Double

The story, or rather, its final evolution was really disappointing (and I've steered to the good ending). All accumulated potential of this highly charged psycho-horror to become a true bomb-story was quietly flashed to toilet in the final chapter. (Yes, I mean in the final, not the one where the protagonist obtains certain crucial info: the latter just pushed the events to the borderline of sanity for turning everything into total psycho-absurd - and bummm. Nothing happened, nothing to see here, keep calm and move on.). I'm sincerely attempting to avoid spoilers while explaining my critique here: basically, the culmination of the storyline has finished far before even starting. The style of the main play came to break apart in this ending, making the impression that all previous events in the game had no particular meaning or even wouldn't be necessary there at all.

So, TL;DR: Dear Developers, for the future, as long as you decide to create a psycho-horror, please do be consistent enough for not forgetting about this your intention when coming close to the end of the script.

Plot: [wow!] in the beginning, [disappointing] in the end.
Bugs: yes, some little jar of them, crashed multiple times, only autosaving rescued the hero.
Graphic: well, suitable just enough for a non-visual horror but don't expect more.
Controls: after inability to continue playing by WASD+mouse, came back after purchasing a gamepad and finally could finish the gamer. Forget about mouse and its unnatural action style combinations.
Overall impression: Anticipated to lose my whole night on it, in reality am missing even that half-night needed for completion.

2 of 5 Doctor's pills.

What the fuck even just happened?

Double is a poorly made Adobe Flash tier 2D side scrolling hybrid visual novel/adventure game/arcade shooter, and it's very bad at all of these jobs. Combined, it's truly far, far less than the sum of its parts. The game has you guiding a soldier with PTSD through his various traumas, badly.

Trying to address social issues through the medium of video games is misguided and can be harmful. While it's plausible to suggest the intention was noble, this can do more harm than good. Game developers are not professionals in areas of mental health and social problems, and when they use video games to pretend they are, this can cause far more harm than good. It's my opinion that it's improper to use video games to push political or social agendas. Apart from the harm such hamfisted attempts at addressing social problems can cause, this offers zero benefit to PC gamers. People suffering from health issues or other social problems should seek out professional help rather than going to crap shovelware video games attempting to get sales by exploiting such problems for their own benefit, as is the case here.

There's an overwhelming amount of mediocre Visual Novel/E-book style cutscenes in this game. So you'll spend a huge amount of time not playing the game, but clicking through endless lines of poorly written VN text cutscenes because the developers couldn't work out how to relate their narrative through the game mechanics, and decided instead it would be better to compete with reading a book for your time. We're here to play games, not watch hours of garbage intersituals.

From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.

While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals.

The game features somewhat lazy, simplistic "retro" looking 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort Flash/browser games and mobile apps. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.

The developers didn't design the game for modern gaming PCs, as such the display resolution caps out at 1080p, a very low resolution that became mainstream back in 2006 and became obsolete when 4K entered the mainstream in 2014. The game simply won't look right on modern gaming displays due to this failure on the part of the developers.

The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers, left handed gamers or gamers using AZERTY or other international keyboard layouts.

Some of the defects in the game can be attributed to the choice of using the GameMaker Studio construction kit/toolset. This is a very poor quality toolset favoured by amateur developers as it's cheap and requires little in the way of development skill, but unfortunately has very limited capabilities. Just as you can't make a silk purse out of a sows ear, you can't make a great video game if you use a terrible engine. GameMaker Studio is most commonly used to make retro pixel shovelware and cash grabs.

A strong argument can be made that construction kits like GameMaker Studio should never be used to make games for profit, as the "developer", Tomato Fantasy Games has done here. These construction kits are intended to teach people some of the basic principles of game development, and to make small demos to pass around with friends. They're not intended to replace to actual work of real, professional game developers. So it's inappropriate when amateurs try to use these for profit, without any actual, real game development effort taking place. This doesn't result in products that have any real meaningful value for gamers.

The very poor quality of this game puts it squarely on-par with ancient 1990's Flash/Java games, and given it's 2024 (and this was released not so far back in 2019), gamers and the industry expect and deserve better than this kind of low effort shovelware.

These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.

The poor quality of this game is reflected by how many people spent time with it. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the all-time peak player number was only 8 players. This is a remarkably low number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam and well over 100,000 games for gamers to choose from, the overwhelming lack of interest in this low quality game is to be expected.

So, should you buy this game? Is this one of the best of the 100,000+ games on Steam?

Double has the completely unrealistic cash grab price of around $6 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam. For comparison, the $6 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Walking Dead", "Batman: Arkham Origins" or "Fallout 4". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this.

This game is abandoned.
There's no way to get 100% achievements.

i have played this game but after few minutes later i felt like this game contains little glitches and lags so then i stopped it and move on to next game Hehehe :D

about this game if a person want to spend time on long story of past and present then this game is good for that person

in this game the art design is alright but this game is lil bit psychopath lol

Great story, very well narrated. Game changes as you give your answers. I was barely able to move away from the game when i started it. Got a bad ending but that's okay. Graphics was also okay.

This game represents alot of things and throws it into a rather good story.

Will you know what is real and what not? Prepare to be confused :)

The action scenes are basic 2D scrolling shoot sequences, just don't stand around too much, run up to the enemies and shoot them.(best tactic)

Why I will not rate this game TOP is because if you play the whole story, you will loose about 30 mintues or possibly more on useless repeating cutscenes of you standing or going to the same place. It is always the same and gets boring after a while.

Still recommended.

UN gran juego, si te gustan los juegos donde tomar decisiones es lo tuyo, este juego es perfecto para ti!

Ima write a better review when i think of somethin' and also finish the game

Like 47% of the players I got the achievement for having skipped more than 10 dialogues...
Unlike some other players, I stopped playing there.
I have multiple folders to sort my games. One is named Boring. This game immediately fitted inside.

Meh. Really couldn't get invested in the game. May have reached a bug but don't care enough to troubleshoot it. Just not to interesting.

Game is alright, a slow burn, was hoping to hear the post-ambient song from the trailer at a certain point but didn't come up unfortunately.

Short, but endearing game. Starts slow, picks up the pace and then it keeps you thrilled until the very end. I liked my ending very much. The characters are good, the twists are fair even if a bit predictable; but the clues they give you from the start make up for it.

This is a really good one. If you have one afternoon to kill and don't mind the price, pick this one up.

The game itself is very good. Very interesting story (I would say it's the best point), great graphics and effects. I was excited while playing, could not take my eye of the screen.

The problem is the crashes and bugs. I had to restart the game a bunch of times because it freezes for no apparent reason (while loading, in the middle of a dialog or battle). Sometimes it becomes very slow (like slow motion), first I thought it was intentional, but when I replay the same part, it wasn't in slow motion anymore. It looks like the game have some performance issues. I gave up when I tried to freeze the boss 3 times and the game closed in all of the times. I've reported the bug in the discussions.

My computer is not the best out there, but is high above the minimum specs.

That's very frustrating. Don't buy it if you want to keep calm.

I loved everything about the game except for the aiming. The story is great and its an interesting, brief(under a few hours) game that doesn't overstay its welcome. My advice is to invest fully in the first upgrade that allows you to have precise aiming. Without it, anything above or below you is almost impossible to hit which really does affect your enjoyment of the game.

I went into this game not knowing what to expect.
I read the "About this game" section and it seemed interesting so I thought I'd give it a shot.

The game mechanics are a bit clunky and of course the game is graphically mediocre at best, however the story is what really caught my eye in this. I found this game to be quite insightful when it comes to mental illness as well as generally interesting in the sense that you were never sure of what is right or wrong throughout the game.

I thoroughly enjoyed the game and would recommend others to try it out.
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Just a small note on improvement to the developers: I played the English version and can confirm that there are quite a few grammatical errors in the text throughout the game, maybe you could have someone double check this?
Also, I feel like this game would benefit heavily by having voice actors for the lines as text boxes are not as engaging.

Recommended despite of several downsides.
Pro:
- Give some comprehensible insights on how schizophrenia works (not sure whether those effects really match PTSD)
- Atmospheric presentation
- Short and sweet. It took me (without idle time) about three hours to finish this game, and I died several times and was not rushing. The story gets unfold in this time without feeling dragged out or hasted.
Con:
- The combat is really clunky and infuriating and I did not really get it. My advice: just charge at enemies, then focus them once they're in a good range and shoot until they are dead. Eat their shots since you're getting healed enough after the encouter. Avoid the duck-and-cover game, it's time consuming, unfun and pointless except for special, obvious situations. The only point where you HAVE to use the cover is in the very end, and even there you should abuse it: stand uncovered until the enemy leaves his cover, then focus him and shoot once, then cover until he hides as well. Rinse, repeat.
- The animations are not worth the word. It was not a problem for me, but if you get annoyed by that, you better skip the game.
- Some of the work of the psychologist is more cliche. How he's fraternizing with you (could be a halluzination of course), how he tells you for everything you say what this means for Freud etc.
- Some consequences and dialogs seem not match to my choices. Might be a bug, some weird story-telling or the result of some hidden choices I made which did not explain thereselves very well in hindsight.

I actually really liked the game! The topic of psychology, unconscious, dreams etc. was always fascinating me, so it's great to find a game that is exploring this area. I was truly clueless about which choice is wrong and which is right during the course of the game, so I can tell that the game designers did their work well. There are minor things that could be perhaps improved and polished, however, the game feels complete and has its unique character, this overpowers all the imperfections, in my opinion.

P.S. Очень удивилась,когда узнала, что что игру сделали русские ребята. Большой респект! Буду следить за вашими новыми играми @tomatofantasygames.

This was a really interesting story with a nice twist. My only problem with it is that despite what the game says, your choices really don't matter that much. The dialogue is just slightly changed but all the scenes happen the same which disappointed me during my second playthrough. I would like to see more games like this though.

Great game with very interesting story and a great score. The only problem with it is that the combat (which there is a lot of) is pretty bad. But it was only about 4 dollars (it was on sale) and it was definitely worth the 3 hours it took to beat.

Interesting narrative, mechanics, and art, but overall the game is almost unplayable in its current state. Enemies are almost impossible to kill. The shooting mechanic is entirely broken, and the "reality" meter is unbalanced. There are combat sequences near the end that make the entire experience unbearable.

I'd say this game is definitely worth playing, but wait a while before you do. They need time to work the bugs out with it.