Grade: B
Hour long horror short story exploring a house you’ve become locked in.
“The Recipe of Madness” was a short horror game. You are here to interview a famous doctor, you walk into their home, and of course, the door locks behind you, and you are trapped. The rest of the game is an exploration of this haunted mansion. You unlock different areas with keys that you find, and as you uncover more and more parts of this mansion, you get closer to the secret truth of this doctor’s experiments.
Surreal and neat art pieces hanging on the walls.
I’m not sure if the developer of the story painted art for the walls in the house or if they found some art to pull in, but the art hung on the mansion walls you explored was gorgeous. There were surrealistic and also post-impressionistic depictions of various spooky things. The time the developer put into placing the paintings was impressive, and I found myself sitting and looking at the art for longer than almost any game I’ve played. I have captured the art for your enjoyment!
Nailed the Ambience
The developer hit a sweet spot with the object design and ambiance. You could feel a layer of dust on everything and even hanging in the air. The flashlight helped some to see, but it was a very dark set of rooms nonetheless. I imagine that the darkness might have been a turn-off or frustrating to some players, but I enjoyed it. Made it spookier and scarier. The author sold the few jump-scares much better due to the lighting.
The authors even made the toilet with a layer of dust and grime.
The biggest mystery of the game was this object I found in a random cabinet. I had no earthly idea what it was, and I couldn’t pick it up. Maybe a paperweight?
Gameplay had some gaps
The gameplay itself was nothing to write home about, and it was one of those “find a key to unlock a door” and then “find another key to unlock another door” and rinse and repeat. In addition to the doors, you find some notes which string out the storyline piece by piece.
My favorite part of the gameplay was when the rooms would shift behind me. Then, when you went to backtrack, you swore you went in the right direction, but the layout had transformed. This was disorienting and added to the horror mood.
The UI was clunky in places, and I had difficulty sometimes grabbing things, understanding what to do with the stuff I captured, and how many of each item I had acquired. There were some frustrating moments due to the clunky UI.
The writing was full of grammar mistakes, but I think the game creator was Russian, and he said in the itch comments that they struggled to translate it, so I’ll give them a pass there.
On another localization note, an interesting tidbit came up for a piano-playing puzzle. An “H” appeared as a note on the clue. I’ve taken many music classes and had never heard of “H” as a note, so this threw me for a loop. Apparently, there’s a whole story there where “H” = B natural in some country’s musical notation because of how the monks transcribed it back in the day. (Source) Whoa!
Wrap-up
Overall, in “A Recipe of Madness,” there’s a few jumps scares and horror tropes, but nothing too gory. If you have an hour or two, this makes for a lovely afternoon.
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