3/5 ★ – Cryophage's review of Amanda the Adventurer.

"It's ok... but only ok." Making a good horror game is extraordinarily difficult. One cannot just create a game with good game mechanics, as those mechanics must work in tandem with the horror elements to create an immersive, atmospheric experience. When the gameplay fails to amplify one’s fear and the scares fall short of providing fear in the first place, the game starts to fall flat on its face. Such is the case with the recently released Amanda the Adventurer, a horror game that looked promising when it began life as a Game Jam project but became dissatisfying due to its lackluster atmosphere. The major issue that the game suffers from is a lack of scariness. Horror is subjective, but the scares that Amanda the Adventurer presents border on downright goofiness. Most of the tapes follow a similar pattern wherein the characters do a mundane activity, events progressively get weirder, Amanda gets angry if you do not get answers right, and you move on to the next puzzle. This repetitive pattern starts weak and eventually causes the horror atmosphere to wane. The game does conjure genuinely unsettling moments at times, but these instances do not occur often enough to avoid the dilution of the player’s horror due to the plethora of downright goofy moments. The main threat of the game also fails in its efforts to frighten the player. Most of the game’s bad endings will end in a monster showing up in the attic and promptly killing the player. However, this monster- the only threat of losing the game- only appears in the endings wherein one has already lost. Once one realizes this, the horror atmosphere utterly fails as the player does not need to worry or fear any scenario the game could offer. This lack of consistently scary content causes the experience to de-evolve from a mysterious horror atmosphere to a themed escape room. However, the game makes up for the lack of scares with all the puzzles the game features. The initial puzzles seem ludicrously simple to solve, but they only give the player a disappointing and brief bad ending. Only when the player starts to dig a little deeper into their surroundings and into the contents of the tapes themselves does the game’s offerings begin to unfold into interconnected puzzles. These additional puzzles still come across as relatively simple when compared to other horror games like Silent Hill, but they still provide plenty of enjoyment. The game could also feature more replayability or content. Even with all the puzzles and content, reaching the best ending does not take more than two hours. Discovering all the secret colored tapes add a decent number of extra secrets to find but leaves one wanting more in terms of the lore, the characters, and the gameplay. It also leaves replayability dead in the water as the game only features the static, unchanging puzzles as its best qualities. All in all, I give Amanda the Adventurer a 6/10.