Pineview Drive Review (PC)

Pineview Drive is yet another entry in the prevalent horror genre, attempting to spook and terrify its players by any thrilling means necessary.

Usually, horror games feel like regular games, only without gameplay and with dimmer lights, and the tension is built more through ominous music, eerie noises and jump scares, and the whole genre relies heavily on how much your mind is willing to work to fill the gaps and especially on how loud you can scream and clown around while streaming it.

Which is a pity, as the horror genre relies on character development, mystery and conflict in order to deliver its effects, alongside the mandatory creepy vibe. Pineview Drive gets the atmosphere part right to some effect, but it unfortunately lacks the necessary depths to immerse one in its world and offer a truly thrilling experience.

The story is delivered in short bursts that are unfortunately too vague and unengaging to hook you and make you interested in sticking around long enough to find what’s going on. There are no puzzles, there is no action, there is pretty much nothing to do but look around for keys randomly left around that unlock random doors to new rooms that have little to offer.

The game relies a bit too much on our innate fear of the dark. It feels genuinely creepy at times, but more often than not, you are stuck circling endlessly at a very slow pace, attempting to find something new or something that you missed during your previous rounds.

While I was going around the house for the third time, trying to find the thing that I was invariably missing, since the game was registering no time passage, I wished that a ghost would come and either put me out of my misery, or at least provide some nice conversation.

The lights went out and I heard a noise, as well as the sound of my own in-game breath, huffing and puffing, and my health dropped for no reason. Nothing happened, yet my health dropped, which made me think that this was likely a video game version of a cautionary tale, What Not to Do When You Have a Heart Condition, placing going around an abandoned house all alone, without bringing at least a modicum of supplies, at the top of the list.

The overall experience is very tedious and slow, as Pineview Drive doesn’t even allow you to grab an axe (that you stumble upon, just can’t pick up) and smash doors open, and coerces you into being the perfect gentleman, who doesn’t stoop to breaking windows with rocks or jumping over the fence just because he doesn’t have the right key to open a lock.

It’s disappointing really, because there’s not much going on, you have to constantly backtrack, and there is no reaction to the various instances of tame poltergeist such as furniture pieces piled on top of one another and other such weird occurrences.

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I was expecting the experience to be a bit more profound and maybe a tad scarier, but instead it was paced pretty slowly and required way too much backtracking. It wasn’t entirely bad, and there is a lot of potential in there, but it simply needs more meat on its bones.

The gameplay revolves around looking for keys and feels very contrived and lacks the kind of flow that would allow the developer to get away with this.

Pineview Drive advertises itself as a game that knows when you’re afraid, and thus gauges your reaction to sudden noises and other such things, but does nothing to tell you what you’re supposed to do in such a situation.

Luckily, your health pool is pretty generous and these moments do not come up very often. It’s in a way better than older games that threw monsters at you and had you smash them upside the head with a sledgehammer, but it would still need a bit more interactivity in order to function properly.

You won’t be attacked by anything in a physical sense and you won’t even explicitly see bizarre apparitions, not in the beginning at least, since you’ll be too busy backtracking and searching for letters from your disappeared wife, that mysteriously pop up around the house.

Searching for them will prove to be a tedious task, as the mansion’s many locked rooms are dimly lit, even when you turn on the lights and light all the candles, and you have to constantly make use of the flashlight to illuminate areas hoping that you’ll find another key.

The flashlight is another bummer, as seemingly nobody ever thinks to pack some items that are heavy on the lumens when they embark on such an adventure, and you won’t get much use out of it, except at very close range.

Further in your journey, the electrical lights will cease to function, making everything even more annoying. The overall vibe of the game is that it’s less about being a horror game but more along the lines of a reminder to pack camping gear unless you like to wander aimlessly in the dark.

When there’s light, the game looks pretty good, especially the vegetation, but it also requires quite a bit of processing power to do so. Walking around the garden in the middle of the day was pretty enjoyable, if uneventful.

The Good

The Bad

Conclusion