This is going to be a very short review of three games that I attempted to play over the last couple of weeks: Only If, Serena, and All is Dust. I stress the "tried" since with Serena, I turned the game on, hit the Esc. key to go to the options menu to invert the y-axis as I found that moving the mouse up make the POV camera look up and I was exited out of the game.
This will be a theme for the rest of this post.
All three of these games were free through Steam and all looked like they would have some promise. All is Dust is a POV atmospheric horror that takes place during the dust bowl era. That alone has captured my attention so I was excited to play a game in an era that I don't think I've played in yet. The first time I gave up when I found out I couldn't invert the y-axis. After looking up the game on How Long To Beat, I discovered that since it's supposed to only take me about 15 minutes I would give it another try. That's when the game crashed without opening up. Naturally I tried opening the game again but to no avail. I even tried once more the following day and I was unable to open the game. So after 12 minutes I gave up on All is Dust.
What makes me sad about not being able to play All is Dust, is that what little of the game I was able to experience, I liked. The visuals looked pretty decent for what I assumed was a Half-Life 2 mod and the voice acting (that was coming out of the old-timey radio) sounded pretty legit and was appropriately crackly.
With Only If, this was another premise that intrigued, being a "surrealistic first person puzzle adventure game." However, just like All is Dust, I was unable to change the y-axis on the mouse. I tried playing but I felt handicapped. According to HLtB, Only If is a two hour game. So I gave up. Plus, I'm pretty sure that this was one of those games that when you hit Esc. or "M" to bring up a menu, nothing happens. There is no menu and no way to change any of the settings. Once again, I gave up after playing for 4 minutes.
Lastly, I tried playing Serena, a Half-Life 2: Episode 2 mod. Thankfully there is a menu option, but nowhere is there an option to invert the y-axis. All I can tell you about Serena is that the voice acting sounded pretty decent and the visuals, being a HL2:E2 mod looked fitting for 2007. I quit the game after only one minute. HLtB says that Serena would only take ~48 minutes, but at that point, I was just too frustrated and annoyed to give the game even that much of my time. Maybe I should give the game another chance, it does look like the story is regulated to a single space, so there wouldn't be as much need for aiming/strafing. I might be able to garner enough will power to figure out a non-inverted (or "normal" apparently) mouse scheme.
I realize how nit-picky and spoiled I sound with my "but I cannot invert the y-axis, so I'm not going to play this game," and even reading a lot of the requests on the forums with people asking for inverted y-axis controls makes me feel bad/guilty for having the same sentiment, although over half are people simply asking for an inverted y-axis. And yet I still wonder if I come across sounding like the "All the best FPS players use inverted mouse :)" guy. But it genuinely feels like a hinderance that should be relatively easy to fix. And I don't know if it is an issue with the Unity Engine, which both All is Dust and Only If were made with, but maybe it just is a coincidence that inverting the y-axis is more of an issue than just flipping a switch.
I think I will go back, maybe sometime in the coming weeks and give Serena another try and attempt to train my brain to accept a non-inverted setup as I was able to do it somewhat with the static speaks my name, and that game didn't have any monsters to run away from or guns to shoot. I think I can do it.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
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