Kiitorakennuksen arvostelu (PC)

Suddenly I’m David Bowie in skin-tight pants and a baggy white shirt, fumbling glass spheres in one hand and aimlessly ascending interlocking stairwells and pursuing random subjects like they’re going out of fashion. I’m not singing, though; I’m hunting for anomalies—peculiar phenomena that are levitating from monochrome skylights and pocketing in a world where fine art is subjective, and abnormality is commonplace. In this endless cycle of exploration, I have all but one job: to climb an infinite staircase that stretches for miles and miles, and to locate not just the things that go bump in the night, but the minor details that make an otherwise serene ambiance all the more harrowing. This is, at least for the moment, Kiitorakennus—a place where anomalies come to hide, and hikers come to scratch an itch.

I’m only a stone’s throw away from Office After Hours, and so, I feel as if the anomalies are a lot easier to spot. The location is different, for sure, but the process of identifying the subjects is a lot like the one that I adopted in the previous endeavor. Oh, I’ve seen these corridors before, and I’ve traipsed these same breadcrumbs several times in the past. By now, I sort of understand how it all works: an event triggers a sudden shift in the atmosphere, and an object of some significance emerges as a result of an anomaly’s proximity to the protagonist. The idea here isn’t that different. Like The Exit 8 or, more notably, After Office Hours, the purpose is to locate subtle changes in the airflow, and use the power of intuition to divvy up the fact from the fiction, the inanimate from the sentient.

Ylös tai alas?

Kiitorakennus whisks you into the inner circle of a seemingly endless museum—a checkered monolith that possesses only two viable routes for you to travel: up, and down. Unfortunately for you, however, you are trapped at the lower deck of the building, and have the job of climbing the floors and searching for an exit point somewhere in the vicinity of the highest possible level. But there’s a catch: if you aren’t able to successfully tell whether or not there’s an anomaly in the near vicinity of the stairwell, you can’t progress. The idea here, then, is to make a decision with each passing deck that you encounter: ascend higher if there isn’t an anomaly, or descend to a lower level if there is. The goal there is a straightforward one: locate enough anomalies to eventually reach the summit.

The anomalies in Kiitorakennus aren’t necessarily true to the cliches of modern horror. Here, not everything is working tirelessly to scare you, nor is the world itself plausibly aiming to use jump scares to construct its entire narrative. Rather, the peculiarities are subtle  and often difficult to interpret; a stranger could very well be the anomaly, whereas a painting on the wall could also be a little different to its cousin on the lower deck. Granted, it isn’t always scary, the act of identifying these wandering anomalies, but it is an unsettling experience that makes you second guess a lot of your decisions.

Maailman ihmeet

With only a couple of directions to travel in, and not to mention only half of the promised anomalies to hunt down, the current version of Kiitorakennus does, at least in some ways, fall short in terms of its size and complexity. It’s still a game-game in the traditional sense of the word, but with only a small handful of anomalies to collect and a single portion of a relatively barebones map to scoot around in, it is worth pointing out that demo version is certainly a long way from being a full-fledged horror. It’s certainly playable, but with a lack of content and oh-so many anomalies left to stuff into the framework, it’s also hard to suggest it to anyone who might be hungering for a sizable campaign.

As far as the visuals go, Kiitorakennus doesn’t boast all that many aesthetically appealing set pieces or dynamic elements for you to gander over. In fact, aside from housing a fairly sizable collection of unique museum-like exhibits, the world itself isn’t pleasant to look at at all, with most of its polish  either being smitten in black, white, or unusual blank spaces. It works, given the general context of the situation, but still — it ain’t exactly pretty.

Tuomio

While it’s no secret that anomaly-based object finding games are becoming increasingly common amongst both horror and puzzle fans in this day and age, there are still several that pop out from beneath the woodwork every so often to add an extra lick of paint to an otherwise dated format. Such is the case here with Kiitorakennus. True, it isn’t noticeably different from a lot of its kin, though to give credit where it’s due, it has grasped the meaning behind the concept and, more importantly, how to transform something of a mechanically short-sighted experience into a good, and perhaps even screen-worthy horror. Is it the be all, end all of hidden object games? Absolutely not, no.  That said, it delivers exactly what it set out to do, and that counts for something, truly.

To clear up any confusion, Kiitorakennus is currently in its demo phase, and so, while we can’t quite cover the full scope of the game and its vast range of anomalies, we can add our fifty cents into the pot, so to speak. For the sake of swaying you in the right direction, though, I’ll stand by my original comment and say this: if the likes of The Exit 8, Station 5, or Paranormal Investigators are to your liking, then you should find all of the same strands and pieces of the same puzzle in Kiitorakennus. Here’s hoping that, with a little luck and extra fine tuning, it’ll eventually go on to surpass its primary adversaries’ anomalies and become its own force to be reckoned with. Fingers crossed, anyway.