Разработчик: Antarsoft
Описание
If you don’t believe in paranormal events, meet the people from White Hill.
It’s been years since all but the daughter in the Smiths’ family were found brutally murdered. The people of the town are getting uneasy as more and more witnesses have spoken about seeing the silhouette of a little girl standing in the house. Rumors spread that the silhouette has to be Ellen, the daughter of the Smith’s family, whose body was never found during the investigation of the murders. 1 year later, James, a bright and eager investigator, has taken matters into his own hands to finally reveal the truth of what happened that horrible night.
- Play as James, an intelligent detective who is trying to get to the bottom of the paranormal events happening in the Smiths' Residence at White Hill.
- Dive into an emotional and thrilling experience while solving puzzles and persisting through nerve-racking scenarios.
- Listen to breath-taking soundtracks as you’re traversing through the unnerving residence of the Smiths' in a beautiful pixel art style.
- Enjoy the atmospheric storytelling as you unfold the mystery by completing all chapters.
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 or higher 64bits
- Processor: 1.7 GHz Dual Core CPU
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, ATI Radeon 4870 HD, or equivalent card with at least 512 MB VRAM
- Storage: 500 MB available space
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
Mac
- OS: OSX 10.10 or higher
- Processor: 1.7 GHz Dual Core CPU
- Memory: 2 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260, ATI Radeon 4870 HD, or equivalent card with at least 512 MB VRAM
- Storage: 300 MB available space
Linux
Отзывы пользователей
Pretty good, the usual side-scrolling horror game.
Visually stunning, some effects and animations were very good, but that's about everything "outstanding" this game has to offer.
The story, music, and gameplay were okay, but nothing striking in my opinion.
What I do dislike about the game is that it is unnecessarily slow.
When you're injured, you're unbearably slow, and even if uninjured, the stamina runs out constantly and takes ages to refill. Which I still don't understand the use for, since there's hardly anything to escape from, excluding the scenes where you actually run from something and get infinite stamina.
The autosave could be more generous in some places, considering the movement speed.
Overall it's a fun experience, and I can see some hard work went into it.
Solid side scrolling pixel horror game and takes a few hours to complete.
This game is up there with The Last Door, Claire, The Long Reach etc.....
Really nice music and atmosphere, good little story about revenge and grief. The side notes, drawings and cassettes add to the story if you search for them.
There are a few downsides including not being able to skip the logos and disclaimers at the beginning, the rough translation at times and horrible stamina (main character is a smoker, I get it).
Solid game regardless
Creepy, surrealistic pixel-horror here from newer developer Red Mount, Ellen puts you in the shoes of P.I. James who travels to an abandon old house on the fringe of White Hill in order to find clues and solve the case of a murdered family. In his attempt to sneak in, he ends up falling through the floor; starting his journey in the house's basement. It doesn't take long for him to figure out that things are more than a little f'ed up...
Ellen's not a reinvention of this genre within a genre but an exercise in trying to cull and display the best elements of the style. You'll be moving left to right, scouring every nook and cranny for items to unlock progression while reading notes, listening to tapes and doing your best to dig up the dirt that nobody's been able to excavate thus far. Things aren't as simple as you hoped; a couple of neatly designed, weird-out monsters stalk the various areas you'll explore and you're going to need to run or hide from 'em...lest you want to face a one hit death. All of the mechanics work well-enough (I especially enjoyed the quick access inventory you can store possibly necessary items in for speedy use) and the general cycle of gameplay kept me wanting to move forward.
Additionally, the ambient sounds/score are well-done for what there is, there's even a few bits of voice-acting and the trippy, peyote-laced visuals look pretty darn good for an indie dev just getting their feet wet. In my personal pixel horror hierarchy where you've got Lone Survivor, Horns of Fear, Settled, The Long Reach...etc. on my favorite side and Uncanny Valley, Claire and Firewood on my "ehhh" side, Ellen stands firm in the middle, above_average ground. There's definitely a lot of potential shown here.
Not all is perfect as in some of the more detailed environments the graphics wanted to chug, one of the puzzles interactive screens stays stuck on your monitor till you solve it and other quirks show in its obvious low-budget. Yet the dark mystery at Ellen's center drives you forward and there's a lot of things that you can examine/get commentary on while the monster bits are fairly solid without being annoying (doing just enough to make the gameplay a touch more varied). There's more here than I expected, let's put it that way.
If pixel-horror is something that you enjoy then I'd certainly recommend Ellen. It's difficult to find browsing the Steam Store and I thought I'd do my part to give it a little nod since I had a good time getting to the end (which took me about 3 hours). I can see even classic adventure game detectives possibly getting a little jolt of fun out of the experience as well.
it was a good game but i do have some slight critizims
1 put more batteries in the house or make it more apparent that you only need the flashlight for EXTREMELY dark rooms, i had to restart the game because i couldn't progress without the light
2 consider putting in the warning that this game does contain mentions and depictions of s*icide even though it is a pixelated game.
beyond that i bought this at a discount and thought it was worth the price, the atmosphere is spooky and disconserning as hell and the story was great. would love a sequel
Pros:
Aesthetically pleasing
Nice ambience soundtrack
Not too hard or scary, good for casual players
Cons:
Bit short, explored everything and played through in 4 hours
Enemies could have been creepier
Great game, though the english isn't perfect.
I'm stuck and the battery is dead.
Ok...This was a ride. I want to preface this by saying; I would not recommend this game for what it's worth. In fact, I really wish I was able to get my money back if at all possible.
The game's trailer leads viewers to believe a very creepy, eerie type of gameplay, which it does! At first. The next parts of this review will possibly include spoilers, so please be wary, new players.
--
The game begins with a standard spooky theme; possible haunted house, a cold case/closed case, murder mystery. During the first few moments of gameplay, things are tense and the game does very well at keeping the paranoia with surround sound and ambient lighting. However, things get frustrating quickly.
The flashlight that the player will need throughout 3-5 rooms of the main building does not last long enough for the initial speed of the character, nor does it indicate where/how to recharge the battery (new batteries are not around, and after finding the first battery, the second and only other one does not show up for quite a while after.).
The format of the 'text boxes' is placed inconveniently to the upper part of the player character's head, and foreground textures/beams/spiderwebs obscure the boxes, leaving players unable to read possible crucial information. On that note, after the flashlight runs out, the dialogue boxes are not illuminated, making it impossible to read whatever may be
in any pitch black rooms. These dark rooms may sometimes contain intractable items and puzzles, making this equally frustrating.
The flashlight battery runs out quickly, and hidden in the upper right corner of the screen is the battery's 'life' bar. I understand the optional screen lighting and dithering/anti-aliasing are available, but these options do nothing to make it clearer or more noticeable until the bar turns red.
The playthrough's i've watched others play of this game encountered the same issues, what with being without the flashlight and battery for most of the gameplay.
The next few issues I have with this game are continuity errors and/or poor language or articulation of written details. What I mean by this is: The notes and messages throughout the game rarely, if at all, explain the ghostly phenomena happening around the character. The notes sometimes contain run-on sentences, metric vs. imperial errors (The game takes place in England, which does not use the standard US imperial system including 'miles' and 'feet' etc.) , and whatever the 'story' may be is completely lost over time.
The story suddenly turns into an amalgamation of unresolved cold cases turned haunted house, to something about an abusive father, the player character supposedly experiencing a form of hallucination, to a prior family being burned under the accusation of witchcraft? There's a lot to take in, to say the least.
The 'voice acting' in parts of the game found on tapes throughout the game are sometimes difficult to understand especially without subtitles. The conversation(s) sound very forced, very flat and cringe-worthy scripted. There is no emotion or sense of urgency for the characters involved, and the random inclusion of one character being from Mexico vs. Spain is completely irrelevant when it comes to later notes given/obtained.
In the beginning, there's no information detailing the name of the wife/lady of the household, so most players will believe the woman described in the first notes/diary entries noted of whom committed suicide , is said 'mother', yet the revelation that she is instead the maid/helper of the house is not made clear till close to the end of the game. Details about the mother rarely mention her name, and the whole thing about it is completely confusing and takes me out of the 'world' of this game and just makes no sense.
The 'mapping' of controls is wonky and lack of customization within the game makes this very difficult. Even formatting outside the game, requires both use of mouse and keyboard through trial and error at times. There also exist multiple bugs wherein the character's idle animation will continue to play if the player character is injured, and some items do not show up in the inventory despite showing an icon above the characters' head indicating otherwise.
It's also confusing to include items not usable in the inventory, if everything else is somehow able to be set to the quick menu. (Example being the lighter, never once mentioned or used, yet is part of the players' inventory for random purposes?) , the "puzzles" are hard to understand and a mess of pixels and took longer than necessary to complete as it was close to impossible to comprehend what the 'image' was supposed to be (This despite being shown what the image 'should' look like on the side), there's just.....way too much.
It feels like this entire game was rushed with only the trailer somewhat polished to show the potential horror elements.
TL;DR:
PROS:
-Atmospheric music
-Lulls the player into false sense of security at times, only to be
surprised by the paranoia inducing ambient sounds and movements.
-Beautiful execution of fluid pixel animation / walking animations.
-Death sequences are terrifying initially
CONS:
-lack of quality articulation in written notes
-poor controls/mapping
-poor quality in text boxes being completely blackened when in dark rooms, making it
impossible to read the characters' interactions where necessary.
-story branches into seemingly random tangents and no real closure
-poor voice acting / flat emotion
-bugs mentioned among other things
Overall, I highly doubt I would've spent as much time on this game as I have, had I known the issues ahead or even watched partial playthroughs of said game. I would not recommend this game for replay value nor would I for especially streamer/gameplay based playthroughs specifically on the notion of being unable to read crucial points of the game in the aforementioned dark areas.
This game was basically spooky, random nonsense with a flat overall tone and fancy animations where necessary. If you're looking for a true, horror yet pixel experience, you're best looking elsewhere, as this one just falls under frustrating and confusing.
Nice horror atmosphere, intresting story, unusual puzzles,good looking pixelart, I definitely recommend try this if u r looking for good inde game^^
Good sound design and graphical aesthetic.
Lighting, shaders, and effects look really cool in my opinion!
For the full price of $10, some mechanics and level design could use a bit of work. Examples:
• Some bookshelves you hide behind, some you don't.
• Plants and other objects repeating as you walk with the same descriptions (if it doesn't add to gameplay, atmosphere, or fun then it's just breaking immersion.) It's better to just leave some of these objects out or shorten the hallways instead of having a Flintstone's effect.
• A lot of very slow backtracking through areas (run doesn’t seem to work early game at all)
• Controller support is half working/broken currently and kind of needed considering how long you have to hold down a button to walk.
• Case notes were a bit confusing at first as it wasn't completely clear that each line of ???????? was for a different case note. You might want to apply the same method you used for collecting visuals or have some delimiter to show they are selectible.
• Goals / objective was not always apparent so I spent a bit of time walking back and forth trying to trigger the next scripted event. You might want to watch someone who hasn't played the game before and just observe how they interact.
• Having quick slot items being the only way to use items was a bit wonky for me. I didn't understand why some items were usable in quickslot and others not. I kept wanting to use the lighter on the drum of oil / gasoline as the game hinted hard at that but it appears that wasn't designed that way early game.
If I find more stuff I'll post them in forums. But recommending game solely on the fact that I want to see more from this developer.
I've beaten the first chapter and I am loving the game so far.
It runs well on my laptop, the scares are terrifying (play it with the lights off and wearing headphones for a better experience), and it's just an all around tense thriller, loaded with frightening imagery and sounds.
Ellen is a unique experience unlike anything I've played before (I haven't played many horror/psychological thriller games, let alone 8-Bit ones. So maybe this would be a true statement regardless). I found Ellen on an online gaming blog and figured I would give it a shot. Normally I don't play games like this, but I was actually really happy with the game and I'm glad I bought it!
One of the things I love about the game is that it doesn't always teach you how to play it. You get a few pointers here and there, but eventually you get how the game works. Everything is self explanatory enough that you'll understand it without a tutorial every five minutes.
A lot of modern games give you too many instructions to the point where you're not even playing a game, you're just performing commands given to you by on-screen text. Ellen NEVER has moments where you have to button-mash to get away from a monster. I hate being held hostage in a cutscene where your only hope of escaping is mashing the X key until the monster drops you. In Ellen, you have to hide or run to avoid the monsters. I'm sure this isn't that uncommon in games like this, but I appreciate that the developers introduced better mechanics than most of the button-mash horror games that come out these days. You have to time your moves so you can hide before you get spotted. When you fail, the animations are bloody and well done.
You also get a sense of where to go and how to play the game as you progress, so you'll never feel too lost or confused despite the lack of directions. The reason this is so important is because the game works hard to establish a mood and it would be disturbed or ruined if you were constantly told where to go and what to pick up. It's easy to infer all of this. Since there's not much visual clutter, it's easier to feel as if you're actually in the game.
Overall, Ellen is a very fun experience. But the gameplay isn't even the best part. I enjoyed collecting the notes, pictures, and artwork over the course of the game. You find out more about the story and the characters in it. I love the lore and it wouldn't be nearly as good if it weren't for the care and detail put into the notes of the characters. The developers of this game didn't make the story too complicated, but they gave enough information to establish who all of the characters were and it helped build suspense as you wondered how the game would end.
The art is unique as well, with sleek character designs on humans and thicker, bolder designs for the monsters. The game was often visually impressive for an 8-Bit game. Considering the limitations of the medium, I was genuinely impressed with how they had captured the mood of each scene. It was very pretty. The glitchy colorful blur effects were also cool and paired well with the aesthetic of the game.
I'm not going to spoil anything here, but this was a fun game with a great ending and it was definitely worth the price.
There were a few problems. I spotted a grammatical error in one of the notes, the voice acting of the two male characters could've been a lot better, and overall I'm not sure if the game will have much replayability (I have yet to play it a second time) (to be fair, most games don't have much replayability). The opening felt slow because of the character's speed and this initially had discouraged me a little. I'm also a little upset there wasn't an autosave when you collected the axe and cut down the vines in the lighthouse scene. Lastly, climbing the hill in that same lighthouse scene was a little buggy and I didn't understand what to do at first, but it didn't take too long to figure out so I can forgive it.
However, these flaws don't ruin the game and the experience of learning about the characters in the story, so I'm still recommending this game because the overall experience doesn't let its flaws hold it back. You will still feel immersed and invested.
Love this game, 8/10
Just getting started with the game, but already I can say that its bringing some great quality to pixelated horror!!
I'm very excited to delve deeper into the game as I progress. Only con is the intro portion having somewhat of a slow start, but once it picks up you'll definitely want to keep going! Definitely recommend to any horror/pixelated art style fans.
Here's my playthrough for a deeper look at the game! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e16K-Pf8zJ8&t=874s
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Antarsoft |
| Платформы | Windows |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 21.01.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 92% положительных (13) |