Fobia: St. Dinfna Hotel

I played till accessing the hotel's room 709. Then I dropped the game and watched the rest. It's the backtracking that made me abandon it. It's excessive backtracking and excess of puzzles too. Even Portal Revolution didn't overused backtracking. The majority of the game takes place within the Dinfna Hotel as per the game's title. In the beginning it was a rather good experience with scary jumps and other scripted events. However, after a while I couldn't bear the excess of "get this key to unlock this, to get another key, to find another room, to access yet another room". With a few monsters here and there to add some reason to have guns and firepower. The devs clearly lacked millions of $$ and a bigger team to make a better game. They didn't have enough funding to make cutscenes, hire actors, build more levels, added more enemies and record a cinematic soundtrack.

I bet that they decided to make a terror game without knowing much about game design. They copied and pasted a lot of things from multiple sources. I couldn't understand the storyline at all. It mixes time travel, horror and "free will" in a way that I couldn't make sense of it. Did they borrow Andrew Ryan's concept of "Free will" from Bioshock? Did they borrow a character suffering from Amnesia from the game Amnesia?

Positive

They created a very good looking game with UE4. With the exception of the characters that look very unnatural

Good environment art. Except that they focused much more on good looking graphics than on storytelling

It seems to be free of collision bugs that plague other games

Good puzzles. I'd praise the cube and the key with moving parts as being very creative

This concept of overlapping realities, I've seen it somewhere else. I do remember this concept from Prey 2006 and Wolfenstein 2009. From what I've read the dev was inspired by the game Fatal Frame, which I've never played

It seems to be inspired by Resident Evil 7, Alan Wake, Silent Hill 2, F.E.A.R. among other references. The last one because it has the exact same black hole distorting space effect and the same concept of a ghostly little girl making apparitions throughout the game. The opening scene with the car arriving at the hotel is very much Alan Wake alike. And the same for a scene near the end of the game where they replicated the darkness and the cabin from Alan Wake.

Negative

Backtracking in this game is taken to the next level! Really... To give one example. When you are with Christopher in his house you go downstairs to find a key, then back up to open a room, then downstairs again, ... In such a small level they managed to force the player to go back and forth just too much. In Bioshock Infinite there were some keys to unlock safes that were located very far apart from each other. In Fobia the whole game is like that! The hotel is not a massive building. It has just 8 floors and one linear corridor. SH2 had puzzles and backtracking but not to this extreme level.

The giant mutant shows up out of nowhere and vanishes without a reason. This combined with backtracking is confusing because when the monster vanishes you don't know that you can go back and revisit the area because the monster won't show up again in the same place twice.

There is some design confusion with passwords. Sometimes they are next to the safe in the same room. Other times the password is found much later on in another place. There is no clear pattern. Ironically there is a cryptic hint in the game with scattered words forming the phrase "there is a pattern here".

No map. The hotel's building is not shaped with an "L" or "U" and doesn't have multiple constructions over a large area. Yet, the abundance of secret passages and Z axis travel makes it hard to memorize without a map.

No checkpoint system. You have to find save points and if you die while traversing the place, you'll be forced to replay a long part of the game.

You need to find the password to unlock a safe. Inside the safe a key to unlock a room. Inside the room another key. Sometimes there is yet another password locked box inside. That's just too much. I got so bored that I wanted to smash open boxes, furniture and break doors open to bypass the damn lock

No melee combat. SH2 did had melee attacks. The little creatures that remind me of HL2's headcrabs jump on you and unless you notice them and fire at them before their attack, you'll lose life

The same button that interacts with objects is the button to fire. You can only fire if you press the other button to aim first. Whenever you use the camera or interact with objects, you are forced to "reactivate" the weapon. The weapon's spread is too large and maybe this is because the game offers upgrades to counter it

Later in the game you find medkits. But most of the time you have to find 3 ingredients to craft a medkit. I think they did it to force the player to explore

The 3 bosses are uninspiring and boring

The level design is very amateurish in regards to the camera thing. Why block a corridor with a wall just to force the player to use it to pass through? Couldn't they had done something more creative and more grounded in the game's plot?

The lack of highlight makes objects hard to spot in the dark. Sometimes it's a key and this happened to me in Christopher's house. It took me 1h to finally see the damn key.

Goofs

How is the laptop turned on when the phone's battery is dead? Wasn't the destruction and fire supposed to have cut off the electricity in the entire hotel? Some places in the hotel have power while others don't.

How is the elevator operational with broken doors, panels and the hotel's destruction?

It doesn't make sense that the giant mutant that you can't kill with guns to be defeated by falling steel girders onto him

They placed an axe on a bathroom as an ester egg referencing the movie "The Shinning". When I reached that door I couldn't stop wondering "Why can't I pick up this axe to use it as a weapon or to break the chain that is preventing me from opening that same door?"

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