You wake up. You're disoriented. Your head hurts. Things seem surreal, yet familiar. Your wife Martha and your daughter Dorie are not there. Why? Looking for answers, you explore your environment and fragments of memories. On your journey you are repeatedly confronted with riddling tasks, driven by the desire to find out what's going on. What happened last night? Why can't you think of any other thing aside from your days as a stage builder at the circus? As things get crazier and more bizarre, the lines between reality, memory, and imagination become more and more blurred and you realize: there is no going back. You have to do whatever it takes to bring this story to an end, no matter at what cost...

The journey was worth the effort

Reveil is a first person puzzle game which is so close to being an instant classic that it pains me to have to rip into the elements that stop it being a must buy.

By far and away the biggest issue is that for the majority of the game the developers rely on too many well worn cliches in order to bring the game to life. It feels like an on-rails offering, as you spend a lot of time just following a winding path to get to the next puzzle. While the journey is enjoyable, I did spend a little too much time feeling that the game was being ridiculously padded out.

The funhouse environment is intriguing, but has been done to death in so many game. Until Dawn: Rush of Blood set the bar... and set it high, at that... That was a VR on-rails shooter. In fact it's a crying shame that Reveil wasn't a VR game, as the immersion would have been so much more intense. And this is a game that relies on the player being fully immersed in the environment and invested in the scenario.

In the end the journey was worth the effort, but I couldn't help feeling that I was just going through the motions on a rather protracted haunted house ghost walk.

7

Nick Smithson