Scary Rant About 'Uncanny Valley'

I decided to try another indie horror game. This one was a lot more obscure than the others I've played, but it was reasonably well received, so I decided to give it a try. I got to an ending, of which the game claims there are many, but there were so many frustrations along the way that I don't know if I'll be returning to it.

Credit where Credit is Due

Before I launch into the main point of this article, which are my complaints about the game, I do want to point out some of its positive qualities. For one, it looks and sounds great. Its visuals use pixel art, but it doesn't necessarily draw its style from a specific retro game.

Pixel art combined with complex lighting is an aesthetic I can appreciate, and the game sounds good as well. I also enjoyed the player character's expressive animations, especially when running. And even though the characters' sprites are basic, good design ensures you'll always tell them apart.

I've mentioned in the last few horror articles that a lot depends on when the game puts its cards on the table and reveals exactly what the deal is. This is another point in Uncanny Valley's favor. It has a few dreamlike visions involving scary shadowy figures, but in terms of the 'real world,' there is a lot of build-up. In the game you play as a recently hired security guard. You're tasked with looking after a building that recently fell out of use and make sure nothing bad happens while the powers that be figure out what to do with it. To get to work you have to walk through a dark forest every night, and you can't properly use your flashlight while running, so it's always a little tense, even if nothing ever happens. I spent several nights patrolling the abandoned building and piecing the information together before anything scary happened. You could even find tapes and listen to them to find out more about what was going on, and initially, it was satisfying to interact with the characters and start figuring out what had really happened in this old building.

But when the building lost power in the story, the game completely lost its momentum and all the small but frustrating design problems came crashing down on top of it.

Bad Communication Kills

For context, I'll give you a quick explanation of how the game works. It's another 2D puzzle exploration game that functions much like a point and click adventure. It comes closest to Silence of the Sleep, a game I played recently, as you can also run, use a flashlight and use items on objects.

The text boxes in Uncanny Valley are rather small. This would be fine if the characters barely spoke, but they actually have a lot to say. This results in sentences getting cut off in the middle a lot and forces you to press the button to continue the dialogue constantly if a character has more than a three word sentence to say. In spite of the importance of the dialogue, the developer decided not to let it interrupt the gameplay - so you can walk around and interact with things with the dialogue box still overhead and can only progress the dialogue with a separate key from the interact key. To be specific, you interact with E and progress dialogue with the space bar. Problem is, moving around or interacting with stuff can overlap the dialogue, and in some cases, even glitch it out to the point that two dialogue boxes appear on top of each other.

This separation between the dialogue and gameplay caused me endless frustrations as I played the game. Sometimes my character would be right on the edge of a screen transition. A dialogue box would suddenly appear and I would instinctively press E to progress it, only to move to a new screen and skip over the dialogue entirely - or a character would be talking to me, I'd press E to progress, which accidentally had me examine an object and skip the dialogue as well. In a game that revolves around mystery and figuring out vague clues, it's completely unacceptable to be able to just easily miss dialogue like that. There was even an occasion where I, somehow, managed to go right back to bed after waking up. I interacted with the bed, the character said "I shouldn't be sleeping on the job," I pressed E again and then he proceeded to sleep on the job. No separate question or option, just the fact that I pressed interact twice had me make what could've been a fatal decision against my will. The game also aggressively autosaves at every step to ensure you can't just jump back a step.

At one point, a major story progression occurred, and the lights in the building went off. I received an objective to fix the lights by turning on the power again, but it was very unclear how. I don't know if the lack of clarity was because the developer failed to write proper instructions, or if the weird way the dialogue was implemented caused me to skip over the explanation. Regardless, I found myself stuck on this objective and actually think I got an ending before ever resolving it.

From this point onward, I'm not sure if the game was glitched, but the player character went from regularly speaking to barely speaking or interacting at all, even when he really should. For example, at one point, I found the corpse of a recently deceased person, but could not interact with it. The player character never acknowledged it and continued on his merry way without this gruesome discovery affecting progression in any way, even though it really should have, as the body was in the same shed I needed to go to to fix the power. The player character also refused to try to fix the power, simply stating that he didn't want to "mess with it."

The way I reached an ending seemed like a series of complete non-sequiturs. I found car keys in one of the apartments, used them on a car parked in front of the building, crashed into some gangsters, got beat up and then woke up in a home with a wife the player character didn't know, even though she identified him as her husband. I found another corpse that I couldn't interact with in the storage room, tried to use a glass shard on it just to see if anything would work, but apparently I dragged the item too close to the main character because he proceeded to attempt suicide with the glass shard. This then led to an ending that was much, much more horrifying than the suicide would have been. I won't spoil it, but it was bad enough that I might not want to go back even if the game wasn't a frustrating mess. I remember sighing and rolling my eyes in exasperation several times in a row during that sequence of events because I had no idea how my choices had let to any of what had happened, and the ending managed to actually spoil some critical details about certain characters that I probably would've found out had the story progressed normally.

This is a situation where the old saying "Keep it simple, stupid" applies. Just let me progress dialogue with the interact key and just stop the gameplay for the dialogue. The player won't mind if the dialogue is important and well written. And if you're going to have them separate, make absolutely sure nothing is permanently missable. If you set goals, make them easy to find - not insultingly easy, just make sure it's clear. And if ANY interaction is going to lead to something you can't go back on, like deciding to sleep on the job or committing SUICIDE, you could at least give me a little prompt asking me if I'm sure, or you could at least not autosave every time something happens. I don't even know if I got the ending I did because of a bug, a glitch or sheer bad luck, but in choice-based narratives you never want the player to think "I don't know how my choices affected this at all" at the end.

Out of the Valley

That was my initial experience with Uncanny Valley. I wish my experience hadn't been so negative, but I can't lie and say I enjoyed it so far. But like I tried to emphasize by starting the article with some positives, there is a good game under there somewhere. Maybe the skipping dialogue and confusing interactions were partially my own fault; maybe one or two freak accident glitches that normally never happen somehow got in the way. So I do think I want to give the game another chance at one point. If I do and my impression of the game doesn't improve, I'll leave it here, but if the game redeems itself, I'll owe it another article. We'll see, but until then, I'm moving onto the next spooky experience.