Hysteria Project Review

       Hysteria Project truly is a mini. There is about ½ hour of content, and that is it. The game costs $3, so that ½ hour would have to be really, really great to justify buying it. Unfortunately, despite some cool ideas, there's not enough there.

       The game is pretty basic. You see a short video segment (and I mean real video with actors) and then you must make a decision about what the character you are controlling will do. You have two choices. If you choose the wrong one, you die. If you choose the right one, you may need to follow some onscreen prompts to press buttons as they flash on the screen. If you press the wrong button or don't press the buttons fast enough, you die. Dying sets you back to the last checkpoint.

       You wake up in a room and have to try to escape and then make your way through the woods while being pursued by a relentless axe-wielding figure. That's the gist of the story. There are a few interesting wrinkles to it. There are about 3 pretty interesting developments that happen while you are playing.

       The video quality is really bad. I imagine it looks a little better on the smaller screen of the PSP, but I was playing on my PS3, and it was pretty grainy. However, in a horror game like this, that's not the worst thing. It looks a bit like a found-footage movie, which isn't a bad look. Although if it was a few shades sharper and in HD, it would still look like found footage and be a little more palatable.

The presentation does have some good qualities to it. It is shot from a first-person perspective, and it pulls that off very well. You often see “your” arms touching branches while going through the woods and the perspective looks great when you are performing tasks. There is also a neat effect where you blink from time to time that works really well. On the other had, the action is frequently broken up by checkpoints, which save your game on a seperate screen, and the decision screens, which take you to a separate screen away from the images of the video. Both of these elements break up the flow and should have been super-imposed on the screen while the video was still rolling. It's strange that they aren't since the quick-time events are super-imposed on the moving video, so the developers obviously know how to do it. Then again, if the video rolled straight through without the screens popping up to break up the action, the game would only be 20 minutes long...
       I also think the game would be better with some gore, since it supposed to be a horror game and you die a lot. Not every horror game needs gore, but this guy pops out and chops you with an axe from time to time and the screen just turns red and you die. Some low-budget gore would be really cool and appropriate, methinks.

       The music is pretty good. It's quite dark and dread-inspiring.

       This game was obviously made by a few people in the woods on a very small budget. In order to be a better game, it would need more content, more mechanics, better video quality, and a presentation tune-up. A few of its narrative ideas are interesting. The “epilogue” of sorts that you can access after the game ends is dumb and threatens to ruin the mood of the game. A few days after playing it, I realized I barely remembered it existed, which is a bad sign. I wanted to like the game a lot, but it's a Bad Game, Tier 1.