Review: Play With Me (Steam)

Play With Me is a point and click adventure game inspired by the horror movie SAW, where the player has to escape a serial killer.

Story

In Play With Me, you play as Robert, a journalist who is investigating the murders committed by a serial killer only known to the press as Illusion. One day Robert and his wife Sara are kidnapped by Illusion and Robert is forced to go through trials set by the killer. At this point Robert has to complete these trials to save himself and his wife.

The story in Play With Me is decent, but it’s nothing really special. It’s all very basic and you can see all the plot twists from a mile away. That said, what is presented on-screen is decent enough to keep you engaged from start to finish.

Graphics

The art style of Play With Me is basic to say the least. All the environments are well done and they’re  creepy. They have decent lighting and this presents a really good atmosphere, but the lights flickering is something I couldn’t handle throughout my time playing. It made a lot of the puzzles harder to solve, and I eventually had to turn it off.

One big problem with Play With Me is that a lot of answers to puzzles are written on walls. Since the resolution is so low, it sometimes is way too hard to make out what and where the answer is written.

Audio

Audio is the biggest setback to Play With Me. The voice acting and music just doesn’t work for me. I’m not joking when I say this, but the voice acting in this game is some of the worst I’ve ever heard through all my years of playing. Everyone does a really terrible job with the acting and it really ruins the tension in some moments of the game.

The music along with the sound effects don’t allow a player to enjoy the game. A lot of it is just stock horror music you can get for free. Now, I know not everyone can compose new tracks for their game, but at least try to find some tracks that are not used by every low-budget horror game on the market.

Gameplay

Play With Me is at heart an escape room puzzle game. You know, the ones you can find on flash game sites, where there’s usually a timer and you have to solve multiple puzzles to escape.  Play With Me has random puzzles for each player, so looking up a walk-through won’t really help. The game has multiple rooms, each with different solutions on how you need to get out, ranging from hacking a computer, to using real life things such as a mirror to help you solve your puzzles.

These puzzles seem really cool, up until half way through when you start to notice that almost every room has the same puzzle. There are different ways of solving it and some of the solutions are really cryptic, to the point where you want to pull out your hair out of frustration. In the end when you finish a really hard puzzle you feel really good, yet sometimes you just completely lose faith in the game allowing you to continue on. The first play through of the game is around 3 hours, after that first play through you can cut that time to a single hour if not even less. Plus, there are 5 different endings, which increases the replay value.

Verdict

Play With Me is a fun game, although it has serious flaws that make the game not as good as it could have been. An adventure game based of the infamous SAW films is a great concept but it doesn’t reach its full potential here. Hopefully when the dev makes his next game, s/he will nail it.

Note: This game was reviewed with a code provided by a publisher/developer.