Reviews

• gamedeal user

  Oct 6, 2021

  The kind of surreal that has little meaning. Story: The Lady is a surrealist emotional journey that takes The Lady through a series of fever dream hallucinations, while being at odds with inner struggles of anxiety and depression. She encounters multiple versions of herself throughout the game, unsure of which versions to trust. From the initial confusion, to all out anxiety that one would experience with panic disorder, it's all there for you to explore first hand through the eyes of The Lady. This is the description of the story of The Lady on the store page, however the game has little in the way of an actual story. Just like the description says it's a surreal journey through a bunch of encounters and what they make you feel will likely depend on the player. I honestly could not comprehend what was going on at all throughout my entire playtime so take that as you will. Graphics: Art style is very likely made repulsive on purpose and it does it's job perfectly fine. It evokes an uneasy feeling whenever you see the lady move and things wiggle around on the screen, it just looks wrong. I definitely think the art style is the highlight of the game and that's about all the good praise I can give it on the surface. Audio: The soundtrack of the game also does well with setting up an unsettling atmosphere, with some creepy droning noises that make you feel like something is going to go wrong at any moment. However I do find the soundtrack nothing special, it's decent, but it's not crazy memorable as I've heard the same type of droning soundtrack multiple times beforehand. Gameplay: To explain The Lady is quite difficult, but it's basically a sort of shoot em up ? I guess on paper. You control the lady on a 2D plain and you can attack things coming after you. There's also boss fights which act like actual schumps which are just super bizarre. The gameplay is just not good whatsoever and the game is hurt by a ton of really weird decisions. First of all the controls are absolutely awful. The Lady herself feels super janky to move around and often feels like she will take a multiple steps more than you ask her and her attacks feel slightly delayed as well which makes the combat a massive chore. The game is also pretty difficult for no reason. It's cryptic nature and how much damage some enemies deal just make the game a chore to finish and at one point I resorted to using a guide to finish it, cause I was stuck and did not have any idea on what to do to progress. Verdict: The Lady is just not a very good game in general. It's art style is the highlight, but to appreciate it you have to put up with some truly mediocre gameplay and some terrible game design. It's really short, barely pushing 30 minutes and since it's free you can definitely find worse ways to spend your time, but you can probably do much better. Final Rating: 4/10 Pros: + Great art style + Unsettling atmosphere Cons: - Too cryptic - Awful controls - Story is incomprehensible If you liked this review please consider joining https://steamcommunity.com/groups/completingthebacklog and https://steamcommunity.com/groups/ImperialReviews
• gamedeal user

  Feb 4, 2015

  This game had me intrigued from the first moment. "The Lady" is a 2D Surreal Puzzle Horror type game, which compelled me to take a look with that alone, but what attracted me even more was the hand drawn art. When first taking a look at the trailer, the feel of it began to take form into something I wanted to experience for myself. The art is utterly gorgeous, and I seriously would not be able to praise it enough. I appreciate games with hand drawn art 10 times more than I normally would. It's got such a creepy and artistic look to it. The basic outline of the game is defined and left up to personal interpritation within the slight border lines of what the designers window out, panic attacks and anxiety. The theme and sensation of the game falls into place really nicely and the eereeily abrasive soundtrack puts your mind in that 'panic' feeling, the rules of it break 'normal' and 'proper' game design in a good way that supports the theme. Now, speaking as someone who suffers from severe panic and anxiety attacks, this is played out perfectly. With the general theme of the game being one that isn't touched upon very often, if at all, it was a great choice. Where part of me immensely dislikes the 'no-save, no-continue' side of things, it is that awful during a panic attack, you are unable to leave it or be dumped into the middle of one, you just always start from the beginning, so it's only realistic that the theme and atmosphere of the game keeps that key element. A couple of things I didn't like is the attitude and attempt to be ''Brutal, like the old days of gaming!'', as it completely ignores two things, ''the old days'' that people remember so fondly, mostly consisted of teaching the player through the gameplay, even within the first few moments, they used to do this.. And secondly, the older games weren't made about these touchy subjects, they were made to be fun, some uplifting with good story and mostly to get as many quarters out of you as possible. Now, in The Lady, there is a part of the game where you have to not go into the first ''doorway'' and wait around for the next. Unless you up-front were told that sometimes the first doorway isn't the right one, even if it's the only one visible at the time, without looking it up, it would be just about impossible unless by sheer fluke to have figured this out. That is not good gameplay and this is by no means to be considered exploration. Lastly, one thing I really did dislike was how it worked so hard and put so much effort into getting you into this creepy, panicked theme to then have it's random 'space-invaders' like levels with completely out of place sound effects, break the atmosphere that it spent so long carefully setting up. It also drops it's 'unforgiving' nature during these as when you die, you can restart from that point up until you have no more lives. In short, through an art perspective, it is amazing. As a game, the immense and deliberate mess makes it hard to progress in the most punishing way possible, not a challenging way, or in a way that engages with the theme and that is never a good thing. However, overall is was an enjoyable experience and had great room for interpretation which was set up nicely and it's also a well displayed out way of what a panic disorder is really like. You and your mind is the worst enemy.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 14, 2015

  The Lady, an experimental game / interactive art / 4D simulator, and by that I mean depression, desolation, depersonalisation, and despair. The game explores anxiety, misery, fear, and schizophrenia, but through a very personal point of view of its author(s), making a very clever use of symbolism; it has an uncanny feeling of healing through art, as if a psychiatrist suggested a patient to express themselves by creating this game. While it doesn't treat these subjects from a general point of view, this approach gives a sense of authencity. Gameplay wise, The Lady is comprised of several minimalistically-designed levels, divided in stages. Each level has a different gameplay approach, with a distinct variation for each stage, some being more traditional, while some being more explorative; the exploration parts focus more on the feeling the player has in regards to what is happening to the lady, and not necessarily to the levels themselves. I would suggest to take the game slowly, since rushing into the stages can get you killed and you have to restart from the beginning of the level (but I decided to treat this as a "story-telling" device); furthermore, the game is short enough to finish in roughly 1h - 1h30. Visually, the game is simplistic and repetitive, but it manages to get the message across perfectly, and the art style is exquisite. At times it reminded me of Alice: Madness Returns, as if it were a collection of mini-game out of that universe. I appreciated the atmosphere and while I'm not a fan of dark ambient or noise, I belive the sound design fits the game perfectly; some of the sound effects could have used some more work, but now I'm just nitpicking. Overall I enjoyed the game and its superb artstyle, and consider it to be a fresh breeze of originality. Pros: * art style * atmosphere * music and sound design * gameplay * originality Cons: * some sound effects Score: 7.75 / 10
• gamedeal user

  May 6, 2015

  Phenomenal art and a killer soundtrack cannot hide the fact that this has really bad gameplay. The Lady's gameplay is sliding slowly to the right, then to the left, then to the right. If you repeat this enough the world around the character eventually changes and introduces more hazards or a boss, for a clunky boss fight. My cut-off for games is around the half hour mark: if you can't engage me in 30 minutes, you likely never will. But I was tired of this game within 10. Still, I kept going in an attempt to see if it earns its Mostly Positive rating. But the game never seemed to actually want to begin being good. Its harsh difficulty rating doesn't help either. Let me clarify: the game is simple as you basically only slowly move from left to right, but because the controls are so slow everything seems to be on a delay, causing you to get hit by whatever obstacle you were trying to avoid. And after just a few hits it's game over, man. Maybe the later levels are great, but since I can't even get past the first two without either dying (and the game closing on me) or me WANTING to shut the game off, I can't comment on them.
• gamedeal user

  May 6, 2015

  Overinterpretation is a thing. This game boasts eerie artwork with a mysterious atmosphere. That is until you play it. And die. And then play the same awfully slow part again. This game's as eldritch to play as it looks. The controls are often unresponsive and there seems to be no indication to how many hits you can take before you have to restart; at times the lady can tank several pieces of glass and other times she dies in one hit. Some levels are solved by walking slowly, and then going slowly in the other direction. The pacing is horrible, often the player is forced to dwell in one level for far too long while having figured out the solution long ago. I really liked the premise of this as well as it's art and atmosphere. Sadly this is broken by the terrible game this is in. One can maybe ignore the gameplay, or lack thereof, by interpreting the game as a whole, but I caution everyone who does so not to overinterprete too much.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 17, 2015

  To start with, the positive - the presentation is nice; the visuals droning tone of the 'music' get you in the right mood very effectively. The gameplay on the other hand is more akin to trying to open a series of locked doors until you find the one that opens, leading to a second series of doors. And then a third. There's also shooting from time to time. It's not a matter of difficulty so much as it is patience. To illustrate this, here's a summary of what I played of the first couple of levels. Starting in a long corridor I headed all the way left, then all the way right, met with identical animations at each end. Assuming those were just the boundaries, it took a good while before I found that you just have to head all the way left again to trigger a different animation and cause the doors to appear. Next I found myself trapped between two barricades that hurt to touch, so I waited, smashing falling glass until eventually my own rebounding projectiles killed me. It turns out you have to just shuffle through all (four, as it turns out) of these barricades, taking damage from each one, before you can proceed to the boss room by going (you guessed it) all the way left, then right, then left again. Did the boss really need me to play with a handicap to my HP in order to pose a challenge? No, as it turns out, since the unresponsiveness of the controls and ill-defined hitboxes did me in several times, along with the lack of brief invincibility after getting hit which meant the boss could bat me away directly into falling glass for a second hit of damage. Eventually I beat it, leading to a maze level where each wrong door looped you back round to the start. This is where my "picking doors until you find the right one" metaphor becomes literal, but the problem is there's no indication as to which to pick of your (up to 5 or so) options, and it's entirely possible you just have to go through every last door before the final one becomes the 'right' one. Again, there's no way to tell other than "keep wandering until something changes". This eventually leads to the next boss, who is a Space Invader complete with 8-bit sounds and Galaga-style projectiles. I'm not sure what this was meant to "symbolize" (if anything) but it scrunches the mood the game was trying to convey up into a ball and tosses it neatly into one of those bins with a basketball hoop over it. It was somewhere in the following level that, for the second time, one of my many deaths (there's no 'lives' counter) caused the game to quit out on me. I'm honestly not sure if it even WAS a game-over I triggered or the game glitching out, as the effect was the same - the graphics flicker, the sprites bug out of place then the game freezes and crashes to desktop. And no, of course it doesn't save your progress. Back to the very beginning you go. Faced with redoing all those levels at the same glacially slow pace again, I gave up. That's not, as the storepage description puts it, 'Nintendo Hard', that's a game deliberately trying to waste your time. Honestly I'm giving this a "cautious non-recommendation" in the end. This honestly shows some promise, and you can get both the game and soundtrack for about £3 like I did, which isn't a steep entry price but this may have been more at home on Newgrounds or Kongregate as a free 'proof of concept'. If it had rethought a few of the gameplay design decisions, and had more ways to proceed than 'wander back and forth' and some means to skip levels you've already beaten this could have been a real gem, or at least less player-hostile.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 25, 2015

  I originally supported this game on Greenlight, becoming interested in the artstyle and vagueness of the game. And it seems like it succeeded in catching my attention, atleast enough for me to buy. Is it worth it? No. Anyway, it tries to be all mysterious and interesting, but it's a case of "doing it for the art" to the point that the game just isn't enjoyable as a /game/. The art looks good, and The Lady's design is re-used quite nicely. The game's vagueness makes it a bit of a crapshoot to figure things out, and while it advertises that it doesn't hold your hand, it doesn't do it like Dark Souls or other survival horror games that it compares itself to. It does it pretty bad. I'll admit, it's nice to figure things out through trial and error, but... when you have to go through 4 rooms which unlock the boss, then fight the boss for an unknown amount of time, possibly fail, and re-do the rooms prior to the boss, again, it takes the big issue about survival horror games: Restarting all over again, which removes anything remotely interesting about the game as a whole, and makes it a frustrating experience overall. Oh and compared to other survival horror games, you won't know whether or not you'll be at full health or not, besides the vague "bleeding out from your arm stumps", which... doesn't really show anything. Cons: - No way to gauge your health; You won't know whether or not the next hit will kill you. The "bleed" mechanic is pretty poorly implemented. - Difficulty is "brutal". About as hard as moving left and right. - It's hard to know what is your hitbox and what isn't. At first your head is the only thing, next it's your whole body. - The re-used assets become a big joke, especially during the final part of the game, where it becomes a Shoot 'Em Up. - No checkpoints, which is apparently part of the whole "brutal old school feel". As mentioned above, it just makes the game tedious and removes any immersion gained up until you've restarted more than twice. - It has Steam trading cards, cause why not? (Seriously, does every single game need these things?) - Game wants you to learn about yourself, apparently? - [spoiler] apparently the game is about depression. Which is probably the most hipster thing you can drop into an indie game. In no way, did I feel like it was about that at all... And I've had depression. I guess I'm not "indie" enough to feel that way. Oh and the ending ends with the Lady getting her arm ripped off by a bird, which I guess is why she was depressed and the reason why the whole game happened at all? [/spoiler] Pros: - Unique artstyle. - Has a nice surreal vague feel to it. - The game wants you to learn everything through experimentation. - It gives an amazing feel of dread... up until you have to go through it all over again. So... overall, it's a pretty disappointing game. I didn't expect much, besides a unique surreal game, and it held that promise high up and then dropped it after it stepped on its own hipster scarf. It could be a good game, but I doubt the creator will make any updates or patches to make this game more favorable to play. So far, all updates for this game have been about his new upcoming game. The game could've been such a great surreal nightmare, but it's plagued by nightmarish game mechanics and things that even traditional throwback games abandoned for the better. Note: I ended up watching the last few levels of the game, as I got too fed up with dealing with the game.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 27, 2015

  This "game" gives all-new meaning to the words "looks great, but lacking in gameplay". And believe me, I'm perfectly open-minded, believe that games can definitely be "art", and am furthermore the kind of person who actually likes the odd "walking simulator"! But The Lady isn't even that, it's...erm...fuck me, I don't know what it is. An excuse for someone to show off their admittedly intriguing visual style? An exercise in MASOCHISM, perhaps?! Let's see what the Store page has to say about the game. "A 2D Surreal Puzzle Horror." Hmmm, okay. Surreal...certainly. Horror...okay, maybe at a pinch (it's definitely "disturbing", I'll give it that). 2D...well, yes, by all means. PUZZLE?! Well, sure...if a super-primitive, mega-minimalistic, barely-responsive variant of GALAGA is your idea of a "puzzle" game, then I guess it might be that too!! The greatest "puzzle" herein is what the dev or devs of this game were high on when they made this rather - ahem - "trippy" product, and one can only hope that no pregnant actresses were slaughtered and no slogans were written in blood on any walls; though I fear the creative process this time 'round may have been a messy one. My best guess is that Terry Gilliam had a teenage daughter who was regrettably molested by Communion aliens...and against her father's fondest wishes she became a video game designer as a way to avoid falling asleep, lest the black-eyed demons should come for her again. Absolute fucking madness. With no saves or checkpoints. ABSOLUTE. FUCKING. MADNESS. Verdict: 4/10.
• gamedeal user

  Feb 4, 2016

  looks sick and disturbing so i thought i would like it:) bu no. just a couple of fine artwork but no gameplay at all.
• gamedeal user

  May 11, 2016

  2.2/10 – Expectations were high; Satisfaction was LOW! This game really let me down! After viewing the store, watching the videos and reading the synopsis; I was nearly 100% that I would love this game. I was 110% wrong though. The art style is awesome and really is the only redeeming factor in the game. Honestly, if you look at the screenshots here; you will likely see everything and more than you would see playing the game. The real reason for the negative review is the gameplay. I honestly have low expectations in general, but walking back and forth avoiding glass just wasn't enough to peak my interest. There are a handful of buttons which allow you to attack and move different directions but ultimately adds zero intrigue. After walking across the map for 30 minutes I can honestly and accurately classify this game as a loser. Worth $0.25 to FREE. Cool art style, but the positives end there. [code][h1] Accidently Reviewed[/h1] Was this review helpful or maybe even not helpful? Either way join this group for more. Free Keys and Reviews weekly! [url=http://steamcommunity.com/groups/Accidently] Steam Group: AccidentlyReviewed[/url][/code]