True Fear: Forsaken Souls I

This game is part one of a trilogy, two of which are released and the third still in development.

The game begins with the lead character Holly receiving a letter from her sister, whom she hasn’t seen in ten years. The letter informs Holly to visit a house in order to unravel the truth about their family. Shocked and elated at the same time, Holly makes her way immediately to the given location and begins following the leads.

The game is described as a hidden-object with mini games. The puzzles are not traditional hidden-object and the game tries hard to be inventive but perhaps a little too innovative, at least to my taste. I didn’t find a logical pattern to the hidden objects and overall they felt flat to me. Thankfully, the developers opted out of hidden objects all together in the second part of the trilogy.

I think what stood out the most to me was the story itself. Often a garden-variety of these games lack depth and the plots feel rushed. In fact, many people I know just skip through the scene sequences to get to the puzzles. In this game; however, the story is engaging. Without saying too much, there are many aspects of the game’s playability that make the narration of the story interesting.

The atmosphere of the game is spooky with a few jump scares here and there but not more than that. The music, by far, is what keeps you on your toes. And it just happens to be that this game is one of the first games I got to play testing my new gaming surround system. Let’s just say I kept my volume at the lowest at all times!

Overall the game is decent and memorable. I heard the sequel is good so looking forward to playing that next. One thing that I absolutely hated, though, was the navigational system. Clicking to maneuver out of places can easily unlock your inventory display by mistake, which happened A LOT. It made moving around a total nuisance to be honest. I’m one of those people that prefer keeping my inventory opened at all times so having it unlock every couple of minutes was seriously annoying. Hopefully they got that sorted out in the sequel.

My final score is 3/5 ★★★

• 1/5 for gameplay
• 3/5 for plot
• 2.5/5 for puzzles & exploration
• 3/5 for overall experience

Game Platform (played on): PC, Steam

Game link

Game trailer