The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair. He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.
The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies. The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull. The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button. When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office. The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be. There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable. The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy. The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.
But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam. If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work. The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right. The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator. What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game. In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened. I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck. I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.
But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work. If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother. I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch. I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.
Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability. A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another. Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else
