![]() ![]() A horror-exploration and challenging puzzle game about family tragedy and self-identity.- Do watch out for the rats as they make your light dimmer Ib and Witch's House got me into watching let's plays years ago. They are all 2D horror games with charming, anime character designs that contrasts with the horror while telling emotionally impactful stories. I never saw games like those, and combined with let's player commentary, they had me wanting to see more. It was those games that showed me that small developers can produce elegant stories rarely seen in big-budget, mass-media games. A let's play of Fausts Alptraum by ManlyBadassHero appeared on Youtube and it caught my attention with its distinct art. Being reminded of those RPG Maker games and seeing that it was free, I decided to give it a shot. This is a top-down, 2D exploration and puzzle game in a horror setting. You go around a dark and mysterious mansion interacting with things and solving puzzles to get keys to unlock previously inaccessible areas so you can learn more about the story and solve more puzzles. You get a lantern giving you a limited view around your character in the dark mansion and you have to avoid rats that roam around. You can pick up matches that, when used, extends the radius of your viewing area up to a maximum. The radius increase lasts forever, but touching a rat lowers it, requiring you to spend more matches. ![]() If the light radius goes to zero, you wake up in the bed you first wake up in at the beginning. Matches are limited, so you should be careful, although avoiding rats is easy unless you have terrible eye-hand coordination, a poor sense of strategy, or are impatient. Rats slowly attempt to approach you, so you shouldn't stay in one place for too long. You can also find chocolates, which increase your movement speed up to a maximum. It also lasts forever, but it doesn't drop from taking damage. If you "die" you will wake up slowed and have to eat a chocolate to get your speed back up. Speed is mainly a convenience for navigating the mansion, although there are a couple of chase sequences that require you to be fast. You can save your game at journals found in specific rooms. There's no limit to saving, and loading the game is pretty quick, so the whole health mechanic seems pointless when you can just load the game if you "die" rather than spend your limited resources. Matches and chocolates are for those cases where you forget to save. As far as exploring goes, there isn't a whole lot of gameplay to be found here. There are a variety of puzzles involving arithmetic, matching, patterns, and reasoning. The puzzles are challenging because you often have to consider multiple pieces of information or follow a series of steps to connect the logic. You will most likely require a pencil and paper to write down the clues and piece them together. Most puzzles don't rely on obscure patterns, but there is one I recall where there are letters associated with numbers and you had to count the number of writing strokes for each letter to understand how to decode another word to get a combination code. It was particularly baffling because the letter 'y' is counted as three strokes instead of two and the font the game uses makes a capital 'Y' look like a lower case 'y' but bigger. Some puzzles "kill" you if you pick wrong, and there is one case I know of that prevents you from getting the hidden ending, which is all the more reason to save often and load your game instead of spending matches and chocolates. The open nature of the mansion means some puzzles are presented to you, but require things that can only be acquired by solving other puzzles first or doing something in another room.
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