HOLES

Holes is a frantic fast paced nightmare where you explore underground caverns solving puzzles and shine your flashlight at grotesque enemies to defeat them. This game is no walk in the park. At first it seems like a generic indie horror game, but the later levels have super obtuse puzzles and Dark Souls style bosses to defeat. I managed to beat this super frustrating (But kind of rewarding) game in 3.5 hours. + The game is frantic, fast paced, and tense, and doesn't let up. The later levels are an absolute nightmare to complete. Massive perserverence needed, some bosses and puzzles took me upwards of 20-30 tries. + The atmosphere is original, and the art direction is well created. + The music is soothing to listen to. - All the fast paced action, frustration, and VHS graphic filters can lead to eye strain and headaches. - The game is a buggy mess. Sometimes items will go randomly missing, you won't know what certain items do, some levels have weird areas with dead ends, some places say "Press E to interact"...and nothing happens. - Many of the sound effects are grating to hear on the headphones. For those that want a buggy, die hard, super challenging, indie horror game, it may…

Holes was a complicated game to analyze; it has a lot of content and a social critique about overwork, the corporate world, and pursuing your dreams. However... unfortunately, the game was quite buggy when I played it. I hope the developer is willing to fix these bugs to make this recommendation worthwhile; otherwise, it becomes difficult to recommend this game. Bugs I encountered: - Specific moments where enemies didn't behave as expected or were standing still. - The office puzzle where turning the light on and off didn't open the door for me to continue. - The skull heads of the "boss"/"puzzle" disappearing, and I had to restart the game from scratch to get the heads again. - Objectives not updating, and I got stuck in a new area with the objective from the previous area.