If you're looking for a quick horror game to play today, look no further than Blameless; a short 20-60 minute puzzle-solving mystery game that has a unique tinge to it. You're a freelance journalist who has been led by a potential client to a house that is under construction. As you follow him into the seemingly abandoned home, you're hit over the head with a metal bar and knocked unconscious, only to awake a few hours later. Can you free yourself from your dark confinements, and escape your pursuer?
There's a tight aura of relentless tension that will surround you from the beginning until the bitter end with this title. The entire time you're left questioning if you will run into your captor while exploring the small, unfinished corridors and rooms of the house. Your first task is to escape the basement that you were left in, and it's in those few minutes that you will understand that Blameless has a different take on investigation and exploration. It takes some critical thinking and scavenging to solve the few puzzles that are present, and it's all very reminiscent of the game INFRA; although the atmosphere here is much more sinister.
The optimization of this game is excellent; it ran at 60 FPS at all times for me on my GTX 1080/i7 6700k combo. The assets and textures look crisp and fresh, the overall title looks really good. Even the voice acting for the intro, ending, notes, and dialogue is extremely well executed; a rarity for a free horror game. There have been some in-game bugs and glitches that've marred the experience of some players, but the developer is very active in the community and a day after the game launched he released an update patch. I played the game after this update patch, and I can confirm that I did not encounter any bugs or glitches during my playthrough.
At the end of Blameless, we are led to believe that this short ride is part of a much bigger project, and that this is a test to see how well it would do on Steam. For one, I think that we need more titles like this on Steam, as the only real "investigative" games that we have are Murdered: Soul Suspect and INFRA; neither of which have a horror element to them like Blameless. So I say to the developer, bring it on! Please do, in fact, as this set-up has left me craving more. To you I say give it a shot, you've got nothing but 20-60 minutes to lose.
Rating: 4.0/5.0 - Excellent, highly worth playing.The Horror Network
Steam Group:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetworkSteam Curator:
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/thehorrornetwork#curation 4.0