An intriguing narrative is interrupted by long bouts of boring wave-based shooting against generic enemies in dull locations. I can’t help but think of the early moments in Ian’s house, seeing ceramic horrors in reflections and being excited for a cinematic psychological-horror action game that would never come to be.
I was surprised I enjoyed the game where it has been improved now. Clearly the graphics and cutscenes are still not really good but thanks to the great variety the atmosphere and interesting story some potential. I was also impressed that with so few people and little money can make a game like this... alone for that I give a big plus!
I’ve played the game before and now I played again with the new patch 1.05 and complete it from a couple of hours and I must really say it makes the game much better! With the changes you have more horror sections and the boring areas are removed. The gameplay makes now more fun ^^ New abilities are also handy. The bed voice acting it’s almost remove only in the prison level it’s still there xD Also the bad cutscenes
have been removed but there are still a few that do not look so good. It is really great that the developers have made the effort and published a very good patch! :)
Past Cure is a mixture of good intentions: unfortunately, it ends up putting too much flesh on the fire, and attempting to keep together various playful and narrative elements, it fails to deepen anyone. The result is a dull, tedious experience, with unjustified difficulty peaks and terribly long, boring sections.
Past Cure is many things: technically infuriating, a slog, and thematically inconsistent. While one can appreciate the effort of a small team trying to craft a game that does many things, it can't seem to do any of them well enough to warrant any attention. With a glut of better games that tackle similar elements on the platform, it's very difficult to recommend Past Cure to people, even as a quick diversion.
Even without the bugs, Past Cure is a bad game that you should pass on. The story is barely there and nonsensical, the voice acting and writing are atrocious, and the gameplay just isn't enjoyable. If anything, Past Cure gave me more respect for the games it tries to imitate, instead of doing any favors for itself.
There's no denying that Past Cure is born from lofty ambitions. Regrettably, those ambitions are not joined with the necessary skill or understanding needed to make Past Cure anything close to a competent, coherent experience. A messy bore of a game that vomits its incoherent nonsense on your shoes as it rambles on mindlessly for ten minutes about why that's important.
What Past Cure is:
1. A psychological thriller
2. Old school
3. Slow paced
4. Max Payne meets Second Sight, with a hint of David Cage
5. Fun, if you don't need to have the video game equivalent of jingling car keys in your face to keep you entertained.
6. Abstract as Hell
What Past Cure isn't:
1. A horror game
2. Well polished
3. A Triple A Title
4. Quantum Break, Silent Hills, or The Evil Within
5. Cohesive
I enjoyed the game very much, but then again I am able to judge a game on its own merits, rather than the merits of games I think it should be more like. It has its flaws, but I do not think that they detract from the game too much.
Past Cure
All over the place
Pasture Cure is a 6 hour long game about a former soldier named Ian.. youre dealing with memory loss due to an experiment that was done to you…
The game starts in a dream, where youre introduced to woman.. and the game is set around trying to understand this dream and the different figures in this dream, and government projects, and pills, and mind powers.. but assigning a single genre to this game just isn’t possible.
Past cure is all over the place with what it is.. and some of these things are good.. some not so good..
And depending on the type of player you are you may actually end up really hating certain parts of this game and loving others…
Theres a great focus on narrative which is perfect for a game delivered in the way that it is..
Theres an interesting story full of intrigue to pull you through the section of the game you may not like.. as really there are no repeating sections here..
The game at first is a resident evil styled horror game as youre learning the shooting mechanics…
It feels like a quantic dream styled game while youre running around your home, and then all of a sudden it’s back to dream land where youre doing puzzles with your telekensis and time manipulation powers.. but this is really just the game using a clever tutorial to teach you how to manipulate later sections of the game…
As youre then in a 3rd person shooter, health pickups and blue pills are important here as youll be using your powers and taking damage as youre taking out enemies from behind, grabbing their guns and getting into gun fights.. using your telekinesis to take out cameras to not alert more..
But now all of a sudden it’s a hitman feeling stealth game which was my personal least favorite chapter of the game where time manipulation is now important are being detected fails the mission sending you back to the last autosave
and then bits feel like dishonored while youre trying to crack safes, then youre in a horror outlast feeling chapter with puzzles and stealthy sections with monsters you cant attack
The game is non stop changing things up which is really great if youre into variety..
Its also great because it stop the game from feeling boring or like a drag to get through
Its bad however because none of these chapters feel like quality chapters indevidually, it’s a bunch of mediocre versions of really great games and genres stapled together, though the sum ends up being greater than its parts…
As an experience its an overall enjoyable one
The 3rd person shooting is probably what will stand out as the worst aspect of this game..
The hit detection is just awful.. you feel like youre getting lucky everytime you finally take out an enemy… but these moments are spaced out and checkpoints are frequent enough for them to not feel like too much of a hastle
Past Cure is a hard game to describe, but if its anything its like nothing you’ve experienced before and everything you’ve experienced before all at the same time.
Sometimes this is a 3rd person shooter, sometimes this is a horror games, and sometimes this is a stealth game.
Its unique and worth checking out.
I give Past Cure
a 6.5/10
This game had a lot of potential. It was ruined by a vague storyline with very little character development. The game-play was fun but the lack of a solid story really took away from the experience.
The only good thing are the music in some points, puzzles and the closed enviroment in chapter 6, the action gameplay it's barely enjoyable, the graphics like ps3 at most, the story it's totally unclear and open, and if there is something original, i didn't saw it. Unless they acquire a better mechanism for graphics and gameplay and better ideas in the script, Phantom 8 should work with puzzles games and with an impotent protagonist because that's the only think enjoyable.
Past cure review
"Well i beat the game and it as Probablly one of the most underwhelming disappointing games I've ever played and i have played ALOT of games. It's not bad per se just very generic and kind of a slog to get through and It's not even that long either. When you beat it you will more Likely be confused and disappointed.
Graphics: the graphics are decent a little plain looking but not horrible. Characters model look ok aside from the very few enemy variety. Some muddy textures and screen tearing here and there but far from the worst thing about this game
Sound: ok the guns and sound effects are pretty good, music is ok if forgettable. The voice acting however is atrocious. I swear at times it sounds like voice actors spoke lines through an old telephone or old communicator it sounds horrible. The voice acting for the characters is also quite bad and there are no emotions in the voices.
Story: the story makes no **** sense. Nothing gets explained, it's so full of plotholes and throwaway characters. Nothing feels important and when things try to get interesting the writing and dialogue just pull you out of the experience. Terrible story overall
Gameplay: it's ok and works but it's generic and clunky. Headshots don't connect all the time and enemies can feel bullet spongy. The ai is spotty mostly dumb with the occasional "all seeing eye" here and there. The game is broken up into parts 3rd person shooter/stealth and part survival horror/puzzle
The shooter/stealth parts are generic and kind of boring especially the damn car park level where everything looks the same. You can use stealth, sneak attack enemies, shoot/melee your way through levels or use your astral projection to disable cameras and stealth through levels but going guns blazing works too (except
one level where you have to use stealth or be auto failed over and over). The survival horror part is the best in the game but it's over too soon and avoiding enemies is incredibly easy especially with the time manipulation ability. Though there aren't many,Puzzles are generic and easy but not bad.
Performance: very poor. The game crashed on me multiple times especially near the end where i had to restart boss battles or difficult stealth sections which really pissed me off and took me out of the game. I even got stuck on random objects in the level which i had to restart, but the worse part is defintely the crashes. Some framerate drops here and there but nothing too bad surprisngly. Overall very poor performance. I know it's an indie but there is no reason for the game to have this many problems in performance. Maybe the developers can remedy these in a patch but i doub't they care enough despite the closing comment before the credits.
Conclusion: this game really disappointed me. I really wanted to like it because of it's cool concept but the performance problems, generic gameplay, boring level design, annoying stealth section and short length prevent it from being as good as trailers made it seem. It's not the worst game I ever played or even one of the worst but it's far from good and I can't recommend it because of these major faults. I commend the developers for trying but it just didn't work out. What we're left is with a generic badly written action horror game that is a chore to play through and not worth the $29.99 asking price. Hopefully the developers learn from their mistakes if they decide to make a sequel or a whole other ip.
4/10
TL;DR
A generic game that is badly written, performs terribly, and just isn't fun to play. It has good ideas and a nice concept but lackluster gameplay and short length add to the myriad of problems past cure has, not recommended.
SummaryPast Cure is a dark psychological thriller that blurs the lines between dreams and reality. An intense, cinematic, story driven experience, blending stealth and combat gameplay. Players are challenged to use an array of skills varying from powerful time bending mental abilities to brutal melee combat and stealth kills.
After his years o...