Reseñas

• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2022

  I've only played 20 minutes so far but already am loving everything I see. Rem's previous games take three spots of my top five best games ever made and I am so excited to see where this goes. A seven day 10% discount on release too? Crazy. Excited! Also for anyone wondering it runs OOTB on Arch Linux without having to mess with Proton which is a huge thumbs up.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2022

  With the small time I had now with the game I'm getting The Cat Lady vibes. Wish more people knew those indie games. So far, so good.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2022

  The release came as a surprise to me, so I haven't been able to fully dive into it yet, but the brief preview made me feel at home straight away. There is no other voice in this ruminant medium like Michalski's. Will update my review once I'm through.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 5, 2022

  It's The Cat Lady again

  I hope i don't get any flack for this, in the end of the day, this is my opinion. Having finished this game i feel like Harvester Games's games are running around in circles, or, to be blunt, stagnating. And it's a bit of a shame, because Burnhouse Lane is by far the most polished game from the studio. It is almost devoid of the rough edges that were accompanying their previous titles. The artwork is great, the music and sounds are refined to the point of them almost being unnoticeable (in a good way), the voiceacting is almost spotless, the core gameplay is polished and the dialogue is the most human-sounding out of all 5 games released so far. All the boxes are ticked - the cinematic direction, the dark topics, the supernatural, everything you expect from Harvester Games is here. But that, in my opinion, is its main problem. This is all the stuff that in one way or another was tackled in the previous titles. Not many risks were taken and not many fresh and original ideas were brought to the table, compared to everything that came before it. This is harvester's comfort zone and it kinda feels uninspired as a result. And it's hard to write all this because this is a really quality product, that is definetely worth its money, and yet i cannot help but feel that i've seen it all before. If you are new to Harvester Games then this one will be a good entry point as it is the least demanding from the player - gameplay or story wise. But if you've played through previous Michalski's titles and would not call yourself a die hard fan (which as far as i understand is a rare occasion), then i suggest to wait until their next game. I truly hope they try something new, because this is definitely the least interesting albeit the most technically competent game from one the most interesting indie developers out there.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 9, 2022

  It was... fine. I'm not a f%&$# hypocrite to give a thumbs down to a game I completed in pretty much one sitting. I would also be very surprised if I remembered anything from it in a month. Which is very annoying, because at its best it feels like a worthy rival/successor to Silent Hill 2. It's a great exploration of sickness and going into dark places, both internal and external, often simultaneously. I wouldn't call it scary in a 'horror-scary' sense, but it often feels deeper and more subtle than most horror media out there. It's more of a tense thriller with very good pacing, and the gameplay is both simple and engaging. The presentation is also great, visual and audio. The soundtrack is well worth a listen on its own, and the voice acting is incredible. The lows are not THAT low, but a lot of it is just... Not amazing. Angie doesn't really feel like an interesting or a deep character in any way. Her interactions with other characters often don't sound believable. It doesn't help that it heavily relies on conventions when it makes you expect something more realistic. A significant part of the game feels like a less inspired rehash of The Cat Lady - it's not criminal in itself or even bad, but it also doesn't have that spark. Some scenes are downright annoying to play - they don't last long to truly bother, sure, but I doubt I'll ever want to replay it. I feel like the overall intended direction for a good ending is pretty clear - and despite doing my best to follow it exploring everything, being generally nice and reasonable, not lashing out, resolving everything as peacefully as possible and being a responsible kitten, I still got the choice of the two crappiest endings - and it just felt completely unnecessary and underwhelming. The situation presented in the end, a big part of what the game was about, also felt like a betrayal of the game's themes. So in the end, the game is generally good, but if you haven't played The Cat Lady yet, absolutely go and play that first. If you have and liked it, there's a high chance you'll enjoy this one too. It goes in a 'Silent Hill-like interaction with the environment' direction more than it repeats 'meaningful personal interaction with the characters', and it doesn't always succeed, but it also doesn't really truly fail. It's... fine.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 10, 2022

  Although I've progressed far enough, I will not finish this game because there is absolutely no way I am retrying _that_ tedious and dead stupid chase sequence again (headless lady with a chainsaw). Which is also why I think there is little to none replayability value to this game: some chapters are just so dragged out that you wouldn't want to waste your time waddling over yet another dozen of straight corridors back and forth just to get a new dialogue line or a different ending or whatever. I wanted to like this game, I really did. It's a huge progress over Rem's The Cat Lady, which remains one of my favorite games. You can clearly see that Burnhouse Lane is a passion project: a lot of attention was put into backgrounds, (gorgeous) music, visual effects, but then there are those atrocious animation, mediocre dub and over-the-top cheesy and naive story. In my opinion, the author has exhausted the 2D corridor thriller format and is ready to explore something different. His first several games sure are clunky, but they have a certain charm, one that makes you sigh once and shortly brush away the clunkiness for good, - while Lorelai and Burnhouse Lain feel like author is painfully fixated on the same story, theme and format, which makes each new game less original and more childish and goofy. The characters are shallow and boring and the story is so all over the place, that it's difficult to give a damn about anything going on on the screen. Like how villains are your standard "ooga-booga-I-am-evil" puppets, it's just embarrassing. This game was promising, but oh well. Really looking forward to the OST coming out, and will definitely check out Rem's next game.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 19, 2022

  I can't believe I'm about to say this about a game from one of my favorite developers. Burnhouse Lane is fundamentally broken. The save system renders the trial and error gameplay not only frustrating, but offensive in how punishing it is. The Cat Lady subverted this at multiple points by having resurrection be a core part of the narrative and gameplay so the player could avoid losing significant progress. Also there were just less threats in general in that game. Burnhouse Lane on the other hand gives you manual saves ONLY and the only proper way to protect yourself from replaying significant portions of the game including heavy dialogue sections, is to run back to an ashtray and save EVERY TIME you take even a single step towards progress, and that is just not a concession players should have to make to avoid frustration. In my review for The Callisto Protocol I talked about how I had become spoiled by indie games which is why I found the broken game design in that game so jarring, and here we have the latest entry from one of our most promising indie devs committing the same sins. I won't be picking this game back up until a checkpoint system is introduced to work in tandem with the manual saves to protect your progress. The impact of each new set piece, character moment, and puzzle section is just ruined, and my immersion absolutely obliterated every time I die because of something I can't possibly predict on my first playthrough. Harvester is supposed to be one of the good ones. I know people will forgive this stuff because of their previous games, but I'm sorry, this is something that should've been very obvious at any level of playtesting. I can't believe more people aren't talking about this. Please hold ALL developers to account, not just the big ones. I should say that, other than this issue, I wouldn't really have anything negative to say about the game, at least from the few hours I played but this particular issue is significant, fundamental, and most obviously, unacceptable in any game with a trial and error fail state. I will absolutely revisit this review if I see a fix to this issue but as it stands, I can't recommend Burnhouse Lane, no matter how much it hurts me to say it.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 2, 2023

  Loved the Cat Lady and the other games before this, but couldn't finish this as i dragged myself through actionscenes, stealth, platforming and bad save-checkpoints.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 3, 2023

  I think Harvester Studio's games were better when they weren't so damn moralistic. Having a kid and growing old are the most important things in life? Uh... Giving a cigarette to a selfish blonde will - totally coincidentally - lead to the death of an old friend? I mean... if it's a Crime and Punishment story, how about at least making a plausible connection how one thing led to another? Among other minor annoyances: - Some things just don't make sense. Like leaving a dangerous psycho criminal with a gun lying on the floor. - At times, it feels like deja vu... I mean, I loved The Cat Lady, but... - Graphics are for some reason worse than in the previous title Lorelai. This game isn't about graphics, for sure. Still, weird. So... While this game isn't bad by any means, I just haven't enjoyed it as much as any of the previous titles. Anyways, waiting for the next one!
• gamedeal user

  Feb 6, 2023

  I'm a huge fan of The Cat Lady, but as much as it pains me, I cannot recommend Burnhouse Lane as I would the previous Harvester Games' work. Burnhouse Lane feels like yet-another attempt at squeezing The Cat Lady's plot. Girl struggles with severe depression, girl decides to take own life, girl meets a ghostly/devilish being that asks her to kill N-amount of evil people. Except this time, there's no subtlety and there's barely any space for "artistic interpretation" when it comes to evil. But more than that, the game's design is flawed to a fault. Mechanically, it introduces a combat system that adds nothing to the game, and it's almost exclusively bothersome as it's wonky and uncomfortable. There are also a couple of veeery long platform-like scenes when controlling characters other than the protagonist, which again add nothing to the game and are mostly frustrating to go through. But the real deal breaker for me is the story design. Characters have no consistency, they behave as completely different people at different points in the game, with very little development and sometimes no explanation of why their attitude changed so much all of a sudden. As an example, at one point in the game I confided in a character that reacted with empathy and love. Further into the game, I talked to that character again and I was given the option to confide the exact same information to them (as if I hadn't done so before?!), only for them to react in an entirely different manner, also making it evident that it was the first time they heard about it. I guess the developers didn't have time to put those two possible paths of the story together in a consistent manner, and simply wished no one would choose those dialogue options? On top of everything, there's an uncomfortable amount of offensive remarks, especially towards "big" people. The main character is a bully for absolutely no reason and eventually softens up about half-way into the game, but some extremely rude and distasteful pieces of dialogue cannot be skipped. I really don't know how Harvester Games took this awful turn.