1/5 ★ – hunkypet's review of Those Who Remain.

What an infuriating experience. I haven’t been so mad at a game in a long time. Those Who Remain is a Survival Horror game and on paper ticks all the right boxes. Creepy story and setting, first person perspective and some nice looking graphics.. according to the back of the box. It even has an interesting concept of staying out the dark as this is where the creatures lurk, keep the lights on and your safe. This was a blind buy, just off of the buzz I had heard about it and it sounded right down mine and my GF street, we enjoy playing these first person survival horror games together. Well what a train wreck. I’ll get the minor problems out the way. The writing is awful, the voice acting is worse. The game is the furthest thing from scary and the graphics are glossy, shiny eye sores. We got to the halfway mark when I decided to abandon it, and in that time we encountered a couple boss encounters I guess you’d call them that. You can’t hide or really make yourself less visible to the monsters.. so you’re left to stand at the other side of the area and wait until they’re off screen and just leg it.. it was frustrating because this was a very slow approach but the only one that seemed to work and it sucked out all tension. Then I realised that they’re very slow after a few trial and error runs I started to ignore the monster as you could always run away. Now the two biggest problems. The game is basically a first person hidden item game. The gameplay loop falls into moving from environment to environment solving puzzles and on the way you get some story context. Well every puzzle boils down to finding a item hidden in an area. I could probably handle that in order to progress the story, while not well written it was intriguing enough. The problem, the real problem is control. The game has the worst first person control in any game ever. The simple task of lining up the camera to opening a draw was a nightmare. Time after time we would miss an item, stashed away in a cupboard we had looked over multiple times because we couldn’t angle the camera a specific way for it to register the action required to open the cupboard. This happened so often I finally called it a day, no story is worth the anger and frustration it was causing. Shame on these developers for releasing the game in this state. Shambolic controls. Played on PS4 Pro