The old saying 'hard work pays off' still holds true today, no matter if it's a game, a movie, a book, whatever. When we receive a finished project, we should always take into account how much work went into it.

A lot of reviewers complain about the combat mechanics. Most people are have gotten lazy in that games are forgiving now and allow a lot of button smashing during combat. This require intentional precision. It's not hard, just older style and takes some adjustment. Past Cure is a third person psychological thriller action game developed by Phantom 8 Studio. Phantom 8 is a small 8 person development team based in Berlin and this is their first game. Past Cure is highly cinematic, near the level of a Max Payne game, and it has around the same type of gameplay as a Max Payne game as well.

And that is true when it comes to indie developers.

We've seen indie developers rise from financial struggles and problems with their own internal decisions to pull out an amazing product that they feel comfortable with and hope the vast majority will enjoy. In some cases, it pans out great.

Not this time. No sir. Nope.

Past Cure is a perfect example of a game developed by a new studio with little to no experience in the gaming industry but with hopes to bring a product that many would enjoy. Here, however, things clearly fell off the track, despite promising trailers and 'game awards' to back them up.

The Story? I Wish I Knew.

Here's how the developers explain the game:

Past Cure is a dark psychological thriller that blurs the lines between dreams and reality. An intense, cinematic, story-driven experience that challenges the player to use mind-bending mental abilities to survive.

You follow Ian, a troubled ex-soldier with no explanation as to how he was able to afford a two million-dollar house in the middle of nowhere. He has psychic powers that will never be explained along with amnesia from being abducted. Ian tries to find the cure to his power and a lead to the people who abducted him and gave him these powers. His brother Marcus, whom you never see, tells him that there's a drug called 'Nexus' that gives the user powerful abilities. So it's up to Ian to find the president of the company that developed Nexus.

You enter these dreamlike sequences as your sanity starts to fade. And let me tell you, the only redeeming quality of these sequences is the Milk Men. They never explain who they are or how they affect your sanity, but they're there, and that's all you need to know, I guess.

What's worse is that there's an inconsistency in how the story builds up because it doesn't have enough time (or budget) to build a story around the world, so you're left with bare details. They barely tackle any subject or conflict, and when they do, they drag out poorly conceived segments, assuming that doing so will build tension. It's like reading a comic book by a 12-year-old -- there's little to no detail, but in their mind, it's a MASTERPIECE.

Gameplay? Good Luck With That.

Past Cure struggles with what it wants to be. It pushes the agenda for an 'action vs. stealth' type of a game, where you can choose what path you want to take to progress through a linear level, only to be guided to one enemy. The controls are atrocious and poorly implemented. Ian moves like a sloth, and controlling his aim is close to impossible, with no thought-out targeting scheme. Your dead-angle will struggle to aim correctly, your shots will recoil like crazy as you struggle to play how the game wants you to, and most importantly, HAND-TO-HAND COMBAT is a no-go. Otherwise, you're forced into a 'cinematic fight' while you're getting shot at.

Standing beetweem you and your destination are 12 perilous puzzles, each with four levels of difficulty. But beware, this is no ordinary challenge.

The stealth segments in Past Cure are a joke. There's no reason to sneak around when the enemies present little to no threat. Crouching is sluggish and slow, and sneaking around will just drag out the game.

The progression in this game is not thought out at all, and they drag every sequence and tutorial till they can milk the four-hour time frame.

To summarize the controls in this game: The game doesn't want you to have fun and play the game with fluid controls; the game wants you to play how the game wants you to -- slow, clunky, and forced.

You know it's bad when the developer barely shows any gameplay depicting shooting at the bad guys. If anything, they'll show off a small, two-second clip on their twitter of them head-shotting a guy.

Visuals? Eh. Sound? Ha!

Using Unreal Engine 4 to the best of their abilities, the developers seem to have taken every preset object they downloaded and placed them wherever they seem to fit. Gotta fill up space? Just fill it up with random tables and chairs since you have no creativity.

Of course the game is going to look slightly presentable when it's built using Unreal Engine 4, but they do not use it to the best of their abilities. And it's clear once you see the whole game that any traces of exciting sequences that we were shown in the trailer were poorly implemented within the game.

This poor implementation includes the sound design. Sound is a very important feature to a game, as it helps build tension, excitement, and a calm atmosphere. Well, you can throw your hopes and dreams away because Past Cure is another example of using stock sound effects and stock music. Every second that passed by with repeating instrumentals was another second that I could have used to play a better game, like Max Payne 3.

Final Verdict

Usually it's okay to give small indie studios a pass since they have a lower budget and often an inexperienced team. The team behind Past Cure should be given some credit, as they didn't get their game crowdfunded and started off with a small team.

However, that shouldn't give them a pass for the game's horrible presentation and the fact that they still ask for your time to play through the game and give it a chance. This is not a spoiler, but during the credits, they had the decency to list the people who left the project during production and still thanked them.

I would not ask anyone to try this game out.

Clearly far too grand to actually pull off because Past Cure is hilariously awful.The game, an alleged psychological thriller, centres around a man, who is of course called Ian, who awakens one day with psychic powers, three years missing from his memory, and some recurring nightmares and hallucinations. Ian combats the downsides of his afflictions by using medication to ‘refill his sanity’ (that’s how it’s put in-game). Ian then attempts to use his powers to uncover the reason for his strange situation and the find meaning behind his visions. It sounds far more interesting than it turns out, believe me.

The game’s opening sets the stall for five hours of an absolute shitshow of disorganisation and underwhelming execution. Ian, in his ‘dream state’ walks from room to room in a surprisingly bland dilapidated house. As he enters a room, the doors shut and you have to watch to see which door lights up red. An enemy (one of four ever-so-slightly-different flavors) known as a ‘Porcelain Man’ shambles out and you shoot him into rubble.

Then you get to leave and enter the next room.This pattern is repeated multiple times, with slight escalation.As an entry way into the game’s themes, mechanics, and ideas, it’s almost perfect because it nails the feeling of the remaining play time in that it’s nonsensical, poorly executed, and utterly laughable. The most compelling thing about Past Cure is in wanting to see if it ever manages to stick the landing on an idea, a mechanic, or even a plot point.

It never does, but it’s ghoulish fun to try and see anyway.The strongest suit Past Cure has is in its visuals, and even that feels like ridiculously faint praise. The art style for the nightmare world certainly exceeds the mundane ‘real world’ sections.

It pulls off the odd neat, if incredibly hackneyed, trick when it tries to tackles some of Ian’s head trips, and there’s a smidgen of smart simplicity to the idea of the Porcelain Men. That’s about it really. In passing, Past Cure looks entirely reasonable, even the technical side of it isn’t as shabby as I’d suspected it would be, with some decent cutscene direction. It is however, a far cry from the quality it believes it has. Also, what the hell is up with Ian’s off-centre head?

The slack-jawed mouth movements are far more disturbing than anything in the nightmare world too. Character movement is fiddly, making the combat an even more unpleasant experience than the poor design manages on its own.

The abilities (all two of ’em!) Ian gains are dismal copies of ones found elsewhere (if there could be an award for dullest, most pointless, bullet time mode). Astral Projection is the better of the two. It's used to mess with electronics and invade characters' minds. Of course, its implementation is cack-handed. Most of the ‘interference’ is banal, and mind-jacking occurs twice in poorly-scripted sections. Slo-mo is just utterly, utterly pointless, as you’re never in enough danger to warrant using it, and it hasn’t an ounce of ‘cool’ to it if and when you do decide to use it.The game claims to have puzzles, but these are only truly taxing if you are in fact not a human being, but a house brick that found itself plopped in front of the telly. If being told to ‘go here, press this’ is something you might find especially puzzling, then Past Cure is a mind-blower.The story?

Oh well the story isto put it kindly, nonsense. Past Cure’s failure to stick to one thing is its ultimate downfall. Much like the game itself, the story feels like it was stapled together from several rejected scripts for several different films. There’s little coherence, and every conversation sounds like over-saturated narration, even when two characters are supposed to be talking to one another. It’s not terrible, it’s incomprehensible.

If there was any hope it’d all tie up nicely by the time the game’s finale rolls around, you’d be sorely disappointed. It would help if the voice acting was even a little bit decent.

Of course it is not. Even by the expected standard for a small studio title such as this, the acting is horrendous. Absolutely nobody involved sounds remotely interested or emotionally invested in the lines they’re reading. While it is hard to blame them when every line sounds like an infomercial for the benefits of All-Bran to begin with, it really does not excuse voice acting that ranks so far below the term amateur, it would be embarrassing at an infant school play.The saving grace for Past Cure, the thing that makes it a minuscule notch above the of PS4 games available, is that many of its issues arise simply because the developer had such high ambition for Past Cure. There’s a modicum of sympathy to be had in that regard, but does it stop Past Cure being a rubbish dump paella of a game? No, because lofty hopes or not, the execution of Past Cure is nothing short of shambolic.

Ambition still requires a degree of skill and understanding, and it is clearly not on display here.Reviewer provided own retail copy for this review. No, we don’t know why either.