Adventure games are rare on the Xbox Live Indie Games service. And even more so, serious games that provide an incredibly emotional and atmospheric experience are even rarer, as most XBLIGs try to have a strong sense of humor more than anything else (I hold I MAED A GAM3 W1TH Z0MB1ES!!!1 responsible for this) So it’s to my great surprise that Shining Gate’s Decay Part 1 is not only an extremely clever adventure game, but is deadly serious and deeply immersive which makes it a special breed of great game.
In Decay Part 1, you play as a man who has just attempted suicide by hanging, but survives and finds out that he has lost all of his memories. As you take control of the character you find yourself in a creepy and apparently empty apartment complex. As you search the building, trying to find a way out, you discover a lot of strange newspaper articles that introduces several characters, including one that your character thinks may be himself. It’s a very interesting story, but it seems to serve as a pilot episode of a TV series; its purpose being to set up the characters, story, and mystery without giving you much more than that, and the game ends on a weird and slightly forced note. But this explains its $1 price point; it wants to hook as many people as possible to the compelling mystery at a cheap price.
The game plays out like most other adventure games. You control a cursor (which is a straight-up PC mouse cursor in this game) and you have to click around the environment trying to collect important items to add to your de facto adventure game inventory where you can examine and combine items to solve puzzles with the purpose of advancing the story and narrative. The puzzles themselves are actually extremely clever and take full advantage of the environment around the puzzle to give you clues to solving the puzzle, and are sometimes actually part of the puzzle. For example, you have to rearrange four portraits into an undefined and esoteric order, but if you pay attention to the environment around you then the answer becomes quite clear forcing a facepalm if you’ve been struggling with that puzzle like I was (yes, a facepalm was delivered). It’s quite ingenious and you’ll find yourself extremely proud of yourself when you solve a puzzle.
Presentation wise, Decay Part 1 utilizes 2D art backgrounds to serve as the environments, with some motion and special effects sprinkled in to give the sense of a living, breathing world. It’s highly detailed and beautiful, and the fuzzy filter on your perspective seems to give you the sense that this place is otherworldly and could quite possibly be a dream. The mostly ambient soundtrack is highly absorbing and the sound effects sound hollow and dark. All of this put together makes this game one of the best atmospheric experiences on the XBLIG marketplace this year.
This is not to say that Decay Part 1 is a perfect experience. I was able to speed through the game on my first try in about 15-20 minutes and there’s practically zero replayability after finishing the game, which even for $1 is slightly hard to justify when you can find much more replayable titles on the market at the same price. Also, as mentioned previously, the ending is slightly sudden and forced and is highly unsatisfying as you feel like you haven’t accomplished anything major that would take you to the ending. There’s no real sense of escalation in tension, except in one part towards the end, but you leave that and then the highly tense atmosphere of the game settles back into its standard creep grove.
Decay Part 1 is an extremely promising title of a hopefully high-quality series. The atmosphere is fantastic, the puzzles are extremely clever, and the story is highly interesting and promises some exciting twists-and-turns in the future. But it’s somewhat hard to recommend as it can easily be finished quickly with almost no replay value, and the ending is incredibly sudden and is highly unsatisfying. If you can look past this, then prepare for an incredibly immersive and clever experience that is entirely unique on the Xbox Live Indie Games service.