Remember all those really bad but funny horror movies from the past where people are trapped inside someplace and really bad stuff starts happening and nobody knows why or how? Those movies can really be entertaining and fun despite how bad it may seem, but Oz Orwell and The Crawling Chaos...not so much.

You are Oz Orwell - e-famous for your videos of yourself in several haunted houses across America and Europe. You are called a fraud (like most internet celebrities, you have haters) so you decide to put an end to that by going to the famous "Angst Mansion" in Italy, where many people have gone missing throughout the years and not that many people even think about going anywhere near that place. Before you can say "it’s going down" you get trapped inside the mansion without any clue whatsoever to what happened and why you are there. And I mean it - there are barely any clues to what you are supposed to be looking for.

How It Plays

This is a point and click adventure - there is really not that much to it than that. You can combine your items to make new things, and you can examine them, but that is the only thing you do in the whole game. This makes it really simple to play, but also really boring for people that are probably not into these types of games.

While Oz Orwell and the Crawling Chaos is easy to pick up and play (there is a tutorial option on the main menu but it is not very helpful at all) there are moments in the game where you will get stuck and will not know what to do unless you truly pay attention to every little single detail. It is not impossible to find things out, but it will make things really frustrating since the game does not give you any sort of hint of what you have to do or where you have to go based on what the characters tell you and the items you find throughout the story. So if, like I said, you do not pay close attention to detail, be prepared to do a lot of trial and error.

How It Looks And Sounds

Oz Orwell and the Crawling Chaos is not the most graphically advanced game there is out there. It looks OK for the most part, but there are some rooms in the mansion that look really plain or way too dark. This is quite the problem since some of the items you need to search for and pick up to advance in the story are really unnoticeable unless you look really closely to and start moving the cursor to every corner in the room to find the item you are searching for. This only adds up to the frustration, since, again, you do not have hints to help you out.

What is worse is that there is not a graphics option to at least try and fix the lighting, which is a total let down considering this is a PC game - no customization at all. While the graphics are not horrible, they do not help you at all during the game either.

As for the music, be prepared to be listening to the same generic creepy tune throughout the entire game. There are moments where you hear other music, but it is only for short moments and it still sounds as generic as the main one.

Is The Story Any Good?

The story starts out slow and you do not get any sense of it developing until Day 2, but once it gets going it starts to really kick in and drag you in. The downfall is that it really seems clichéd and dumb most of the time.

The story itself is kind of intriguing but it is not as polished as other games and it truly falls apart in the end. I won’t spoil much, but the ending had me going "That’s it?!" You discover so much in the game they could easily expand on and tell you more about what is happening and why you are trapped inside the house, but you only get little or no explanation at all. While there are Lovecraft references in the game, they are just there with little to force the shock factor and have no meaning at all.

This is supposed to be a horror game and while there are some spooky moments, they are just there to get a jump out of you. The Resident Evil series does this, but there is at least a sense of danger in them. In Oz Orwell and the Crawling Chaos, you pretty much expect them all the way and since the visuals are bad, you do not even know what is you are supposed to be scared about! Not even the "mind tricks" in this game are scary, and there are only a few moments where it tries that.

The Verdict

Oz Orwell and the Crawling Chaos is a really big disappointment. The game is playable and does not have any game breaking bugs or glitches, but between the boring gameplay, mediocre graphics, and terrible music, this does not hold up to what you would expect based on the story. It is not worth of your time and money.

Midian Design is an indie developer from overseas, I will give them that, but if you release something like this to the public, you should at least try to put something way more decent than this. And while the game is really cheap, it is pretty much cheaply made.

Price: $3.99
Acquisition Method: Promo code provided by publisher