Great potential, but horribly put together, this is when a good idea happens and the creators get lazy through the way. Well graphics and content were good. There is no map, which means you will get lost many times, doing countless circles, the controls are very crisp, but the map structure is awkward and will make you do many bitter jumps.... that just makes no sense, there is no waypoint so the effort is lost once light goes out of you, only one enemy type.. which is lame, but this idea could be carried over for a better game, even though as for a halloween special is not so bad.
Reviews for "Ereban Dawn"
idk didnt seem like very good game
sound was ok but the scratchiness made it sound worse than it already kinda did. animations arent that great, but its whatever bc the b&w makes it less obvious. it was dumb how there were hands and ghosts n stuff that floated around but if you hit them they didnt do anything...
furthermore platforming / control was mediocre, and i still dont understand what the point of the lanterns was
Frustrating... When I clicked this I was expecting something like Limbo. And it sure seemed like it at first, but I can't tell you how many times I just ended up going around in a damn circle. Plus the ceiling collisions are a little too aggressive; I missed a lot of jumps because of that. The gameplay just isn't fun or intriguing, all I noticed was a platformer that gave you no directions. Overall it was an exercise in frustration.
As far as sound goes, this may be one of the top reasons why the game wasn't as scary as it was meant to be. It seemed a little too loud and techno-like. Just taking music from another horror game or film would have been much more effective than using something on the Audio Portal. Penderecki is really the only person you can reliably go to for scary music, but you could have also used the Giygas Theme or something. Some kind of sound effects would have been nice too.
Now, graphics... Not good. I like the black and white thing, but it needs polish. Lots of it. There are some nice transparent fog and mist images you can find (just Google "mist filetype:png") that you could animate floating across the screen to give it a more grainy, textured look or feel. It might also have been a good idea to slightly blur the ground you're standing in, and possibly showing slowly moving environments in the background. For a black and white game, it's important to up the ante when it comes to effects and atmosphere. I'd also point out that the animation is rather poor, and the character could be drawn much better. There's only one playable character, right? So put some time into animating him!
Last, I'll address the scare value. Taking the whole concept of shadows and a limited line of sight, it looks almost as if this game was inspired by my Flash story Gemini. This is not entirely bad, but the game has some serious balance issues. The spectre guy that floats around comes too often and drains things too fast. Plus he doesn't even have any sound effect. When I first started the game I tried seeking out potential hazards just to see what dying was like. In the end it felt more like I was playing Platform Racing against the spectre than he was actually chasing me. The visibility penalty is annoying where it should be creepy. The only thing that really bothered me was when my line of sight dwindled to almost nothing. And that was because I thought something would jump me if I lost. When I realized it just gave a silent game over screen, I decided to quit. No point in going through the same boring landscape again only to fall and climb my way back up.
The biggest thing this Flash is missing is polish. It needs more atmosphere in looks and sound.
Well I think it's awesome! :)
This game is not scary at all. I haven't shat my pants. Not at all. Really. On a totally unrelated note, I'm going to turn all the lights of the house on.
The game is interesting and has a good atmosphere, although it can get a bit boring after a while (specially before you understand what you have to do). No need for a tutorial, IMO. If needed, there's some help on "About" at the beginning of the game, but it's pretty easy to figure it out. Basically, light the 20 lights (or something like that) and then I guess you have to go to the circular thing where the number of lit lights appears.
Unfortunately I wasn't able to find the last 3 ones and died in a horrible death. Will try again this night, because sleeping is overrated.