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Albino Lullaby: Episode 1 (PC) artwork

Albino Lullaby: Episode 1 (PC) review


"Not living up to potential"

In its current state I don't believe Albino Lullaby is fit for sale. What I experienced was a buggy mess with gameplay that barely functioned correctly and a horror element that wasn't scary.

Before I go into what made me hate the game so much I will briefly talk about the few thing I did like about the game. The first of them is the graphics style. I love the cartoony style that the characters and world are animated in. It's simple but very effective. The world is full of colour.

Added into this is just purely the setting of the world. The basics of the setting is a mechanical household world with rooms that can move about by the press of buttons. Parts of the world seem to be a kind of mad house setting. The outdoors sections of the world are beautiful colourful settings. The world is set upon a seemingly endless pit. The setting of the world really got my attention.

I was also rather fond of the story. Fitting into this uniquely designed world is also a very unique story. It seems to be that there is a cult following from grandchildren to what they call the grandmother. You find out some very creepy facts around the world. The majority of the story is told through notes found around the world. Unfortunately the story has a cliffhanger ending at the moment due to it being episodic though.

Albino Lullaby: Episode 1 (PC) image

Unfortunately this is about as far as my good experiences went for the game. I guess I'll probably start with explaining what I didn't like about the horror, since thats probably why your looking at this game in the first place. The game seems to pride itself on not using jump scares. This means they have limited options on how to carry out horror. They needed to create a horrifying atmosphere instead. Unfortunately they didn't do this. There only attempt at horror was the enemies (called the grandchildren). They're creepy for about the first minute you see them and then they just get to be neusance. The way they focus on the horror in these enemies are through the voices. They have a kind of creepy tone to them. This creeped me out when I first saw them and then just got annoying.

Which brings me nicely into my next point. The voice acting. I mean it's kind of a mixed bag. I enjoyed the enemies voices at first. There voices were usually in a kinda high pitched old man kinda tone. But this gets old quickly and very annoying. And then you realize the voice acting isn't actually good at all. The other issue with this is that the enemies repeat the same quotes multiple times. There isn't enough variety in what they say to last through the game.

The biggest issue I had throughout play was a game breaking bug. Through fault of the game I had managed to go backwards an objective through a door opening when it shouldn't have. This made me had to complete this section again. However I couldn't. When I got to a door that I had went through before when completing the objective it was seemingly blocked by a rock. This meant there was no way for me to continue to progress. It meant I had to completely restart the entire game from the beginning again. I was about 1.5 hours into the game so I wasn't particularly happy about this. I attempted to speed run the game again to the point I was up to which took me about an extra half hour of gameplay still. I reached out to the developer about this issue and they are looking into it. Whats worse is it isn't the only game breaking bug out there. A friend of mine also experienced one that had an unmovable enemy blocking his way.

Albino Lullaby: Episode 1 (PC) image

Another buggy part of the game is the way stealth mechanics work. To be honest they don't really work at all. Sometimes enemies seem to spot you when your nowhere near in sight to them and other times they don't spot you when your right in front of them. This means you have to be extra careful to try and make sure the game doesn't mess it up for you. But whats even worse is when you do get spotted. There is seemingly no way to escape them. Hiding out for a while doesn't make them loose attention for you. Every enemy in the world seems to locked to pathing towards you whether they have any kind of vision on you or not. Stealth missions really aren't fun to do because of this.

Then combat isn't much better either. Later in the game you get this device called the clicker. When you use it it creates a green orb in front of you. All enemies in this orb at the time get knocked out for a while. The problem with this is that the orb makes is so you can't see were your going. It is exceedingly bright and large so much so it covers basically all of your visiblity.

Talking about visibility you don't really have much of that throughout the world either. The game is way too dark in a lot of areas. It's so dark that at various points throughout the game I found myself having to guess where I could actually go. So therefore a lot of the time I also found myself walking off of the world accidently. The settings has no option for brightness so I couldn't fix this. The only option there is was for the detail of the shadows which seemed to make no difference.

Albino Lullaby: Episode 1 (PC) image

Performance is also terrible on Albino Lullaby. I have a system that should easily be capable of playing through this game at a constant 60fps. However I barely managed to get 40fps throughout most of the game and had frequent framerate drops to unplayable levels. At one point in the game it dropped to an abismal 5fps and stayed like that. I had to change all my settings to the lowest and still only got about 20fps. It is unacceptable to have a game this poorly optimized!

Another small complaint is with the notes. When I am being chased by enemies I don't want to be having to read notes. If I do have to then I would like the game to pause for me to read it. I found myself having to rush my reading so I don't get killed by an enemy while doing it.

On top of all this issues I had other smaller bugs with clipping, getting stuck in the world, jumpiness in elevators and bad parkour mechanics. I also completed the game in probably about between 2-3 hours so it's not long of a length.

At the state this game is in at the moment I wouldn't recommend it anyone. The developers really need to try and fix a lot of these issues and make the game just overall more fun in general. I really think the game has a lot of potential with the setting and story drawing it forward but it's not living up to it. It may be worth picking up in a few months time after a load of patches but for now I don't think it is.



TheIronicGamer's avatar
Community review by TheIronicGamer (October 17, 2017)

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