The Heilwald Loophole

If you are expecting a story that makes sense, and that satisfyingly concludes the many threads that it weaves then look elsewhere. This one ends with the writer shrugging his shoulders and loudly proclaiming "Well... I give up."

Admittedly I did not deep dive into this game, the premise of dying to unlock new routes / information is interesting, but the means to get there are unengaging. This entire game is just the hide and run away loop of Amnesia, but lacks any puzzle qualities that would require you to think about anything. Progression is just knocking your head against setting up different scenarios to be killed and seeing if the developer agrees that this is in fact deserving of a new information scrap. Since you inevitably die within the first 10 minutes of gameplay, and realize it is a means to progression, all the scary dudes chasing you immediately stop being scary. Watch a youtube playthrough.

The game is more than a little all over the place. Comically large corks in the wall, liver stealing doctors, a possible intermediate time looping protagonist, golden toilets, and door kicking nurses. The game certainly keeps you on your toes, and the sound design is excellent. The gameplay is fairly simple dodge the monster fair with a singe moderately interesting puzzle. I can't give it a ringing endorsement, but it's interesting at least.

Was neat, had paths that were a little hard to find, but still pretty good

A fun little lite-horror game that balances it's comedic elements well along side it's horror pretty well. Though it's never out-and-out scary (as someone who gets afraid at most horror games), there are some tense and unsettling moments interspersed within characters with goofy gimmicks, trash eating, and patients in desperate need of toilet paper. It does tow pretty close to the line of being too immature, it never crosses over, but there is some grace given with the fact that hospitals can easily be twisted into a truly disgusting place so it's more gross-out elements aren't unwarranted. As a game, Heilwald has some puzzles but most of the game boils down to the Outlast run-and-hide style of horror. There's some minor item collection to solve simple puzzles, and some trial-and-error pathfinding in regards to going back to stages to see how they can play out differently to progress to different areas, but on the most part you will be running away from the weirdos who make up the staff at this hospital. Heilwald is a short game and perfect for someone who can't handle too serious horror, with Halloween right around the corner this is a fun game to play with friends in a discord ca…

Great story, great gameplay, and a system of spooks that keeps you engaged throughout the whole game. Highly recommend playing this for yourself.