Night time? CHECK!
Home alone? CHECK!
Headphones? CHECK!
Ready to get scared? CHECK!
Everything was prepared for the great horror night. But then...
The game launched in weird resolution, so I decided to change it in options. I had to restart the game, but it launched in a way I could only see about a third of the screen. I tried changing the resolution again just in case, but after getting same results. After searching for this problem on the internet, I found out it's pretty common bug. But after trying several fixes, it stayed the same. So I had to pick one of the smaller resolutions.
At this point any atmosphere I built up before launching the game almost destroyed. And then I started the game, heard the first the very forst dialogue of the game and completely lost it. It sounded so bad. Reminded me of "Don't do it, I'm a virgin" line from... ehhm... I don't think I'm allowed to say from where it is from.
Anyway, any horror atmosphere was gone at this point, so I might have been a little bit more critical towards the game. But the first few minutes were meh. In the first game, you get your objective right at the start of the game. Here, you're just walking around the house and trying to figure out what to do. Like at one point I was going in circles in one location, trying to interact with things there and had no idea what to do. Then I went through the same room again and got a note in journal that I can interact with a tube and stuffed grizzly that I couldn't interact with before. And after interacting with them and meddling with valves, I was once again stucked, because there was nowhere to go. I had to go back to that room with grizzly to trigger a jumpscare there and then had to return to valves, where new passage opened.
Now, I have to say that the game built the scary atmosphere again after about an hour when I got outside the house and got to the church and the machine. But I still had problem with what to do or where to go. The original game always told you in pretty nice way what is your current objective, which this game kinda forgets to do.
Enemies in this game are also really weird. They look cool, but you can pretty much sprint past them and nothing happens. They don't even chase after you in some instances. There are apparently more types of enemies, but I don't think I even met them. I had like 3 encounters with enemies throughout the whole game, which was weird. I expected more of them. But I also watched a walkthrough and apparently skipped some enemies. It reminded me of what we used to say with my friends to each other: "You're either too blind to see the scary stuff or you're too stupid to realize it's supposed to scare you."
Anyway, I got through the game quickly, beating it in around 3 hours. In those 3 hours, I got scared only once. When my girlfriend came home. Otherwise it was mostly boring walk through creepy locations. Especially the Machine location was really well done. And the music was also great. But they couldn't save the game for me. Not really a great start for spooky October. I'm considering picking up another game to play for this month's Game-Along.