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Tuesday, February 5, 2013

Spotlight on Games: Anna

It's been a while since I did one of these, might as well.

Anna is an indie game available on steam for ten dollars. Here's what you need to know.
Anna is NOT worth the 10 dollars. Hell, it wasn't worth the 5 dollars I paid for it while it was on sale.

I have a bit of experience with games similar to this. I'm a fan of the Myst series, and I've played through Amnesia: The Dark Descent a couple times. Compared to both of those, Anna is a piece of shit. Here's why.

Puzzle Mechanics
The game used extremely stupid, sideways logic in their puzzles. They're the kind of things you wouldn't be able to figure out logically, it's basically "Use this random object with this random object". There's hardly any reason to do it. For example (spoilers here) in the first level, you have to arrange two pieces of a mirror into an eye, and then add an iris somehow. How do you add the iris? By burning a fucking pine cone in the mirror. Makes perfect sense, right? Most of the puzzles are actually like this. This sideways logic alone makes this a bad game, because you don't feel like you're solving anything, just stumbling around, getting frustrated until you accidentally use the right object in the right place.

Gameplay and Physics
The game uses the Unity3D engine, and its physics are basically what you get if you take Amnesia's physics, water them down a ton, and take away jumping, sprinting and crouching. There's only a couple things you can actually move around, the rest is literally part of the environment. And no, you can't jump, crouch or sprint. You move at a set, constant speed. Interacting with objects is similar to Amnesia, but a with a lot more glitches, and more frustrating. The graphics themselves are comparable to Oblivion, in other words, mediocre for a game made in 2012. The controls are hellish to figure out at first. Everything is controlled with the mouse and the WASD keys. You open up  your inventory by clicking the mouse wheel, something that actually took me 10 minutes to figure out because it's such a stupid place to put it.

Scare Factor
Really the only place Anna gets any amount of points is scare factor. They manage to create a pretty creepy atmosphere using dark lighting, isolated rooms, a relatively small FoV and random events that can easily catch you off guard. For instance, you enter a room, try to solve the puzzle, look around back through the doorway and suddenly there's a ghostly figure standing there. You go up do it, suddenly you're frozen and more ghostly figures appear behind you. It doesn't force you to look at them, it just waits until you do. The game also uses a lot of effects with sound, but the audio quality for those sounds are pretty bad. The scratchy audio and poor choice of dialogue really take away from the atmosphere for most of the game.

I'm not covering storyline because I never actually finished the game, because I don't have the patience for stupid, sideways logic. My sister finished it with all three endings and said they were pretty disappointing.
Overall I'll give this game a 4.5/10. Don't buy it. It could have been so much better.

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