Sometimes it’s fascinating to think how far the games industry has come, especially with advancements in technology making it easier for game creators to make their creations a reality. Case in point is this game from Indie developer Oldmoustache Games who hail from Turkey.
No70: Eye of Basir is a first person horror / investigation game which you play as brothers Aras and Erhan, who, having grown up at their grandmother’s house, No70, experienced various paranormal activities they couldn’t explain. Twenty years after the death of their grandmother the brothers now find themselves reunited to figure out the mysteries from their childhood as well as the secrets held by the Eye of Bashir, an artifact that allows the holder to view hidden realms.
Built with the Unreal Engine the game is unquestionably stunning to look at regardless of if you’re exploring the house or the surrounding grounds. There is plenty to look at. While the game can be enjoyed normally on your computer, it does however feel at times clunky, leading us to run the game through VR tech, which the game lends itself to in terms of gameplay, though it didn’t really improve these issues. Of course this only makes it more of shame that despite how good it looks, the game is ultimately hollow as you wander around aimlessly looking for objects to return to their correct location, making this more of a cleaning simulator than perhaps the fulfilling puzzle-solving experience the developers perhaps intended.
While the game sees itself as a horror title, its atmosphere is constantly being quashed by the pieces of background information we get that flash up like scraps of paper pulling you out of the main game and effectively killing dead any atmosphere and tension the game has built at that moment. Things only get worse once you discover the Eye of Basir, which is essentially the old William Castle gimmick Illusion-O, which he used for 13 Ghosts (1960) as the device basically allows you to see the spirit world when you hold it up, making paintings seem altered or filled with ghostly footprints, though from the way it’s built up, you’re left kind of expecting more than what you get.
At its heart the game is a walking simulator and we truly mean that as you plod around each location with no way to break into a faster pace. It really makes for a grind. Worse still, the copy of the game we had to review was prone to crashes, which might not seem too much of an issue until you look at the fact that the game has no save points or auto-save feature. As such you’re faced with having to make it through each chapter before you can save your progress and with no way to really speed run through the game to get back to your original position. It’s a glaring issue and makes it only the more confusing how it wasn’t raised during testing, along with numerous other issues.
Shallow as a puddle, the game might be pretty to look at, but this really is just a pretty shell masking a hollow core. Even if you make it through the game it’s doubtful that you will find yourself returning for a second run.