The 9th Gate Reviews

Ever wondered what it would be like to explore an abandoned, haunted apartment complex? Well you don`t want to.....

You can't even stand still in this game https://youtu.be/oI4U3ZF9Ixc The models look like unity bought assets (and this is a unity game) with all of the models being inconsistent sizes which is clearly not to add to the horror element as the woman you play as only acts annoyed when you get to the abnormally large toilet and no one's spooked at the chair that's the same size as a clauset. Also there's only 4 rooms. Enjoy

Oh boy. Where to begin? I really wanted to enjoy this game. It looks pretty interesting and had some positive reviews so I gave it a whirl. The voice acting was pretty painful to listen to. The lady was overly dramatic with the way she spoke and it really ruined any kind of horror aspect since it wasn't scary, it just annoyed me. Let me give you a quick run-through of my playtime thus far: I start the game and I'm excited to see all the settings I can change since a lot of the indie games I play really only have an option for screen resolution or whether or not it is windowed. I'm a little worried about the rocking horse sound since it's a bit choppy, but I ignore it and continue with the game. Opening doors is ridiculously hard and glitchy. You need to hold your mouse button along with W or S (up and down) to use doors. This only works half the time so most of my game time was spent struggling to click and drag doors open. It was like they weighed 500 lbs and were too heavy to move. I try to ignore this and keep playing even though there is some lady(the same terrible voice actress from the beginning) who keeps calling you on the phone and being overly dramatic to the point that it sucks all of the horror out of the game. After about 10 phone calls within the space of 5 minutes, I'm not scared of the ghost anymore, all I wanna do is find the person who keeps calling me and strangle her so that she will shut up and let me play the damn game. So I get to a point where she tells me to go hide in a locker. Well, the second she does, the ghost spawns and kills me. What? Why? How do I avoid that? It sends me to the game over/reload screen. I reload and it puts me in a different room that I hadn't been in before at a completely different point in the game. Wtf?? I walk 5 feet, fall through the world, and die. Game over/reload screen puts me in another part of the house again. Jeez!! I fall through the world and die again. And at this point I'm done. I don't know how to finish a game that doesn't want me to play it. I don't understand why reloading from the last save puts me in a place I had never been in the game or why I kept falling through the world and dying. Sorry, friends! I was hoping to leave a good review for this. I tried. :(

Fun enough little horror which doesn't quite do enough to justify the price but on sale it could be a worth a look in. There's a brief prologue to get you used to the controls and mechanics and then you're let loose in an incredibly dark, sprawling 3-story building. Your goal is to track down 9 dolls (in order mind you, you can't shortcut by taking any old doll back) and return them to your magical circle home base, and this unlocks finding and rescuing the lost child to complete the game. And for each doll you only have a certain time limit to do so, otherwise you die and you have to hunt for it again. It's not very punishing though, any failure from timeout/monster catching you only sets you back to homebase, your current progress/saved dolls are still saved. Which does take the tension out of it a bit. How you find the right doll is to use your phone recorder. Where you put it to your ear, and hunt down the sounds of crying. If you don't hear any crying at all you have to go to another floor. At first it's pretty difficult as you bumble about, and have no sense of where anything is, and get stuck on furniture. But over time you quickly learn. As you go about you can light red candles which act as safe havens that evaporate any chasing ghouls. And there's a surprising variety of monsters populating the house. I won't say any more for fear of spoilers, you'll just have to just encounter the monsters for yourself. I wouldn't say this is a jumpscare heavy game, just a constant sense of tension, which escalates as you go on and the monsters have a heavier presence, the more dolls you find. Took me just around 90 minutes altogether to beat it and I had fun. Just not 5 euro fun. The 3.74 euro which I paid for it on sale for was just about right.