Great game
A very well done, horrifying game. My only two complaints:
-There was a typo in Alexander's room. I can't remember exactly where now.
-Escaping from the monster in the sewere pipe was extremely annoying... you should change that so it doesn't take quite as much mouse clicking.
Other than those two things though, it was very well done. Great work!
Sucky Ending is Sucky
Though I do take into account that you have done the puzzles quite cleverly and did add a twisted sense to a horror game. But the ending however did feel as though it wasn't worth trying to survive the entire game at all.
Next time try not making it so predictable.
The problem with prequels...
is that the player may not know the exact details, but will know enough that most all of the game is spoiled. This is a shining example of that. Having played the first game, I knew almost exactly what was going to happen. It was already given that Langdon would not live and Tracy was evil. Despite this, I won't deny it was a great game, certainly better than the first. It was nice to be forced to kill monsters or get around them in creative and different ways rather than just hammering through them all and being able to die through poor choices or puzzle failures kept me on my toes. However, I still feel I couldn't get into the game well enough because of my intimate knowledge of what was already going on from the first game.
As for specific suggestions for this game, the dialogue box, in all cases, should be removed. Characters should still talk of course, but I think it might work better to display it in a similar manner as when examining items or your surroundings. Honestly, the box looks kind of goofy for a game such as this and makes it difficult to take dialogue seriously. The dialogue also moved WAY too slowly to keep my attention. This wasn't ordinarily a problem except in the case of talking to Tracy as trying to skip to display the whole text would cause her to instantly attack you. My suggestion is to have a button to skip the whole dialogue, perhaps space bar, and another, probably mouse click, to advance dialogue until a new person speaks. (For example, if Langdon was talking to Tracy, it would advance to the next line Tracy had, another click to Langdon's next line, etc.) The same principal should apply for when discovering, or being discovered by, monsters. It takes too long for the text to complete and by that time, the shock has worn off.
In the tunnel where you had to shine the flashlight on the key while avoiding putting it over the monster, I feel personally that his head was too close to flashlight. It would've been better if he had been leaning the other way near the key to force the player to be careful when grabbing it. I died several times on accident barely moving the flashlight down form it's starting position, which was more frustrating than anything, and in the chase scene, I don't think you should show the monster's position relative to yours. I think it'd be best to leave it to the imagination of the player how close he is.
As for the ending, it was completely unsurprising as I mentioned everyone who played the first game knows he would be brought back and killed, which took away a lot from the ending. Even if I hadn't known, the shadow of the man in Langdon's house was way too obvious to not be noticed. You should have placed him against a dark background to help hide him at least a little. After that, the ending would probably have been better if you had skipped straight to the video recording of Langdon. After all, I'm sure most people could easily remember Friendly saying he would be the last thing he would ever see, so that monologue was really just a waste of space and time. You need to keep your audience more engaged, and I feel that monologue just didn't do a good job.
Overall, I feel this was a very well done game that only had a few points needing real improvement. The biggest problem of all was not necessarily your fault in the fact that it was a prequel, and there is certainly nothing you can do to really fix that. I will look forward to the next chapter.
Thanks for that detailed and lengthy feedback.
I'll keep some of your comments in mind when I begin work on the last installment next year.
Couple of things though, first of all I think you may have mixed up the names, Peter Langdon is not Nathan Langdon, the one mentioned in the first game. That's his brother. So even though Nathan did get killed, (and btw it's a horror game?what do you expect lol)- it's actually Nathan Langdon that Tracy Takaki was referring to in part 1.
But don't expect there won't be more of a twist to that too.
I do agree with you about the Project K shadow not hidden well enough. My monitor is a little dim and it looked completely blacked out when I was designing it. I didn't realise the mistake until I saw the game on another laptop after release.
Thanks.
i feel like H.H.Holmes
after playing this sequel to the first game this was over all a good sequel.
the gameplay has been simplified so it's not as confusing compared to the first game,
the writing is still weak but not as bad as the first game ( i'm not even going to talk about the
main protagonist)
the aesthetic and environment design is still gripping as the first game.
overall this was good improvement over the insanity 1, it has the potential to be a very good
horror game with more improvement's over time.