Adventure games that want to give you the knocks: many contenders, very few chosen. You have to have a little something extra to become the new Silent Hill, the new Outlast, the new Amnesia, the new Observer, and I forget about it. Without looking more original than another, Someday You'll Return, developed by the Czechs of CBE Software, seems to have its own little thing. But is that a reason to give him a blank check?
Daniel's daughter Stela has run away. He decides to go looking for him, alone. His ex-wife is against it and wants him to call the cops. He persists. The rebel teenager, whose movements he follows thanks to his phone, fled to a corner of the Czech Republic that he knows well. A fort that he frequented for several years as a summer camp instructor. He vowed never to return. But no choice. And hardly arrived, already felt the tree, figuratively. As night approaches, a tree falls on the car. No more turning around. It is the start of a strangest trip to Moravia. In a word, did he delight us?
One day, summer internship
We can say that Someday You'll Return starts as well as the different trailers shared by CBE Software suggested. This psychological thriller keeps first of all its promise of a splendid and exotic setting which will regularly turn into a nightmare and leave us like two circles of blanks. The pretty labyrinth of greenery, which offers some not so awful points of view, can be walked until, the way of a Silent Hill, the concrete, the rust and the twisted frames do not replace the greenery. Nightmare? Slows down? Witchcraft? No doubt, we are quickly intrigued by these supernatural and horrifying changes, as by the rare encounters with mysterious characters, or downright creepy, like this disguised colossus who seems to want to dismember everything that hangs around. The multiple elements to read, the bits of the pass redial, the secret stories of a newspaper found … Without really making people cry, it helps to want to move forward. The fact remains that at the end of a big fifteen hours leading to a suitable but predictable outcome, we will have had the impression of suffering physically and psychologically alongside the hero in his long ordeal. Not exactly as the developers had planned.
went off well
Someday You'll Return, like his hero, enchanne gadin on gadin after having been believed the illusion of a clearing. Let's start with the saddest. Walking Simulator of stock, it presents a consequent number of puzzles to solve to progress. Some, a little vicious, really well thought out. Others, the majority in fact, irritating at best. The reason is that in the old point and click way, you have to find an object. Sometimes you had seen it before but couldn't interact with it. How do you know you would need it before you are told it out loud? So you have to remember its location. And this sometimes requires, as for other interactions, a scan not of a pixelated notch with your mouse, but of one or more entire areas that you cross a slightly soft pace. Especially when it requires doing a little rock climbing, which requires a good placement of the hands otherwise we return to the beginning, cross makeshift bridges or try to avoid the gaze of threatening creatures in phases of infiltration without great tension and a little erratic. And we are not talking about the use of tools or the mini-workshop of herbalist, which let glimpse some nice shots of head.
In the end, it's as simplistic as possible, painstaking, and we get tired, in the second half of the adventure, of having to run after a mushroom for potions that we would have preferred to see created automatically after having expressed the recipe a first time. Particularly because the controls have a tendency to respond incorrectly to the joystick. Ah, yes, concerning the keyboard and mouse game, the impossibility of remapping the keys is quite restrictive for those who do not live their life in QWERTY. And what about the happy bugs that force you to restart frequently.
Thank you V12 Simulator
All these technical and fun cues could be forgivable. Really. After all, in this kind of experience, the important thing remains the atmosphere, the way in which the story is told, transmitted … Except that I stop you right away: it's no. Performed in English (because there is no French localization), Someday You'll Return has a problem of staging and monstrous acting. Los has a first name. Daniel. The "hero" is this open space colleague who tells everything that happens to him live, with a monotone tone and a tendency to repeat himself in a boring manner. Certainly not helped by the people in charge of the dialogues, uninspired, and a musical atmosphere rarely in agreement with the tone of a scene, Daniel exasperated by his side Captain Obvious and completely lack of implication and conviction. You want someone who prevents you from knowing the urgency of opening a door when everything crashes around, never arrives to express their anger or their confusion, someone who completes making a game painful? If you intend to feel nothing, Daniel is your man.
