Friday, May 9, 2025

Game EXP: ELISE (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Elise 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.] 

ELISE
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: December 12, 2024
Publisher: Stuart White
Developer: Stuart White
Time Spent: 2 Hours 54 Minutes
First Play Playlist on YouTube

When I first saw ELISE on Keymailer, I recognized that I was getting into a third-person survival-horror shooter with an obvious gameplay homage to the Resident Evil series, complete with visual and design references to Claire Redfield.  In ELISE, you play as the titular character (or is your friend Elise? That's not 100% clear based on the game description and the in-game text) as she awakens in a maze of basement-style tunnels and hallways filled with slow-moving and persistent zombies.  Armed with a handgun, a lead pipe, and disposable single-use daggers, it is Elise's purpose to escape the basement and find out why she was captured in the first place.  And maybe also discover the source of the zombie outbreak?  I didn't finish the game, which we'll get to down the line.

It took me several attempts before I was able to make any significant progress in ELISE, as I first tried playing on the Steam Deck, then on my laptop, and then back on the Steam Deck.  My first attempt led to a horrible failure on the part of the game; I could possibly blame myself, but that hardly seems likely.  Maybe?  I had initially thought about changing the resolution, but then decided that I'd stick with 1280x780, being the closest to the Steam Deck's native 1280x800.  I did change the game from Windowed Full Screen to just Full Screen, but that apparently did something to the overall resolution and messed up the screen resolution overall, and put a black bar through the middle of the screen.  I wasn't able to make any other changes in the settings after that, so I had to uninstall and reinstall the game, all the while hoping that my settings wouldn't be saved, which thankfully they weren't.

Once I got the game running, I noticed that on the "High" graphics settings, the game was only running around 14-18 fps while in the basement and still looked pretty grainy and pixelated.  I lowered the settings down to medium, and the game was able to run between 20-32 fps and seemed to smooth out the visuals, so I left it there.  But there ended up being a whole host of other technical issues that cropped up during my playthrough, both on the Steam Deck and on my laptop (which I already knew wasn't going to run the game very well, if at all).  The most obvious problem was that the game would freeze during loading screens or become unstuck during loading screens by bringing up the menu, but then the menu would be stuck, and I couldn't exit out of the menu and was forced to force-quit entirely.

Game design-wise, there were choices that I didn't enjoy.  I understand wanting to draw inspiration from Resident Evil by having an in-game explanation for having limited saves, so while Resident Evil used typewriter ribbons and typewriters, ELISE uses quarters and arcade machines, which, for some reason, are in a zombie-infested basement bunker complex.  During my entire time playing, I was only able to find one arcade machine and after saving for the last time, using up my last quarter, I realized I was going to stop playing altogether because when I came back to the game, I found that all of the enemies had respawned.  What annoyed the hell out of me, was that I had spent close to an hour exploring the basement, found it connected to a vast complex of interconnected hallways in a connected high-tech laboratory setting without finding another arcade cabinet (to save at), and ran all the way back to the near the beginning.  The thought of having to fight my way back to where I was after having used up so much ammunition and healing kits was the antithesis of fun.  This is why the last video from this playlist series only lasted just over four minutes and at 02:25, as I look through my inventory to make sure that I have keys and healing kits that I picked up during my last game, I feel that you can see me contemplating having to go through everything that I did in Part 3 all over again; mostly anyway.

So I decided to stop playing.  There were some fun moments and I didn't overly mind the less than crisp graphics or having to frequently shoot zombies again after felling them once so that they wouldn't surprise me by popping back up all over again.  I didn't mind the absurd ragdoll physics of the zombies after they died and their bodies turned into fleshy pretzels.  I didn't mind that the knife was a single-use defensive item.  I didn't mind the narrative of finding a massive laboratory system connected to a brick and mortar basement or how long both Elise and Hank must've been out to be taken this deep into such a large complex only be be placed in a dank cell.  I didn't even mind how frequently I was killing a zombie with the same face/body/clothes/skin, and I get it, that unique assets can be expensive when you're kill count numbers in the hundreds.  But what I couldn't get behind was the design choices that ultimately led me to stop playing altogether.  There's some potential here that would need a lot more work, but for me, it was the end of the line.


~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
When the Stars Lose Their Life

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