600Seconds ~The Deep Church~

More than any other, I think the word "odd" describes 600Seconds the best. More compelling than the sum of its parts, 600Seconds combines exploration with a fairly short and straightforward third person shooter adventure through a church. Exploring the empty church in the waking world for items for ten minutes before your siege in the nightmare seemed, at first, an unnecessary and kind of obnoxious feature (ten minutes is a long time!) though it does help set a certain kind of mood, but after dying in the nightmare once or twice the interest was made more clear to me. The church at first appears impossibly weird and confusing, maybe even randomly generated, but both the items and the layout are the same every time. This is important because as you progress through the nightmare, which forces you onto a (mostly) linear path, you become more familiar with the various rooms, which then increases the interest of the initial exploration section, which feeds further attempts at the action section because of better/more gear and so on. It's really a pretty clever model and there's a lot of stuff to uncover, so much so that the 600 seconds went from feeling too long to too short, as I was…

First and foremost, I think it's best to remember that this is StudioGekko's first title. So know going in that it's not very complex, not very long, and may be prone to jankyness. All that in mind, I still had plenty of fun with the game. Item placements are not random, so learning the layout of the church and location of everything was really fun. I like that there's no text or story to read and that I can just make my own assumptions about what's happening, though maybe a little more to see would've been nice. After my first couple of unsuccessful runs, I thought I was done with the game but I found myself coming back to it the next few days to learn more and give it another shot. Combat is unfortunately a tad easy, so after a few deaths to simply learn about enemy attacks/patterns you should have no problem beating it fairly quickly. I've gotten ~20min victory in that would've been shorter if it was possible to end the exploration phase earlier. Unfortunately I've never actually seen the final cutscene due to a consistent crash at the end, but I can tell from the achievement stats that others aren't having the same problem. The devs are still updating the game and have even fix…