game doesn't continue in real time when interacting with NPCs and objects. In other words, the flashlight battery no longer drains every second, and enemies don't run towards you while you're stuck because of text or a cutscene. I'm still giving the game a positive rating simply because I don't want this to drag down the average rating here and scare off potential players. I hope it continues and I hope that many of the negative aspects are improved, as it has enormous potential and good things in it.