Disturbed Reviews

Disturbed is a fairly short visual novel that takes on a slight horror atmosphere. You play as a farmer in a decaying land that is cursed by a spreading plague which is wiping out not only crops, but livestock as well. You will need to proceed through the story, solve a few small puzzles, and return the land to its once inhabitable form. The title uses the Ren'py Engine, which is the current standard for most visual novel games, so if you've played any previously the interface will be familiar to you.

I'm going to say right off the bat that the story here is lacking pretty severely; there's nothing interesting or fun about being a depressed farmer who wants to restore the fertility of his land. With that being said, where Disturbed really excels is its dark atmosphere, morose mood, and raw graphics. All of the scenes are hand drawn in black and white, and honestly they look completely untouched by Photoshop or other image editing software; rather they look like they went straight from the paper to the scanner, in to the game. Another fun thing to do in this title is to find out all of the ways that you can possibly die, and there are about a dozen different ways.

Another lacking feature here is the audio. You can play for minutes at a time without hearing anything whatsoever, and music is virtually nonexistent. The only sounds are the ones that indicate when you're on a death screen, and effects such as doors shutting or keys jingling. Even just a slight dark ambient soundtrack would suffice, it certainly wouldn't take away from the corroded atmosphere of the game; in fact, it would enhance it. Most players get mind-numbingly bored without any background audio to listen to. There are also quite a few spelling and grammatical errors throughout the dialogue, but some of these have been patched out.

So you may be wondering why I'm recommending Disturbed even though I listed off more cons than pros. Simply put, the game has an impenetrable depressive atmosphere that should be experienced by any horror and black metal fans. It's also easy to tell that a lot of time and passion went in to drawing all of the scenes, and there are quite a lot of them. Disturbed is best saved for a rainy fall day, when you have an hour or two to kill (or to be killed).

Rating: 3.0/5.0 - Average, can take it or leave it.
The Horror Network
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From publisher and developed Brad Moore, comes the indie horror game Disturbed. Released on the 3rd of October, 2016, this is a casual adventure simulation game where you go about your adventures and try not to die (although you get a lot of achievements for dying).

Play as a farmer who struggles to manage a failing farm. You come to a point where there is no more hope, and you must do something.

You figure that you will die and it is just a matter of how and where. What difference is there to make? What can a simple farmer do? Only you can answer these questions.

This game is powered by the Ren’py Engine and the visuals are 800 by 600 by default. The game runs really smoothly and there’s no connection issues (thank goodness for offline play).

I got this game around Halloween 2016, just to have a look at what it was, and found the achievements were relatively easy to get. Due to college, I abandoned my old Steam account, and forgot completely about the game. Coming back to Steam at the start of this year, I was delighted to find this again. I was really enjoying it on my old account, so to start it again and see how it went and if there were any updates was really exciting.

I found the game quite easy to remember. I managed to click most of the achievements in ten minutes of play, and then it became a lot of clicking around, seeing where my choices took me, and trying to click the last of the achievements. There was a lot to discover in this game, and it was fun to sit down for forty minutes and click around for a bit.

It was exciting to see where my choices took me, to find the horrors that waited to kill me, and to eventually beat the game.

The art style is very simplistic, however, it was still really enjoyable to look at. The sound work did well – there wasn’t much sound unless something happened, which added a tiny aspect of jump scares if you weren’t expecting them. These are easy to adjust to, however, and the jumping ceases during the game.

This game really doesn’t take too long to complete at all. As I said earlier, it only took me forty minutes (I think Steam said thirty nine minutes) to fully complete all the achievements. Achievement hunters, I’d recommend this one. It’s quite simple, although some of the achievements take a lot of time to come across, especially if you make more wrong choices than right.

I’m really glad I decided to come back to this game and give it another try. I would definitely recommend this to choice-based simulator lovers, and for achievement hunters as well. Indie horror fans would likely enjoy this one as well, so give it a try! This is definitely one of my favourite games for sure.