Then when I had my PS4 and had downloaded my excitement had reached its pinnacle… for about 5 minutes…. I then felt quite deflated as i played through the game. The more i played and the lack of interaction with the world really got me down. Yes there was Radio’s and Sat phones to listen to messages to do with a rather disjointed narrative, but that was about it.
As you walked through the lushious English countryside in Shropshire there were what I can presume to be echo’s of the people that were missing from the county. Even then learning about what had happened to them before the incident happened didn’t help to fix together what i saw as a rather disjointed narrative with quite poor storytelling.
As you’re walking around there is no link between anything, you’re falling a glowing orb which tends to shoot off as you’re left feeling like you're holding onto a zimmer frame just plodding along. You can’t run in this game and that is one thing that annoyed me, the vast size of the world that you are in and you can’t run… Fast travel…. Nothing…. Just slowly plod through. Sometimes this can be a bit of blessing as you get to notice more in the world than you would just zooming through. However what is even more annoying about this is you can spend an hour or so just wandering around and checking in houses for things, to end up doing a big loop back to where you started and basically make no progress, so you now have to do all that walking again and find the turn off you missed earlier…. Eeeeeeehhh
The game is very monotonous in that with the lack of interaction of anything, you are basically just walking and looking around at the world that’s there. That is my major beef with the game, it’s all very well and good having the player walking around at that speed, but give them something to do. There’s only so much of the countryside that you can look at before getting completely bored out of your skin.
Through exploration you do learn about several different families and their situation before the incident, so in that way the exploration is good, but the lack of being able to do anything, or help them is a let down. There just didn’t feel like an endgame to this and all the walking I was doing was pointless.
The world that you find yourself in is the luscious green countryside of Shropshire and I have to admit that this is perhaps on the best looking and most detailed games I have ever had the pleasure of plodding through. I think the lack of doing anything helps to get the detail as good as this. I know I have said lately that there have been loads of brilliant looking games, but this one is topping the lot at the moment.
There has been such care and devotion gone into this game it is unreal. The attention to detail in everything such as the phone boxes, houses and the style of houses for the area in wonderfully done, and walking around the world in this sense was a joy, because even though there was nothing to do, there was still so much to see and admire.
The music within the game is also absolutely fantastic and this does show why it was a Game BAFTA nominee. The atmosphere that the music creates r is simply brilliant. There is so much depth that it adds to the people you’re learning about while walking around, it does start to give some meaning to the game, but again there isn’t much.
What promised to be a really good experience was really let down by the lack of nothing to do within the game. The game is held up by some of the most impressive graphics and sound I have ever seen, but that isn’t enough to pull through and entire game. The lack of any structured narrative creates a disjointed effort that could have been so much better with some clear structure.
Another thing I think could have clearly been improved or added from the start would be the ability to move faster…. A lot faster than what you currently can in the game. Just to make all the walking and viewing a bit more bearable.
Overall I'm going to this a 7.
Please note all screenshots included in this review are from my gameplay to give you a sense of the beauty of this game.
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