Video Game / Dont Chat With Strangers Review

Don't Chat With Strangers is a pixilated and brusque trek dorsum in fourth dimension, into the instant messenger-style chat of yesteryear. Released on Jan 6th, 2017 by developer Bartosz Bojarowski, information technology's a title like many others in that it seeks to recapture elements of puzzle horror games from the ninety's.

Ghost Girls and Video Games

Given that the screenshots included on its Steam page make it plain for all to see, I don't feel bad mentioning that Lucy is a ghost girl. Her interlocutor is the game'southward main grapheme, and he appears to be just another average Joe who gets home to curl upwards in bed, just to wake up to the sounds of an "IM" on his computer. It's her, Lucy, only "a girl" online who wants to conversation and possibly spotter him play a couple of video games. That, and quench her thirst for vengeance in a whole host of vicious, murderous means.

Don't Chat With Strangers has a minor plot, in which players must effigy out how to appease Lucy long enough to survive, by style of soothing her restless spirit. What happens is a whole lot of trial and mistake, which involves more than than a few ghastly deaths for our poor protagonist. Environments are express to a single bedchamber and a handful of outside locations (if you can effigy out how to get there in one piece), plus the computer screen where players interact with the mysterious Lucy. You tin interact with several items in the bedroom, from its door and window to the lamp and the bed, and these objects all carry some significance; you'll demand to use the radio at one point, and the telephone at another, to survive these encounters.

The Danger of Repetition

As someone who loves retro-inspired, pixel-heavy titles, I was excited to give Don't Chat With Strangers a try, specially after reading there'southward a mystery to solve. Unfortunately, the game falls flat in one major way, and that correct from the start: It's exceedingly repetitious, fifty-fifty for a retro point-and-click. There's also a lack of clues for how to survive and gratify Lucy -- I simply had to die, over and once more, while trying to recall the exact order in which to say or do things. These reoccurring series of events became tedious in a hurry, especially because the payoff was minimal; I would become through numerous dialog options with Lucy, only to have a giant cantankerous descend from the ceiling out of nowhere, looming in the background.

It didn't stop well for me.

For anyone else, such lack of caption and rewards volition surely exit them frustrated and unimpressed rather than pleased and excited, and Don't Chat with Stranger's minimalistic plot itself doesn't assistance players care what happens in the narrative. Who is Lucy? Why is she so angry? Why does the gas pipage keep leaking?!

I'm all for trial and error, but in that location'due south a process of elimination, and and then there's unnecessary and taxing busywork. It's a shame, considering the graphics are beautiful, and I enjoyed the audio cues too; fifty-fifty the mini-games on the calculator are a fun break in the monotony of attempting to navigate dialog choices.

Regarding presentation, there is no interface to evaluate, no salvage feature, and the Escape button is merely a global restart – which you'll accept to click after you die unless you want to stare at your corpse for a while. Then are the technical bug: the game is rather unstable; I had to resort to using my Chore Manager simply to exit it, or information technology would have run indefinitely in the background, with no apparent indication of doing and so.

Eventually, I turned to a walkthrough guide on Steam that a community member provided and found out how to go along through the dialog/interaction choices successfully; even then, I kept encountering bug and roadblocks that felt more than like a programming glitch rather than repeated errors on my function. For case, when using the telephone to talk to Lucy, the phone call wouldn't connect considering the game mistakenly flagged her digits as incorrect.

The ending is lacking as well, which is, unfortunately, no surprise given the lack of sustenance in the rest of the storyline. It felt abrupt and seemed to ostend that Don't Chat with Strangers relies on a needlessly complicated series of steps to arrive at its resolution. I would have enjoyed more than plot, more interaction with Lucy, and certainly more than survivability. I'one thousand okay with a permadeath situation that requires me to start over, but I think the developer could have given the players a little more than margin for error -- unless the whole signal was to bolster playtime and complexity through a forced repetition of playthroughs.

5

The Verdict

As much equally I wanted to recommend Don't Chat With Strangers, your time and money are ameliorate spent elsewhere. Accumulating Steam Achievements which are, essentially, a scrapbook of the many ways in which Lucy killed you, is undeniably fun. Sadly, these aren't enough to brand the championship shine: Don't Chat With Strangers is another retro, point-and-click adventure with much novelty and a great premise to begin with, withal it ultimately fails every bit a puzzle horror game.

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Source: https://opnoobs.com/archived/reviews/adventure/don-t-chat-with-strangers

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