Astray is a first-person horror/puzzle game set in an abandoned museum based on unusual cultures, legends, and supernatural themes. But something more sinister lurks beneath the surface.. You must survive as you make your way through the museum, interacting with objects, and completing puzzles along your way to unravelling the mystery of what lies beneath the museum.
*REVIEW CONTAIN SPOILERS*
Positives:
- Creepy
- Good level design for the most part
- Hard puzzles
Negatives:
- Cliché storyline
- Only one type of monster + one boss
- Boss looks like the eye from lord of the rings ^^
- Some soundtracks are from sites with free music (in other words, not made by yourself)
- Some floating objects
- Very short, with no replay value
- Rushed ending
- Zero character development (I don't even know the name of the character I played as)
Conclusion:
Astray offers hard puzzles and horror, but lacks in everything else.
The level design is pretty good, but several objects such as books and mushrooms are floating in the air.
You made one single enemy (excluding the boss) and used it over and over again. It was very scary at first, but after encoutering it over and over again, I learned pretty quickly how it behaves and could easily avoid it with zero deaths after a few maps.
The storyline is yet another "we found a mysterious artifact with evil powers" we all have played a thousand times before, one of them being Amnesia The Dark Descent, but what really ruined it for me was the huge lack of character development. In fact, there aren't any. The main goal is to find my uncle, right? I found one dead body near the end of the game, not knowing if it was him or someone else from the expedition, and the character I played as showed no emotions about it what so ever.
I think this game puts too much faith in us as players, that we will take the role as the main character and react for him.
The ending was pretty weird and suddenly turned into a black screen with the credits printed on it. I hate when game developers don't put enough time with outros, and this game developer sure didn't.
But you did a good job with the puzzles and it was very scary for me. At least before I got used to the monster, but as I said earlier, it lacks in everything else. It doesn't offer much new to the table besides the puzzles and a few intresting level design ideas.
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Glad I bought this game during the summer sale because it took me less than 3 hours to complete it, even though I spent quite some time with some of the puzzles.
4/10 - Okay
Not recommended.