I’ve said it a million times and I’ll say it again, I love walking simulators. You’ll never hear me use the phrase in a derogatory way. 35MM, developed by indie game developer Sergey Noskov and ported from PC to consoles (where I play games) by publisher Sometimes You, is almost entirely a walking simulator, with a few short sequences where you can shoot enemies. You also carry melee weapons throughout, but you almost never encounter enemies, so they’re mostly used as tools.
This might be the most rough indie game I’ve played in terms of bugs. Granted, I never play ultra indie games like you’d find on Steam because the indie games I play tend to be slightly higher quality as they would have to be in order to be ported to Xbox or PlayStation, who I can only assume have much stricter review requirements to be accepted.
I had to reload the game a few times. One time I was no longer able to switch or equip different items making it impossible to progress. Another time I got stuck between a barrel and door! Ah, the good ol’ days in old games where that kind of thing happened all the time. And finally, the game just straight up crashed on me one time. I suspect the bugs were an issue of the game being a port.
Additionally, the animations during cutscenes were pretty jarring and ultimately, the story, while I understood each beat of it, didn’t really feel like it all flowed together very well. It’s worth noting here that this game allows for multiple choices/paths (that result in alternate endings) as well as the dialogue being in Russian (and lacking quality English subtitles). I did try to search every room and read every note, but ultimately, I must have missed something because the ending, while I understood it, didn’t really hit because it felt disjointed from the rest of the game.
With those issues out of the way, I still managed to enjoy myself. I just find these games to be charming and a nice break from AAA titles. I appreciate indie devs and I have nothing, but encouragement for them to keep perfecting their craft. This developer has already made a few more games since this one, and there’s clearly some more polish to them. Video games are by far the most technically difficult form of storytelling, compared to movies, TV shows, books, or anything else.
I can neither recommend or not recommend this one. It’s up to you. It’s at least very affordable (under $10). Have a look at the gameplay trailer:
Snaps of My Journey Through the Game
I’m 99% sure that the moose head is intended as a reference to Evil Dead and 75% sure that one of the dead bodies I took a snap of is supposed to be Niko Bellic.
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