Dirge of Cerberus Isn't THAT Bad

 

There’s a fairly lengthy unwritten list of games that most of the “gAmErS” tend to agree are bad.  When we’re talking about things like Atari ET, Superman 64, Bubsy 3D then I can stand with you and point and laugh at the abject failure of its design and presentation.  But then there’s stuff that people all say is awful but it reeks of idiots online just downloading their opinions from an ignorant YouTuber rather than actually having played the game themselves.  Things like Balan Wonderworld, Devil May Cry 2, Megaman X7 and Metal Gear Survive come to mind when I think of games that are fine but idiots who get their opinions from  content creators will blast them without having played them. 

Not that any of the above games are great in any way, but they are by no means worthy of the ire they get in comment sections and forum posts.  Also the criticisms these games do get are ALWAYS the same.  Always sweeping statements about X thing being bad or Y thing being cringe and never any specifics, which only serves to bolster my idea that you didn’t actually play the games in question.  Before I move on, let me just say that this is an absolutely pathetic mentality to have.  Johnny Dickhead with his game review channel full of awful opinions formulated from 2-10 hours of play of any given game telling you a game is bad is not an opinion worth heeding at all.  If I had, for example, listened to the opinion of foghorning dick head James Rolfe about Silver Surfer, I would have denied myself an honestly pretty good shmup experience.  Watching these people are fine but you should form your own opinions on things by engaging with the media and thinking about it for yourself.  Tell the content creators to piss off, most of them are only going with the grain for view counts anyway. 

But lamenting YouTube slop isn’t why we’re here.  Recently I replayed Dirge of Cerberus on the PS2, one of those games that has a pretty nasty reputation online for being completely awful.  Now I’m old enough to remember having played Dirge of Cerberus when it was new and before going in my memory of the game was that it was pretty OK.  Nothing mind blowing, not something I think about very often but also not shitty enough to stand out in my mind.  So is it really as bad as people say and I was just a dumb teen with bad taste OR are people on the internet just regurgitating the opinion of a big content creator that had a dislike for it? After my replay, I’m going to say it’s the latter

The chief complaint I see with this game is that it’s “clunky” and I’m sorry but if that’s how you feel about it you are just shit at the game.  I will concede that it is a little on the stiff side, Vincent lacks the fluidity of your modern action game hero.  But this is the kind of thing that you should get used to within the first 3 levels.  It’s stiff but it’s not like Vincent is a WW2 era tank and the enemies move like they came from DMC5.  Everything operates in this sort of weird tanky fashion and with a little practice it’s just not an issue.  If this is your big problem with Dirge then your opinions on not just this game, but probably any game in general aren't worth listening to, you clearly lack the motor functions to engage with the medium properly. 

The other big complaint I hear about is the plot and this one I’ll grant you.  The plot is fucking awful, the characters are corny and cutscenes, especially in the back half of the game drag on for WAY too long.  At first I didn’t mind it, it gave off that “I’m 15 and this is deep and heavy” vibe but as it went on and the stakes got higher and the conspiracies got more complicated it started to devolve into nonsense fan fiction.  I usually don’t mind levels of corny like this because I find it funny but Dirge insists on the severity of its own plot so hard that it’s exhausting to put up with.

A slightly more sporadic complaint I saw was regarding the difficulty being too much but I think the reverse is true, Dirge is pathetically easy.  I think I only died in one level where you’re in Midgar avoiding snipers.  2 snipers wombo-combo’d me from full to dead and after 1 restart and a little more attentiveness the section proved to be no problem.  Playing on hard, for the record.  The bosses are also stupidly easy with one late game boss failing to do any damage at all, which was quite funny.  I was playing with Retro Achievements turned on and the developer of the set thinks that killing bosses without the use of a Limit Break is a challenge worth awarding points for but none of the bosses actually need that kind of power.  Keep in mind too, that Limit Break is an item that fully heals you along with upping all your stats and you get to carry 3 of them NOT including the super markets worth of potions Vincent also has stuffed in his pockets ALSO NOT INCLUDING the auto reviving Phoenix Down, one of which can be active while another stored.  Dying in this game is ALMOST impossible.  Maybe you’ll find some challenge if you want S ranks in every mission but while even though I’m defending Dirge from the haters here, it’s not really good enough to warrant doing that shit.  People were also complaining about the back half of the game having too many bullet immune enemies but again, these people are just shit at the game.  Every room that has these guys usually has a few Ethers in them, and they aren’t immune to L1 materia shots.  They also aren’t immune to your wicked claw hand melee strike which stunlocks them until they die and if you REALLY can’t be arsed, just limit break.  Like I said, you don’t need it for bosses so just use it to kill the small fry.

The last common complaint I found is that the level design sucks which I both sort of agree and disagree with.  The levels are drab and a lot of time is spent clearing box rooms with dudes so you can get a key card but also the game tries, usually at least once per stage, to give you an interesting scenario to deal with.  Not a terrible criticism because long play sessions do get very boring but also not entirely true of the entire game. 

Finally I have a few little nitpicks to get off my chest.  Upon finishing stage you get to choose if you want to either level up or convert the points to Gil to buy upgrades.  I hate that this system is an all or nothing affair and the option to split my points like, half exp half Gil isn’t an option.  That said though, take exp every time because even doing that I had enough Gil for every healing item, ammo and a decent number of upgrades which were crap anyway.  Also the machine gun is useless.  Bad damage, bad range, putting mods on it didn’t help, always caused problems when I tried to use it.  Pistol and rifle for the whole game, put that gun in the bin.  Finally, the English voice work is FUCKING AWFUL.  I usually like Steve Blum, one of my few english anime VAs that I don’t want to see made homeless but his voice just does not fit a character like Vincent.  The rest of the cast are significantly more embarrassing.  How any of those people left the recording booth not wanting to commit Sudoku is beyond me.  I would never want to be seen near a mic again after performances like that.  The issue of the corny, nonsense plot being insufferable is exacerbated greatly by these Yank motherfuckers acting an FF7 plot like it’s Blues fucking Clues. 

So in conclusion, is Dirge of Cerberus a good game? No, not really, it’s a very 5, maybe 6/10 action game but you also have to consider that it was the first real spinoff for FF7 we got.  I know technically Before Crisis was first but that was a monthly subscription based Japanese exclusive flip phone game so fuck off with that.  Is it as bad as people on the internet make it out to be though? Absolutely not.  Over hated by people who either haven’t played it or sucked so bad at it that they never finished it.  If you’re interested in getting as much FF7 content in your life as humanly possible, then give it a chance.  More than likely you’ll have an acceptable time. 

 

The Type of Shmup I Hate

 

Shmups, or “shoot ‘em ups” are a genre of video game I have loved since I was a young boy. The earliest one I have any real memories of really diving deep on and getting good at is Thunder Force 4 on the Mega Drive, an intensely difficult title that ate up a staggering amount of my time with that system. I probably played one or two previous titles before that but my memory is hazy. However the one thing that is undeniable is that even to this day, despite the genre becoming as niche as it’s become, it’s a type of game that I have loved dearly the whole time.

Like most genre of game, shmups come with their own series of sub-genres. The big over arching ones being horizontal and vertical. This is self explanatory as it’s simply referring to the direction in which the screen does its scrolling. There’s also a 3rd type that I’m unsure what the internet at large likes to call which is an over the shoulder type game. You know, something like a Starfox. Not a fan of this style personally but I wouldn’t say I hate it. A game like Iridion 3D on the GBA might piss me off but you can give me a Lylat Wars or a Panzer Dragoon and I’ll have a grand old time.

Then there's the other big distinction of your regular vanilla shmup and bullet hell. The first kind being something like Darius or R-Type where the enemies shoot directly at you in easy patterns but some kind of other factor may make things more complicated. The second being something like Touhou or Mushihime-sama where the stage itself doesn’t really factor in at all but the enemies and bosses shoot at you in extremely dense patterns that require some of the prior types skills but mainly boils down to memorization and the ability to adapt to the odd curveball. I have no qualms with either type. I prefer bullet hell but I do love a bit of Raiden, Darius and Thunder Force too.

The type of shmup I absolutely can’t fucking stand doesn’t even really come down to a sub-genre really, at least not one acknowledged by online communities as such. The type of shmup I absolute cannot fucking handle is the type that I’m going to name “checkpoint shmups”. Let’s say, for example, you’re enjoying a bit of DoDonPachi in the arcade. You misjudge the space between some bullets or a stray shot escapes your focus and you eat shit and explode. A couple of power-ups fly out of your ship, it disintegrates and a new one flies up the screen for you to power on and keep fighting. When you eat shit too much, a full power appears, you pop in another coin and keep going. This is the kind of shmup I like, when I die the instant chance to re-power a little and the constant forward momentum feels good. But then there’s a game like Gradius and good lord does Gradius fucking piss me off. You’re flying around, having a good time and then a stray bullet blows you up or you run into a wall trying to avoid enemy fire. The ship explodes, the game stops dead in its tracks, the screen cuts to black and then knocks you back to a checkpoint in the level with no powerups. Sometimes it may give you one notch on the upgrade meter but most of the time it doesn’t. You lost a bunch of progress and now you’re weak as shit so even returning to that point feels like an impossible chore. MAYBE if you’re lucky and the checkpoint was by some enemies that drop upgrades, you can claw it back but upon that first death, your run is basically over unless you’re some kind of shmup demi-god.

THIS is the kind of shmup I can’t stand. Nothing kills my motivation to keep playing more than the game stopping me dead in my tracks to knock me back a few meters through the level. Gradius is a particularly bad example of this too because in that game, ship speed is tied to your power up meter and you need about 2 points in it for the game to feel even remotely playable. You die once, lose all your speed and weapon power and now segments that were at first easy suddenly become impassible without a great deal of practice and the only way to get that practice is to die and restart over and over. The very epitome of unfun dogshit in a genre of game where short, quick play sessions are one of the main draws. It’s mainly found in early entries in the genre and isn’t used as much today but that just means that going back to experience “the classics” is an exercise in frustration rather than fun nostalgia.

Shmups are great, even the ones that piss me off like Gradius I still enjoying playing up until the moment I suffer my first death. Bottom line though, in a genre like this, don’t kill the momentum because of a single mistake and if there’s any developer out there who has made a shmup like this within the last 10 years, sincerely, fuck you. Patch your game and take that shit out. Now excuse me I’m going to go play some Deathsmiles

I Think We’re Doing Remakes Wrong

 

I recently happened across a teaser for a remaster of legendary PC game Deus Ex.  A game so revered by gaming culture that there’s a joke that says every time you mention, someone will reinstall it.  The remaster, based on the teaser, basically looks to be the same as the original but with a bit of a face lift but it suffers from the problem of looking like complete and utter shit. 

Deus Ex was released in the year 2000 and it wasn’t the prettiest thing to ever hit our PC screens but being one of the first “immersive sims” it was an intensely interesting experience.  This new version looks less like a loving graphical rebuilding of that kinda fugly game and more like an amateur student project that you’d download for free off a modding site.  Some crap thrown together by a guy who’s been learning blender for about a year titled something like “Deus Ex HD Mod” or some shit.  Something you might download out of curiosity and then remove from your system after about 30 minutes into a new game. 

But does Deus Ex really need a remaster or a remake? Personally I don’t think so.  It was a great game when it dropped in 2000 and you can easily grab a copy, install it and still have a great time with it to this very day.  You could have just left it as is and everything would have been just fine.  Let’s face reality for a second here, though.  If you’re the kind of person who looks at something like Deus Ex (or any other deeply respected game for that matter; RE4, Crash, Dragon Quest etc etc) and then start posting online about how these things “need/deserve” remakes, then my bet is that you don’t actually like the game all that much in the first place. 

I caught whiffs of this the hardest when the RE4 remake came out.  Suddenly people in comment sections saying that they were so happy RE4R came out because the original version was “clunky”, “stiff” and even “unplayable in the modern day”.  If you GENUINELY believe any of this stuff about an old game then the reality of the matter is that you just don’t like RE4 that much.  That’s fine by itself but because RE4 is such a respected title and you’re too much of a quivering pussy to hold your own opinions on media, you start pining for remakes.  Even if your pines for modern releases are purely based in aesthetics then you’re still a bitch.  If you claim to be a fan of something or you see something that looks interesting and you’re put off even trying simply because it looks “old” then why are you even here? If you have that much open disrespect for gaming history like that, maybe you should fuck off to another hobby.

But this leads me to the title of this post, I can’t help but feel that we’re doing remakes wrong.  There’s no need to remake Deus Ex because we already know it’s good.  The only purpose this remake serves is so a sales team can utilize the power of nostalgia to make a line go up.  I think we should be using remakes and remaster to have a second go at games that were bad at the toke but that made of had value were they executed better.  One example I can think of for a game I played this year is The Bouncer on PS2.  A lackluster beat em up with extremely basic gameplay that demands that you spend about 60% of its 4 hour run time watching cutscenes.  Some levels in that game are single rooms with 3 dudes that you spam a single button to kill before the movies start playing again.  But the aesthetics were great, the world seemed interesting, if you remade The Bouncer in 2025 and fleshed out the combat, maybe made it a little Yakuza-esque you might have something special on your hands.  A more personal example for me would be a remake of the horror game Outlast.  Let someone who doesn’t have severe brain injury rewrite the plot and bring it more in line with the horror themed Mirrors Edge that I thought it was going to be instead of the painfully boring non-game it ended up being. 

Not that I’m ENTIRELY against remaking good stuff though.  I had no problems with the Crisis Core remake, for example because that was locked to the PSP, a system famous for having the battery swell and maybe explode.  Putting it on my PC was welcome.  SMT3: Nocturne was also OK in my book because original PS2 versions of Maniax were stupidly expensive and giving me a version that cost 30 bucks instead of 200 was nice.  If your remake serves as a middle finger to the retro game market then I salute you.  Finally I was completely OK with the remake of moon: Remix RPG Adventure because it never got a real English release until that came out.  I personally might be fine playing Japanese only games but when I find a good one I want to be able to suggest it without having to point to a shitty fan translation made by a guy that couldn’t order a beer in an izakaya without having a breakdown however the absolute state of that side of gaming is another post for another day

What I’m saying with all this is that we should be using remakes and remasters to have a second shake at stuff that didn’t quite make it in the execution.  Buying remakes so that you can pathetically wallow in nostalgia while giving money to suits who don’t care about the medium even a little bit needs to stop.  Next time you see a remake of a game you already know is good, just ignore it and instead go find something new and interesting and put your money there instead.  Doing a little digging will enrich your life much more than doing a 15th play though of Deus Ex but with shittier graphics this time

Edit: Please forgive the weird highlighting, the Blogger post editor is actually one of the worst things to ever exist, Ill try to ensure it doesnt happen again, maybe this post needs a fuckin remake

Choose Or Die? I choose die

 We all know that video game movies are generally pretty bad.  There may be the odd exception here and there but generally speaking a movie based on a game is almost guaranteed trash.  What's worse than video game movies, however, are movies about video games.  The most famous example of this is probably Ready Player One.  An unfathomably shit movie about a bunch of morons looking for some thing inside a VR Metaverse that will give them a bunch of money and allow them to escape their shit lives or something.  It's an extremely poorly written plot surrounded on all sides by trite video game references and a bunch of money men trying to seem relatable by pointing out that they looked up a thing about Adventure on Atari 2600 one time.  But then Choose or Die got made and it makes Ready Player One look like a fucking masterpiece.

There's a short story published by Steven King in 1983 called Word Processor of the Gods.  To cut a short story even shorter, some dude has a word processor that has the magical property of making whatever he types into it turn into reality.  The guy in the story basically deletes his shitty kid and shitty wife and makes a more well mannered kid his and a woman that's a bit nicer to him into his wife and then the word processor runs out of magic juice and breaks down forever.  I think that's what happens anyway, it's been a hot minute since I read it.

The reason I bring up Word Processor of the Gods is because Choose or Die basically rips off that idea wholesale but instead of it being a magic bit of 80s tech, it's an old video game that bends reality. The film follows some woman finds a game called "Curs>r" in her friends failing retro shop and on the back of the box there's a promise of a cash prize for anyone who can beat the game.  They call the number and find that it's still in service (with the audio recording being delivered Robert Englund of all fucking people) and so the woman takes the game home and tries to beat it to get the money and pull herself out of the shit, broke life she finds herself in.

"Curs>r" is a text adventure, kind of like Zork or any of those ancient purely text based adventures that you controlled by typing in shit like ">walk north" into a command prompt only this game creates its situations based on where the user is and then asks them to make some kind of horrible choice under the threat of death if they fail to choose in time.  For example when the woman first gets hold of it shes playing it in a bar and the game is like "you are in a tavern, should the waitress take a break?".  So she types yes and by "take a break" it meant that it forces the waitress to start picking up random glasses off the shelf and smashing them off the floor.  Then when asked if she should clean up by the game, the woman picks yes and Curs>r forces said waitress to pick up the shards of glass and eat them.  This is probably the only effective moment of the entire movie because I have to admit, watching a woman being forced to chew glass by a reality bending text adventure did make me wince.  

After that moment it's entirely downhill.  Instead of ramping up the stakes of the choices the game starts doing all sorts of weird shit like making the main character control a rat that's trying to eat her mother and somehow teleporting the characters to alternate fog dimensions to tease her about past traumas.  The core premise of the film isn't even that bad but the execution of the movie after the initial couple of scenes is just completely fumbled.

There's one really funny scene where the game traps a character in what I can only describe as "the lag dimension" and kills him by making him puke a never ending stream of casette film.  Base Film is soft and fairly brittle but somehow it kills him because this movie things that the inside of old casettes are made of barbed wire.  

The whole production feels like it was made by someone who has never actually engaged with anything outside of wikipedia synopsis. Like the writers know roughly what a video game is, have seen tech from the 80s in Instagram reels and maybe have a vague idea of the existance of horror movies and with this vague surface level understanding of these things attempted to make a film.  

Choose or Die is a boring movie trying to pander to middle aged men who will eat up any old bullshit if it has things from their childhood in it.  It's sad, embarassing and if you were going to make me choose between watching this film again or putting a bullet in my head, I will log out of my Netflix account and you can watch me die.

 

Silent Hill 2 Remake Isn't Very Good

 

I finally did it, I finally slogged through the Silent Hill 2 Remake and saw the ending.  I got Leave if anyone is curious.  I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the game but overall I'm pretty negative on it.  There's a couple of things here and there that were done decently but overall it's an annoying and boring version of the original with a bunch of the sublety removed and a final act that seems to just not understand how good storytelling works at all.

First of all, I want to address the gameplay because that part of the game is at least OK.  Silent Hill 2 Remake plays basically the same as every other 3rd person over the shoulder horror game that you've ever played.  Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, remakes, The Evil Within, Silent Hill Downpour, Dead Space, all that shit.  It plays just like those and therefore there isn't really much to say, if you have played any modern horror game since 2005, you've played a game just like Silent Hill 2 Remake.  What is kind of cool about the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 Remake is the exploration and the remixed areas that James has to explore on his quest to find his dead wife.  When I bought the game for 60 quid I was worried that I was going to blast through the game in a couple hours because I'm pretty familiar with the original and can blast through it in an hour or two.  The areas of 2R have been expanded quite a bit though with new puzzles to solve or expansions on old ones.  For example the coin puzzle in Ashfield Apartments has been carried over from the original game only this time the coins have two sides that you have to contend with and solving the puzzle comes in the form of a 3 part poem with different coin arrangements for each part.  There are certain sections of the game where the expansions to these areas feel like padding such as in the prison, labryinth and one absolutely unforgivable puzzle segment in the hotel but overall the changes to the areas and exploration are decent.  Not better, not worse, just different and for a game that I'm extremely familiar with, I welcome the effort.

Another positive thing I want to touch on are the changes to the boss fights.  The bosses in original Silent Hill 2 are kind of wank.  For a town that's trying to punish James with monsters from his own pscyhe, it's not trying very fucking hard.  In the remake though, from a gameplay standpoint, I like the bossfights.  The change I liked the most is the Eddie fight in the meat locker.  In the original the AI would run at you, get stuck in a loop punching a piece of meat and then die in a couple of hits.  In the remake he's running all over the arena, shooting at you, trying to confuse you by fogging the place up.  At one point the hanging meat starts moving around and so if you're trying to gun him down then that's another thing you have to be managing while you shoot at him and avoid his revolver.  It's cool shit.  The fight with the double pyramid heads at the end of the game is also significantly more intense and while it's not difficult in any regard thanks to James having Dark Souls-eqsue i-frames when dodging, the sheer spectacle of fighting these two hulking fuckers with spears is very cool.

There is some stuff that's absolute dogwank though.  The game learned one trick very early on that was to hide its sentient pairs of legs around corners and have them ambush you and instead of just letting that be a one time or a couple-time thing, it's spamming that nonsense for the ENTIRE GAME.  Even when nightmares start intersecting with each other and James is supposed to be seeing Angela's monsters in the hotel, the remake decides to not do that and instead just fill the hotel with MORE FUCKING LEGS.  Legs and Pukey Boiz, that's all you fuckin' get for like 15 hours.  Maybe a nurse if the game is feeling generous but you fight them in the exact same way you fight the legs so what's the fucking point?

But that's all gameplay stuff.  Admittedly, the game part of the video game is alrite, solid, even if it does run like shit and crashed on me once in the hotel.  But the game isn't the real reason we're here is it? or at least it shouldn't be.  The story is what counts in Silent Hill 2, an absolutely masterfully written supernatural tragedy and how did Bloober handle it?  Well they fucked it up in nearly every single cutscene.  It was so bad that I started to dread getting to the end of segments because I knew something was going to piss me off royally as soon as the characters started flapping their gums.

There's too much to go through in a simple blog post, maybe I'll do a video on it one day, but the general gist of why it all annoys me so much is the complete removal of subtlety from the story.  Everything that was hinted at or implied through imagry or line delivery is gone and instead replaced with obvious statements made by Hollywood-ass sounding voice actors.  Angela doesn't sound weird and stilted like she's supposed to, Eddie is overly pathetic, the letter read at the end of the game from Mary sounds like a weird dollar store version of the original.  Granted, for most of the game it's only mildly annoying, stuff that me and my friend were saying "yeah it's OK but they fumbled it a little bit, I guess".  But then you watch the video tape in the hotel and everything, narratively speaking, goes to complete shit to the point where I wanted to take a plane to the Bloober offices and just punch every "writer" they have it that place right in the fucking jaw.  The game was made for them, all they had to do was copy it and yet they made all these weird changes to the sequence that aren't just different and a bit crap, but actively ruin the effect that the original was trying to produce.  

I understand that Bloober is a team of not very talented people and the fact that SH2R is as acceptable as it turned out is an christmas fucking miracle but what they did to the ending segment of the hotel is nothing short of art vandalism and I'm already sort of swerving into spoiler town enough with this post so again, another post for another day or maybe even a 14 hour video about why it sucks if I ever find the time to produce such a thing. 

Overall, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a medicore experience that teeters very close the being just flat out bad more often than not.  A few good decisions here and there but, quite frankly, it would be better if this game had never been made.

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it