A free first-person found-footage horror game
Westgrove is a first-person horror game in which the developer made some very interesting design choices. The game copies the late 90’s style of found footage horror movies. It copies the graphics style made popular by Playstation 1 games.
The graphics have a lot of similarities to Tomb Raider 1 by how they copied small portions of map texture over and over again, which they stretched over large areas. The game itself is like a first-person version of Silent Hill if it only had monsters near the end, and you couldn’t shoot them.
Search an unsettling forest
You explore a forest during the day, and it turns out you are going in circles. This unsettling horror game then has you running around at night in the dark with only a flashlight while creepy noises can be heard around you. It forces you to explore to progress the story.
Creeping dread with an intertwined story
There aren’t any jump scares except at the very end when you look through the keyhole. The story is told through the many text documents you find littered around the environment. The documents mostly tell stories by giving you an insight into the mind and times of the people who wrote them.
Plenty of potential with very little payoff
It really feels like the designer had much bigger plans for this game. The world is well-built and large but is severely underpopulated. Luckily, the game funnels you in the right direction, so you rarely feel as if you are wandering aimlessly.
The sound design is not fun
At the end of this psychological horror video game, the monsters appear, and the sounds they make are very loud and repeated. If you are wearing headphones, then it is not a fun experience. It forces you to turn the volume down or off, which damages the gameplay experience.
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