Reviews - Voyage of Horror mod for Amnesia: The Dark Descent

A fantastic , beautifully made mod.

This was pretty enjoyable! To start things off this is probably my favourite mod of the author so far, whose work I found mostly controversial in other mods such as the Hunting Grounds series. It looks like the solo format worked out better for this one. I will break down my points into 3 categories below.

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Good:

- The design is very atmospheric, and uses the content from AMFP well, with a pinch of Amadeus and other larger projects from the past in there.
- The outside sections is particular looked sublime!
- Monsters were overall good choices for the theme, even the AI being stupid - on the first one - in some ways helped the concepts behind it (being an undeveloped child or so).
- The recurring monster had GOOD MUSIC. This is very rare in custom stories, where music usually just takes away any surprise factor an encounter might have. Here it finely increased tension.
- Music overall was enjoyable, kudos to the composer!
- Player goals were clear, and I like the way progression was set up.
- Puzzles are nothing too refreshing, but for the author's first scripting work, they do the job fine in most cases, and aren't overcomplicated without clues (didn't have to check a walkthrough once).
- The bossfight was quite enjoyable with the point above in mind, nice of you to include such a thing for the finale!

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Mediocre:

- Voice acting had overall better quality than I remember in the Hunting Groudn series where I often felt like they lean into very low quality.
- The actors however didn't really resonate/relate all that well with their characters, but for the amount that was put in there, it was okay.
- I didn't like the little subsections at first that held seemingly nothing on first glance, but later on with the Lab puzzle they all made sense. However in these later sections I think you introduced a bit too much backtracking that might set some players off (especially the 3 keys in the other world!)
- Player character reacts strangely to certain smaller events, like no scare / concern when seeing the blood pool did indeed belong to his wife (that he mentioned earlier).
- Resources such as oil and tinderboxes were a bit too excessive when it comes to amounts, and I wasn't really trying to save them.
- I didn't really see a reason why so many blockboxes and static objects were placed. In AMFP, the reason was for you can focus on the story and narration, but in here I'd say that was a bit unnecessary because..

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Bad / Things to improve next time:

- The story was not nearly as complex to actually be Lovecraftian. I felt like creatures from the mithology were included in some texts only to justify this designation. The areas while being nice also lacked the weird aspect of said mithology, and the "other world" looked way too much like the one we started in. To give an example, the narration mentioned irregular shapes, or black spheres on the sky, but we didn't really even see ANY sky there once..
- The setting and the buildup lacked any kind of mysticism to further reinforce above statement.
In gameplay we saw nothing supernatural for a while and the player actions nicely unfolded, while on the other hand we were bombarded with squid creatures on the loading screen and an obsession with the unknown that felt like it served no purpose.
- All that would have been forgiven, especially as the author's first solo work on a story, if the proofreading / english in general wasn't downright AWFUL. Please ask someone with native or at least experienced english for proofreading, as it really broke immersion almost every time I was reading a note.

All in all, I liked this mod. I think that tackling a lovecraftian theme requires a bit more story complexity, and a lot more work in the proofreading department. Good job on making it on your own, but don't hesitate to call upon help next time if you need it!

Feel free to submit this as-is on the Steam Workshop with the next update applied (and mentioned proofreading if you can help it), you could benefit from more players playing it there!
If you don't mind a bit of extra work you can even make use of my AMFP asset pack submitted there with instructions, but at this stage of the mod that is highly optional, just spend the well deserved rest.

EDIT: Some of the issues have been corrected, and I added proofreading myself, so the mod is now closer to a 8.5.

Amazing!!

very awesome cs