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Apr 02, 2019 Past Cure has no shortage of issues like this, and although many of them are not as invasive as the aforementioned pair, it’s still a mess nevertheless. The pace to the gameplay is off too. Past Cure will throw everything and its cat at you, rather.
Psychological horror is not easy in the realm of video games. Instead of relying on the tried-and-true jump scare, the game needs to make the player feel uneasy despite the prevailing thought that most games provide the player with a power fantasy in almost every setting. It's even harder to do if you're a small team with resources that are stretched thin. At first, Past Cure makes a solid attempt to do psychological horror right. By the end, however, it does many different things, and none of them are done particularly well.The story is promising. You play the role of Ian, a soldier who suffers from nightmares that stem from the fact that he's been experimented on and three years of his life have been wiped from his memory.
He has gained a few powers as a result, but he mostly wants revenge against the people who have done this to him. While the start is good because of the constant trips into Ian's psyche, the tale becomes less interesting as it goes on due to a myriad of story threads that pop up without any resolution. Past Cure starts off in Ian's nightmare world, where you run around in circles and shoot at porcelain men.
As an introduction, it acts as a frustrating shooting gallery. The controls for gunplay are rather loose, and one hit from these porcelain men instantly renders you dead. It adheres to the survival-horror mantra of always leaving the player with little ammo so they can't approach the situation with guns blazing.The game takes a while for the tutorials to wrap up, as all of the mechanics are doled out in a very slow fashion. After watching countless cut scenes and roaming around the house doing menial tasks, you'll learn about your ability to use standard punches, melee attacks, counterpunches, and finishing blows.
In the nightmare world, you'll learn about using stealth while also coming to grips with your newfound mental abilities. Slowing down time is self-explanatory, while astral projection lets your spirit leave your body so you can activate switches remotely. It doesn't take long to see that astral projection is woefully underutilized. Throughout the game, all you'll be doing with it is activating switches from afar.
Save for two instances, you can't use it to mess with people, and although there are a few switches that require more than a key press, the act itself is mundane and wastes the potential of the power.Both astral projection and the slowing of time utilize your sanity. It makes sense thematically, but much like projection, it feels undercooked. Sapping away all of your sanity makes the world wobbly for a second.
You can use a blue pill to regain your sanity, or you can wait for it to recharge to one-third of the meter. Based on its name, you get the sense that your nightmares would carry over into the real world once sanity is depleted, but there aren't any actual consequences, so it simply acts as an artificial limit for your powers. Outside of the nightmare world, the game transforms into a stealth-action game. Beyond solving a few switch puzzles, most of your time is e spent disabling cameras from afar and trying to take down enemies silently along their predetermined paths. Should you mess up or decide to eschew stealth, you can go in shooting and brawling with anyone you meet.It's here that the game goes from having underutilized mechanics to just being broken. Attacking while in stealth is dodgy, since you have no control over which attack you'll implement. Simple knife slashes are preferable, but sometimes, you'll unleash a choking maneuver that takes so long you'll be seen by others.
Trying to hide from others is a hit-and-miss affair, since enemies can vary wildly on their levels of perception. Sometimes, you can sneak up to a foe just fine. Other times, they'll either see through walls and spot you or somehow see you from the back of their heads when you're crouch-walking toward them. These faults are bad throughout most of the game but become infuriating during the hotel stage, where getting spotted means instant death.Shooting is further degraded once you're out of the nightmare world. Despite the constant presence of walls and waist-high cover, the game employs no cover mechanics, so you're forced to crouch at all times to get some protection. Taking aim means that your shots are woefully inaccurate, as you'll have to wait for a second reticle to line up with your primary one in order to hit anything. Even then, headshots aren't a guaranteed hit, as the telltale sign of a fatal blow can be misleading, often taking two appearances of blood spray to confirm a kill.
The story itself is short, but the experience feels much longer due to the erratic enemy AI and poor game mechanics. If you're a Trophy hunter, the game is rather anemic in this department, since there's no Platinum at hand. There's no difficulty-related Trophy, so replaying the game on a higher difficulty isn't going to matter. Even though price should rarely matter in a review, the $30 price tag stings when you see what's offered.The graphics follow the trajectory of the gameplay. The characters look decent until you get to their facial hair, which looks patched on and unnatural.
Animations are sometimes laughable. Moving while crouching looks awkward, and mouths barely move when people speak. Interacting with anything is equally bad, since you can be far away from something and still see it react accordingly. The environments may have lots of particles, but they all look bland – with the exception of the cube dream world that you encounter early in the game. It also doesn't help that the camera tends to go wild when you're near an object, so fights and basic navigation become a chore. As for the audio, that's also all over the place.
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The music, while sparse, fits thematically but is otherwise uninspiring. The sound effects feel hollow, so things like bullet impacts and malfunctioning cameras come across as weak. The voice acting, however, has plenty of issues, and this is where the sound falls apart.
At times, the volume fluctuates so much that one line can be quiet while the next one is at the right volume. It doesn't help that the tone from every character is flat, so every scene that is supposed to evoke any kind of emotion feels flat instead. Hearing someone seem so unconcerned about choking or someone asking others to check out an area while sounding bored doesn't exactly make the game endearing to potential players.Past Cure is many things: technically infuriating, a slog, and thematically inconsistent.
While one can appreciate the effort of a small team trying to craft a game that does many things, it can't seem to do any of them well enough to warrant any attention. With a glut of better games that tackle similar elements on the platform, it's very difficult to recommend Past Cure to people, even as a quick diversion.Score: 3.5/10.
Past Cure is a third-person psychological thriller game that is developed by Phantom 8 - a new German studio comprised of just eight people. Despite the team’s size, Phantom 8 has been very ambitious from the beginning, with the team aiming to create a game with near-AAA production values. However, this is one of those situations where you shouldn’t have bitten off more than you could chew, as Past Cure is a just a game that had a lot potential but failed to achieve greatness.
Past Cure follows the story of Ian, a former special operations soldier who became victim of experimentation and torture in prison during a mission in Syria. As a result of this, Ian has a three-year gap in his memory and suffers from severe nightmares, but also gained a set of superhuman powers such as time manipulation. With the help of his brother, Ian sets out to find the people who did this to him and make them pay. While it’s an interesting and intriguing premise, i felt a bit disappointed by the overall delivery of the story, as I was left with more questions than answers, something that the game’s somewhat ambiguous ending didn’t help.
Split into seven chapters, Past Cure offers a lot of variety in terms of gameplay. Due to Ian’s fractured and fragile state of mind, you will have chapters that take place in the real world and chapters where you are inside Ian’s terrifying nightmares. The sections in the real world offer a mix of stealth and gunplay gameplay, while the nightmares section is all about horror and puzzle solving. While none of these sections are particularly brilliant, the variety and gameplay genre change between chapters helps the pace of the game and keeps things fresh through this 5 to 7 hours experience, if you appreciate both genres at least.
During the game’s action sequences, Ian’s powers are crucial to survival. Using Ian’s astral projection ability (his spirit leaves the body), you are able to check enemy positions, interact with objects, and disable security cameras, something that becomes very useful to plan your strategy in case you want to deal with the enemies with stealth. Not every section can be completed with just stealth, and in these situations, Ian’s time manipulation is without a doubt your best friend to survive the gunfights. By slowing down time, you can easily headshot everybody in the room, and change position without risk of getting shot to death.
While these gameplay mechanics are interesting, the experience is somewhat ruined by sluggish and unresponsive melee controls, the absence of a decent cover system, among other issues. Ian’s powers are tied to a sanity meter which depletes everytime you use them. However, there’s no real consequence to abusing his powers, as all that you get for depleting the sanity meter is a blurry screen for a second before the meter partially fills itself back up, making this a mechanic you can exploit over and over. There were also a few occasions where I started certain sections with so few bullets that it became mandatory to headshot everyone while not wasting bullets in order to survive the gunfight. The checkpoint system in also very unforgiving, with very few checkpoints and far between each other, something that becomes frustrating when added to the game’s other issues.
During the nightmares sections you will often have to solve puzzles while porcelain men are trying to hunt you down. In most sequences you have your gun with you, which makes these porcelain beings hardly any threat. However, there’s one nightmare later in the game that takes place in a dark prison, making this part an horror sequence that could have been easily taken out of a Silent Hill game. To make things more intense, you don’t you have gun this time around, leaving you with no choice but sneak past the porcelain men unnoticed, and it’s another section where Ian’s powers come really in handy. Overall, I found this to be the best part of Past Cure, not because it’s particularly brilliant, but because it excels in comparison to the rest.
For a game that was made by just eight people, I must say that visually Past Cure is impressive, although it’s not something on the same level as several AAA titles on market. The environments look polished, although they are also bland and empty, with the exception of the horror section. Although I praise the visuals, several other aspects definitely needed some work, such as animations, character models, and framerate issues. While the soundtrack does a passable job, the voice acting is one of the worst I have heard in years. The way the voice actors deliver their lines shows a complete lack of interested and emotion in delivering their lines, so much that even I could probably deliver a large majority of these lines better, and English is not even my native language.
Final Thoughts
Past Cure is a game that had a lot of potential, but with a limited budget and an inexperienced team, it ultimately crumbles under all its ambition and ideas. While there are some interesting gameplay mechanics and lots of variety, these are accompanied by several gameplay issues and lack in polish in several areas. Even if Past Cure isn’t a great game, I have to praise Phantom 8 for the valiant effort and ambition, which leaves me intrigued and somewhat excited to know whatever the studio is working on next.
Past Cure was reviewed using a PS4 Digital Copy provided by Phantom 8 Studio. You can find additional information about Gaming Union's ethics policy here.Interesting gameplay mechanics. |
Gameplay variety helps the pace of the game. |
Horror sequence is decent and intense. |
Story drops the ball the more you progress. |
Clunky, unresponsive controls. |
Terrible voice acting. |
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