Demo Time: Portrait of a Torn - Demo (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Portrait of a Torn -  Demo through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.] 

Portrait of a Torn - Demo

Systems: Windows, Linux, 

Release Date: October 24, 2024

Publisher: Poysky Productions

Developer: Indigo Studios - Interactive Stories

Time Spent: 65 Minutes

Portrait of a Torn - Demo is an interesting game from a couple of angles.  First, and admittedly so, I could not get the game to run very well on the Steam Deck and that wasn't for any lack of trying.  The first time booting the game, I ran it as is without any compatibility settings and that game ran horribly.  Kind of.  It ran, but the game maxed out at 6fps even on the lowest graphical settings.  Now, I acknowledge that games don't need to be 60fps to be playable and even sub 20 can be playable depending on the game, but I just could not handle these measly 6 frames per second.  So I gave up, and went to the compatibility settings, first trying Proton Experimental then moving to Proton 9.0-3, 8.0-5, and finally giving up with 7.0-6 because it's not that the game wasn't running, is that it wasn't running well.  So I went back to Proton Experimental and that kind of worked until it didn't.  I'm not entirely sure what happened, but I would frequently get a brief message of "Attach HorrorEngine Blueprint to Players Camera!" on the loading screen that I couldn't make out and the game would end up stalling before needing to force quit.  I finally got the game to semi-run using Proton 9.0-3 which is where we now find ourselves.

[From here on out, there are going to be massive spoilers sprinkled throughout.  You've been warned.]

If you just watched the video, you can see that the game does not run very well, but it does run at least well enough to get an idea of what Indigo Studios are trying to accomplish with this title.  In this demo, you play Robert Candell, a soldier who is home from the war (more on this in a bit) and walking through his family home finding it eerily empty.  Not entirely dissimilar to the basis for Gone Home, but that's the closest comparison I can make to that game.  

The first thing that stuck out to me was that the voice acting sounded very emotionless and my first thought was that it was an artificial voice recording or an AI voice reading dialogue.  The presence of what felt like AI-generated pictures in the game didn't add to my confidence that the voice acting was not from a real person either.  At least all of their fingers could be accounted for and that's not inherently something to knock a game for, but it was something that I noticed in Robert's self-monologues to the player and the other two voices we hear in the game in the form of letters to Robert's mother.  I don't know if I was feeling more critical because of how the game was running, but that could be a very real possibility.

For most of the game, you walk through rooms in the Candell house opening doors and clicking on items found in those rooms.  I assume you could either just skip all of the downstairs rooms and b-line it for the bathroom to find Robert's bedroom key which would then activate going back upstairs to check on his mom after leaving his bedroom, which then leads you through the trench scene to finding the memorial and the end of the game.  I make this assumption because I don't want to boot up the game again not only because of how slow the game runs, but also because I'm prompted to either uninstall or install Microsoft C++ Visual Runtime if I use any of the compatibility settings, but for all I know, the game requires you to go through each room before entering the mom's bedroom with dialogue from Robert saying that he wants to do something else first.

My biggest gripe with the game was not how poorly it ran on the Steam Deck or the AI voice and AI pictures, but with all of the historical inconsistencies and how the game felt like it couldn't decide when it wanted to take place.  The first thing was Robert's wish that his mom had ordered pizza, implying that she could have called up a local pizzeria and had them deliver in 30 minutes or less.  But that didn't mesh well with the photo of Robert and his army buddies looking like they were circa mid 1940s (maybe?).  Then there was the letter from the Army sending their condolences for Robert being killed in action.  With the US Air Force symbol in the upper left-hand corner.  With the letter dated November 1952.  So a few things.  The largest war that the US would have been involved in in November 1952 would have been the Korean War, so I guess that's okay.  However, the US Air Force symbol was officially adopted in 2004.  Then, after you finish the letter and try to leave, you find yourself outside in a rain-soaked trench with Robert exclaiming "The trenches."  The problem with this is that trench warfare was not common outside of World War I, although I did read that the Nazis continued to use trench warfare to a certain extent in World War II, but not by US troops, and again not very much in the Korean War.  I know I'm making generalizations here, but having a story take place in a war-torn trench heavily implies World War I, 32 years before the Korean War.  I can't comment on the language used in the letter though, if it's military appropriate so I'll leave that be.  I'm not a military person by a long shot and I had to look up dates, although I felt that the logo/symbol on the letter looked far too modern of a design to exist in 1952.  That was the crack.

The game ends with Robert finding a memorial to him downstairs and the front door opening revealing a mysteriously dead-looking woman, who is not his mother otherwise I feel like you would have heard Robert say, "Mom!?"  After following the woman through, you're in a similar position to the opening of the game with a dark void and a door, which is where the demo ends.  There are plenty of implications here, that you might be visiting another home of someone who died, or possibly Robert's home again but at a different time, either before he went to war, or sometime after.  Plus the mystery of who the woman is and how she is connected to Robert and what he is experiencing.  So at least there's a little bit of a mystery there apart from Robert's story, which seems like it's solved at this point?  Maybe not?  Maybe the main game doesn't focus on Robert Candell and this is more of a demo for the game and the mechanics?  I guess we'll find out when the game releases (yesterday, October 24th).