[Review] Apparition - Nintendo Switch

Developed By: MrCiastku
Published By: No Gravity Games
Categories: First Person, Horror, Adventure
Release Date:  11.13.20

You’ve heard it before. It’s a first person horror game where you’re defenseless. In Apparition, you control a paranormal investigator, who’s also a filmmaker, trying to find proof of the strange and unknown. This story and premise is fairly bog standard, but it is good enough motivation. How is the game itself though?

The game does have a bit of a good first impression. You start out selecting your inventory. The recording equipment, books for knowledge on a variety of things, and so on. Most of these need to be unlocked with points you earn in gameplay, but I do like the variety and the options to play your own way so to say. Upfront, the game gives the option to turn off jump scares too, which I very much appreciated, even if I didn’t turn them off until *after* I had experienced a few. After this leads into quite the long loading screen however. The game is dark, almost too dark. It’s also rather muddy looking. I can handle one or the other, but not both at the same time. You do have a candle to light the way, but even with that, anything not immediately in front of you is incredibly washed out.

You’ll be dropped into a quite spacey woodsey area, next to your car. The car is how you’ll leave the area if you’re done playing. Of course, you can do it almost immediately, which made me laugh, but it’s stopped being funny when you remember how long load screens are. Not doing that however has you search around for any evidence of strange happenings. With your camera you need to record anything that looks off. I didn’t receive any points for doing anything in my playthrough besides recording the fact that the wandering monsters were around. I liked that you do encounter a nice little bunch of different monsters and even find cards that show you before you’ll eventually catch up to them, but they all work practically the same. They walk up to you and you die. Be sure to take a photo before dying though to get some points out of it though. You can trap the monsters, but I never got a good feel for it by the time I saw one. Inventory was never quite something I got used to either. One button opens it, while another looks through it, and at one point I managed to get locked out of even changing what I held, which was really unfortunate, since I needed the candle to see and was stuck holding the camera. The game does have a Ouija Board mechanic, but it can only be used in specific areas and is most likely going to be a bad idea if you’ve been seen.

The game did make me feel on edge at times, but just wasn’t really that fun. The audio, especially the footsteps of the monsters was pretty impressive, but otherwise, I was left feeling middle of the road about the game. There’s much better first person horror games, but being made by a single person is incredibly admirable.