by: Michael Barnes

Reader, I’m going to level with you. I didn’t play through all of Amy, the newly released survival horror title available on the Xbox Live Marketplace and coming soon to PSN. Regardless of my professional obligation to do so, I simply could not stomach more than about four hours’ worth of this utterly wretched video game- one that I would definitely slate in a list of this console generation’s rock-bottom worst.

So if you demand that a reviewer see the end credits to establish their credibility in assessing a game, this isn’t the review for you. But after futzing around with the ham-handed controls, trying to make sense of the trope-laden story, and wondering how in the living hell this technically incompetent game got through Microsoft’s quality assurance and approval processes I can tell you with authority that there is nothing in the balance of the game beyond what I played that could possibly alter my opinion of it. No story or gameplay twist can salvage it. The only ending sequence that would be acceptable in my eyes would be a video of the developers apologizing directly to me for taking my money and wasting my time.

Sure, not finishing the game means that I’ll likely never know the full story of Amy, the “verbally challenged” little girl that requires literal handholding throughout the game’s extended escort mission set against a vaguely futuristic zombie apocalypse. Nor will I ever find out what happens to her handholder, Lana, as she battles zombies with a crowbar and spouts some of the most inane, trite dialogue ever spoken in a video game. And thank sweet heaven on high I’ll never know the story behind Marcello, the idiotic thug that the ladies meet early on following an inexplicable train crash. Note to game writers- characters that speak in “weezes”, “deezes”, and “youzes” sort of undermine any kind of spooky horror atmosphere.

Not that the game has any despite its flailing attempts to nick story elements from pretty much every horror video game you’ve ever played. Yet the scares are more cheap carnival funhouse shocks than existential Silent Hill dread. Apparently, the folks that made this game also managed to get “dark atmosphere” confused with “dark graphics”. The look is so murky and muddy that even with the gamma correction cranked up it’s hard to see anything. Not that you’d really want to get an eyeful of the game’s crude textures and horrifying character models, but still. It’s at least nice to be able to see where you’re going.

Vagueness is just one problem in the laundry list of sins against good game design that this junk game commits. Objectives are unclear, and too often confusion results in death at the hands of a one-shotting boss or Amy getting stuck somewhere and dying. And that means replaying 10 or 20 minutes of the game due to a checkpoint system that must be a sign that Lexis Numerique harbors contempt for people that play this game. Expect to play through each of the game’s chapters in a single sitting. You can’t save halfway through them, and the checkpoints that are there are few and far between.