“One Eye Open” by Colin Sandel and Carolyn VanEseltine
Had you known the bloody history of Corona Labs, you would never have signed up as a test subject. But now, plunged into that history, surrounded by the damned and the dying, you must find the truth. Perhaps you will even survive it.
More horror. I’m not thrilled, but I do hear potential in the blurb. I’ll be spoiling below.
Please be advised that One Eye Open is a horror game. It contains mature content (including blood, gore, human injury and death, mild language, tobacco reference, violence, and violent references.)
We do not recommend this game for a younger audience.
Would you like to proceed? (y/n) >
No, no, I say again no! Believe it or not, I’m not a fan of horror. Having been offered a choice, I’m tempted to answer NO and give this an NR.
For completeness, I’ll give this a try.
Hmm. Bleeding photographs. Fake trees becoming real trees. We’ve got some drugs/insanity/unreliable narrator stuff going on. This is so much like the last game I played that I’m thoroughly discouraged. Must… keep… going…
…
Well, I failed once. I guess it was pretty stupid to open that interior door. I’m done for now, but my opinion of this game has almost entirely reversed since I started playing.
I think this is the best execution of a horror setting that I’ve seen this year! Though the mature content warning is merited, the extreme imagery is used with great skill – a general sense of claustrophobia and doom is punctuated by frightening discoveries. And curiously, the horror mixes insane demonic visions with classic slasher flick – and it kind of blends together okay.
The slight psychic ability of the protagonist gives you a little control over the situation. I assume my objective is more or less to collect all of these papers I find lying around, and to escape the insane hospital if I can (needs a light source?). It took me a while to get a feel for my ability to ‘see’ the past, but gradually getting a grasp of that worked really well.
I didn’t finish the game, but I really want to go back and give it another shot. I want to find out what could possibly be bringing the building to life with giant fangs and also eating people from the inside out. That’s saying something, since I don’t really like this genre.
Verdict: A-