Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Nov 25, 2017

  Had my first Co-Op run last night, with a random Russian guy/gal, It was fun! There was a little language barrier there, but I felt like it added to the realism a little bit. Being trapped in an unknown land with a stranger of different nationality. We spoke simple English to communicate. [I dont know the first thing when it comes to Russian] First Coop run was a painful yet funny experience since I fell into Coma multiple times from a bloody cut and there was no clean bandages around. Well, my partner had it, but we didnt know how to transfer items, serves us right for not reading the "rules" section. We only figured it out in zone 3! I was getting by with scraps of food from Zone 2. The "you can't die but only fall into coma" rule is a blessing. Makes the game less challenging imho. I also learnt from my Russian comrade that you don't have to loot every single building, and sometimes sticking to the objectives is a better choice. Mind you, I've had pretty decent hours in this game, and I'm still learning new strategies. I'm a hoarder, what can I do huh? All in all, Coop is a beautiful addition to an already awesome challenging game. If anybody would like to have a run, hit me up, I'm game!
• gamedeal user

  Oct 16, 2017

  This is a rather simple and straightforward survival game, that is oversold by the mention of John Carpenter's "The Thing". If you forget about that, it can be enjoyable. It's all about handling 2 or 3 people trying to survive and figure out what is going on, on a series of scattered buildings in the arctic (randomly generated each run), while you struggle to stay warm, fed and rested. In this regard is kind of a time management game. When any character sleeps, 1 or 2 hostiles appear and you have to play into their weaknesses to defeat them. This is probably the weakest part of the game, since despite the name and mention on being based on the movie, there is no trust factor nor do the enemies disguise or hide themselves. Each run probably lasts about 2 to 3 hours, replayability comes in the form of unlockable characters and achievements. Overall, it's good as a cheap weekend game if you enjoy the arctic survival theme. Otherwise skip it.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 25, 2017

  Aw man, I'm really sorry. I feel bad for leaving a negative review but I have to be completely honest, I even recommended this to a couple of friends before I properly played it. I bought this because of the title, game cover and description, everything said to me that this was as close to a proper 'The Thing" game it was going to get. (forget about the PS2 game for a second, which was awesome by the way) The game runs amazingly, with an isometric view, a creepy arctic theme, RNG map/loot, and a lot of damn scavenging. But it's not actually very fun to play. There is no 'The Thing' here, your enemies are alien anomalies that are attracted to the delta waves that your REM sleep produces, so when your characters need to sleep they are in danger (cool concept, but an anticlimactic enemy) The anomalies are orbs that are damaged by light, so you need to keep a nearby generator running to keep them away, or else they'll enter the building and start killing your survivors. Other dangers that your survivors face are COLD and HUNGER, warmth isn't too hard to come by (during the early game atleast) but food seems to be quite an issue, all factors will damage an overall health pool that each of your survivors have, when their health pool reaches zero then they enter a coma (not death) and they can still be revived with adrenaline, but also become quite a burden as you'll have to give them a shoulder and drag them to safety (another awesome concept) Once all of your survivors are in a coma then the game is over. To win the game you must find the exit through each of the six sectors, each sector is a section of the arctic base you are in (A lot like FTL, which I love) So far it all sounds quite cool, but now I'm going to explain my PERSONAL dislike. There really isn't much gameplay other than scavenging, scavenging, scavenging and keeping your survivors warm, fed, and rested. You may as well just play 'This War of Mine' or something (I'm not a shill, promise) I've only played for 1.8 hours, but it was more than enough to know what I was getting into as the 1.8 hours that I HAVE played seemed to be the same thing over and over. Another really neat gameplay mechanic here are the 'Madness symptoms' your survivor gets when they're extremely tired, they will begin hallucinating and not quite knowing what's real or not, but I wouldn't quite call that 'Distrust' I think if the game had some horror to it then it would be enjoyable, or aliens that aren't spherical, atleast. Also tone down the needs of the survivors just a tiny bit, it's boring. I'm not going to refund, I'll wait and see what else comes of this game because all of the base features are here. Thank you for reading I suppose.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 13, 2017

  I got this game for its coop element but after playing I discovered that you cannot unlock any content in coop, only in single player. I've got no interest in playing this in single player so I got cheated. The game advertises coop support but does not mention that you only get the base experience and cannot make any progress toward completion. If you only want this for single player, it's fun. If your looking for a don't starve kind of experience, this is NOT the game for you. Beware.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 22, 2017

  It's a cold, snowy day here in Canada. The visibility is nearly zero, something we generally call a white-out. It's the perfect time to settle down with a warm cup of coffee and fire up a wintery survival horror title. There are few to pick from here on Steam, you have The Long Dark, Frozen State, a handful of others, and of course, Distrust. If you've never seen John Carpenter's classic horror movie, The Thing, then you need to put down your games for now and go watch that instead. You can come back to this review when you're done, I promise it'll still be here. For those of you still with me, let's dig deep into this title's frozen tundra. Distrust is, at its core, an extremely simplified survival game with horror elements. Alone, you can control up to three characters, though you only start off with two. You must tend to the needs of their hunger, warmth, and sleep as you explore vast maps filled with ice, snow, and unspeakable horrors. Each map has its own set of buildings for your plundering pleasures, where you can find first-aid items, weapons, clothing, food, tools, and all types of much needed wood and fuel to power generators and furnaces. Your goal is to keep going until you find the "end zone"; some are unlocked by simply getting to them, but most have challenges such as toxic waste spills, levers that need to be pulled in a certain order, and multiple timed levers that must be activated while you make a quick escape afterward. The levels are randomly generated, so everyone will have a different experience everytime they play. There's also the element of random choice-making surprises; every now and then when you go to complete a task, like making something to eat, repairing a door, or even picking a lock, your character will say something and you will have the choice to continue or stop. If you continue whatever you're doing, a coin is flipped as to whether you'll have a good or bad outcome. Bad outcomes usually lead to your character developing some sort of mental illness that, if left untreated, will surely lead to hallucinations and danger. With the addition of decent isometric graphics and a wonderfully ambient soundscape, all of the ingredients are here to create a detailed survival game. Unfortunately, Distrust has too many faults that cause the game to become boring rather quickly. Foremost, the environments are all the same and they are far too empty in their vastness. There's literally nothing to find out in the open, everything that you require will be in buildings. It's understandable that an endless icy landscape is difficult to diversify, but some sort of variation other than building placement would be a welcomed change of pace. The time that it takes for your arctic exploration team to rifle through crates, lockers, boxes, lockpick doors, shovel away debris, and break down items for fuel and wood is excruciatingly tedious. Most of the time you will have at least two of the three members together in order to go through a location faster, which leaves a lot of sitting-around-doing-nothing time. The sloth-like pace mixed with the repetitive environments and gameplay easily leads to boredom within an hour to an hour and a half. Not to mention, the horrors and only enemies of Distrust come out only after your characters have been sleeping. They're extremely easy to outrun, and most of the time they go away on their own if you have enough resources to hold up in a location for a little while; more sitting-around-doing-nothing. While the newly added co-op mode is nice, you're unable to unlock more than two additional characters as you can only play the main campaign mode, and not the more difficult challenge mode. This leaves the other 13 locked characters completely inaccessable to those who do not wish to play solo modes. The story isn't exceptionally detailed, and the majority of it is told through found files and notes that act much like journal entries from multipe people. Overall, Distrust isn't exactly a bad experience, but it leaves a massive void that could've been filled with a lot more interesting content. It's the tip of the iceberg as far as survival games are concerned, but it can still offer a decent challenge for most. I can't recommend it, but if you're going to get it or give it a try, do so when it's on sale. [h1]Rating: [b]3.0/5.0[/b] - Average, can take it or leave it.[/h1] The Horror Network [url=http://store.steampowered.com/curator/28221963/]Curator[/url] | [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetwork]Group[/url] Click for Gore
• gamedeal user

  Sep 19, 2017

  Honestly, I would say the single worst part about this game is the enemies. The mechanics are all there for a fun little game if it just had a different antagonist. The game even does a pretty solid job setting up the atmosphere. It's dark, it's cold, you're all alone, and the music and ambience make it sound like something spooky is afoot. A couple of times, the ambience would play a noise that sounded like something moving around on the map or growling at me. This would cause me to actually stop and look around the map a little bit because I was genuinely worried something was crawling around outside. This, of course, was all before I went to sleep for the first time and realized that the enemies are nothing more than a floating basketball with some different textures for different types of enemies. To call them anti-climatic would be an understatement. These things are so underwhelming that I find myself just annoyed by their precense rather than scared or concerned that they are there. Not only that, but these things don't randomly spawn. You control their spawn by sleeping so it's not like you're constantly scared of their arrival since you know exactly when they'll show up. This set up makes the game extremely repetitive despite it's randomized nature for every playthrough. 1. Start game 2. Loot and such until you have to sleep 3. Sleep and spawn basketball aliens 4. Deal with said aliens 5. repeat steps 2-4 until you die or reach end game I'm not saying they're super easy to defeat or anything so the game can still be challenging. But before I actually knew when the aliens showed up, I was actually scared that they were there the whole time and that they could be hiding behind each door. I was sending people through a building one door at a time, ready to have them sprint away if something was inside. I guess what I'm saying is that there's no tension. At no point am I afriad to just walk into a building all alone. At no point am I afraid that my survivors might get ambushed. At no point am I afriad that I could be killed at any moment. Even when I'm getting cornered and killed by an alien, it's just so anti-climatic and boring. They just float up to you and... well that's it. They just float up to you and you slowly lose health. I don't mean to say that the whole game is bad because I really do think it has all the right stuff to make it an entertaining game for the price. I just feel that the antagonist of this game falls short. And since the antagonist of this game is really the core concept, it hurts the entire game for me.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2017

  See that 1.7 hours played? That was 1.7 hours of myself, my father, and my wife frantically rushing from frozen building to frozen building seeking warmth, light, and lockable doors as strange 'things' from who knows where chased at our heels. Frantically we'd scurry around seeking things you might find trivial: a place to sleep, coffee beans, food, a simple band-aid. To us these things were worth more than gold. It was a fun, tense experience and we had made it just over halfway through campaing when disater took us. My father had cut himself searching a warehouse and had been bleeding for awhile. We had searched in vain for more bandages but the wound finally caught up with him He collapsed into the snow. Seeing him fall, I sprinted over and tried to drag him inside a warm building to perform CPR. But the 'things' arrived. They attacked and battered me down. I collapsed as my wife arrived, beaming the creatures in the face with a flash light and causing them to scuttle away, screaming. First she dragged me inside the building, and then my father. But as she went to give us CPR, the heat and the power went out. The sounds came then from just outside the door, the sounds of the 'things' as they clawed for us. Without gasoline or fuel for the furnace to heat the building and drive the 'things' away, it looked grim. Then a fit of madness struck my wife. She began to cackle as if C'thulhu itself was revealing it's montrous visions to her broken mind as the door flew open and the 'things' took us all. This game is clearly a labor of love by the developers. It balances survival meters in a way that keeps you at the edge of your seat. It creates tension with very simple graphics and the result is a game that is more exciting than many games with far larger budgets. The look of the game is great, the sound effects are perfect, and the soundtrack...wow, the soundtack is EXCELLENT. It captures the feel of an 80's sci-fi movie perfectly and the tracks are haunting and add to the overall feel of the game. The gameplay boils down to: run from building to building for supplies over and over, but it just works very well. Added to this are the rogue-like elements that increase replayablity. This is a wonderful game. If you are thinking about buying, I highly recommend it. The dev's have made a rock-solid base here and any extras they add will just icing on and already amazing cake. And these are great devs. They changed the alien looks based on player feed back AND added co-op tot he game because it was so requested by the player base. These are the type of devs who should be supported.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2018

  I think this games cool but you need to like managing resources and multi-tasking a lot, it almost feels like an RTS. There's not much action so a need for reflexes or good hand eye coordination isn't required (quick thinking does help), and I think it makes a great laptop game. However, as a big fan of "The Thing" I was expecting a game that would follow more closely to what The Thing actually is. It seems like the only inspiration they took was the arctic setting, but I'm not gonna ding a game that tries to implement their own original ideas. In any case, if you're expecting blood tests or seeing your squad mates turn out to be horrifying mutant alien clones, then.. uh.. don't expect that. The largest disappointment for me are the monsters (or "anomalies") and how you interact with them. They act as a passive damage area more then something that is an immediate threat, and they look cartoonish and silly. I feel like these are creatures the game wants you to fear, but they feel more like an annoyance especially due to their goofy visual designs. I feel like I'm being chased around by Pokemon. I understand they're more of a force of nature then a standard video game enemy, I just wish they were more scary. This is more of a criticism towards the monster design on its own, as I really like the rest of the games art style (although that intro cutscene animation is a bit trippy) As for the soundtrack, I'll always like synth music to a degree but you can tell the devs just got done watching Stranger Things or something when they started composing. Staring at timers can get tiring after a while, and you do that a lot in this game. I understand the game uses time as a resource, but I think they could scale the balance where I'm not staring at a circle gauge for 2 minutes straight. I do like how you have to make decisions and investments that could either help or hurt you in the long run, but there is far too much RNG for me at least to make it feel like my decision making is making a difference. The RNG definitely feels like its raw dice rolls and there doesn't seem to be much logic ran to make sure a seed is beatable. I don't necessarily think this is a major problem (Isaac is a big fu[b][/b]ckin' offender of this), but if you get this game I would recommend learning when to kill a run so you're not wasting your time when you inevitably die in zone 4 because you used too many planks for repairing beds and furnaces. I got this for $4 on sale and I see myself playing it for a little while longer just to see if I can beat Adventure mode at least so I'd say it was a good buy for me, but I'd have to say its a game for a niche market so do your research and what not before buying. It's definitely a game the developers have passion for, and I will always give a positive review just for that alone. So while the gameplay is simple, this passion shines through other aspects of the game and I think its definitely something different if you're tired of blast shootin' games.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 26, 2017

  Far too much RNG. Something that won't abide in this genre. Wits, conservation of items and experience should be what counts, not hoping for some coffee beans because you can't find a single bed in 12 different buildings. Open a door... WHOOPS cut your hand, better stop everything and look for some rags or you're dead meat. Basically the game forces you to contantly, and relentlessly, without pause, look for the items you need to sustain your extremely needy sims, while trying to find the key items you need to open the door to the next zone. It's a good concept and the setting is fantastic, great atmosphere, music, and offers a lot of charm to John Carpenter fans, which i happen to be. But all of this is dragged down by a constant struggle to find trivial items like pills, coffee and dried noodles. Honestly, if you're into isometric survival games Don't Starve is a must if it isn't already in your library, i also recommend Project Zomboid, it's an oldie but goodie, Darkwood is great as well, but i can't recommend a game that relies this much on RNG, just too frustrating.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 24, 2017

  Well made game. No bugs or lags so far, the game feels finished. Clearly worth its low price. Though don't expect much from the Strategy tag, the title or its description about being inspired from 'The Thing'. This is a Top-Down survival adventure in an arctic station. There are aliens (just spheres) but these doesn't play a big role, the game would work without them aswell. And luck plays a pretty big role, even a little more than I like. So the goal is to finish 6 areas each consisting a couple buildings. To advance to a new area one needs to solve a specific task. Finding specific items, using levers and so on. And like in every other survival game one does have short-term goals like fighting fatigue, hunger and coldness that prevent him from solving the respective task of the area directly. If you fail at this not only do your 2 characters (later 3) lose health but they can also get psychoses what requires them to sleep even more. And you really don't want them to sleep because then the aliens may spawn and you don't have much options to fight them. Coffee is best. The devs clearly tried to add some replayability to the game. The areas are randomly generated and so is the loot. There are quite a good amount of different characters aswell though these have just some different passive abilities (and sometimes a few starting items). But I don't expect that I will play this game for quite some time now that I finished it for the first time. And that's fine for a game of this price.