Only If

Only if is advertised as a surreal adventure puzzle game on Steam that costs exactly £0.  I never heard of it until recently when I saw a friend playing it.  When we spoke about it the idea sounded kind of interesting and since I have nothing to lose I thought I'd give it a go.

The game is about some guy who goes to a party, gets drunk and wakes up in some unknown house.  Shortly after craziness he stumbles into a room with a radio that has a guy on the other side telling him all sorts of weird stuff like he's called the cops or that the protagonist will die soon.  The kicks off the adventure of you trying to work your way out of the house with the evil man on the intercom being a dick the whole time.

The game play is standard first person stuff.  Hell, if it wasn't for the reference to Unity during the ending credits I would have assumed the thing was a Half Life 2 mod.  You look around rooms for keys and or switches and press E at them and hope that things happen.  Despite being advertised as a "surreal adventure puzzle game" there isn't anything here that you haven't already seen a thousand times before YEARS ago.

Graphically the game is also nothing special but some of the levels did look pretty cool.  There is one segment in particular where you have to platform on big pillars that are suspended in mid air.   The area sort of reminded me of something from Alice: Madness Returns but without the budget. 

The game is also piss easy with almost none of the puzzles requiring any real brain power to beat.  On top of that, there is a segment where the game just fucks off the puzzles and decides that it wants to be a platforming game and the platforming controls fucking suck.  Once you figure them out it's not so bad but the game never explains how they work and it's a real pain.  You see, the distance in which you jump depends on how long you hold the space bar for and if you let go you just lose all momentum and plummet downward.  Once you figure out what the fuck is happening it's pretty easy but it's annoying and why did it never tell me that?

I could probably complain a lot more but lets remember one thing and that's that it was free.  It's also inoffensively long clocking in at less than 2 hours for a first time play through.  Despite some of the things I just said though, I actually sort of had fun with it.  It killed a little bit of time on a lazy Sunday afternoon and I came away mildly entertained. 

Give it a go, maybe you'll enjoy it more than I did.