Scyla

The controls effectively don't work. The lock-on will miss shots more than hit if the target is moving, and will often just not lock on, or lose the lock, for some reason. The light and grappling hook both start from *behind* the sub as far as I can tell, meaning you'll occasionally hook onto something behind yourself instead of in front, dying through no fault of your own. The hookshot is also painfully slow to go out and back in, so missing is incredibly painful. This is exacerbated by many of the hazards having rather tight timing, meaning you can't sit still and make certain the hook will behave, because the stupid currents will push you all the way back out (or the eyes will insta-nuke you). So instead you often just have to desperately spam, and miss most of the time because there's no way to tell if the hook will actually grab or not because it's fairly short. The visuals are okay. Nothing fancy, but they work fine. The sound is a bit odd. The ambient noises don't seem to actually have anything to do with the creatures or objects that are actually nearby, and the sounds just kind of seem to do whatever. For the level design. Most of the small areas are a bit too cramped,…

"Scyla" is a badly made student project (I think) where you control a submarine on an octopus. It's one of those games where the developers dug up the corpse of HP Lovecraft to spit on it. I can't think of any work in the public domain that's been more abused by "developers" than that. What do you do in the game? If you can get past all the bugs, you move around an underwater narrative with an octopus on your head. The graphics in this game are passable, but could be better. And while it's vital for any game to have impressive visuals (gaming is a visual medium, after all), there's more to a game than just the graphics. To be worth a gamers time, the game must match top tier visuals with top tier gameplay, and that's not happening here. On the matter of pricing and value for gamers, most "free" games on Steam aren't really free. There's often nasty mobile app cash shops, or content locked behind DLC, or donations being requested, or any other number of shady pricing schemes that could mislead gamers, but in this case I'm glad to say this really does appear to be a fully free game. Nothing demonstrates a developers belief in themselves and their work than giving it away wi…

All my progress is lost, no save system

NIce

While it is rough around the edges, I found Scyla to be enjoyable enough to recommend if you are limited with budget (FREE) and time (~30 mins). The game is typically better played with controller, but at times I found mouse and keyboard superior for aiming the grapple hook. Save points are very forgiving, which is good because there are times where I would die repeatedly from enemies or hazards. As you play the game, you unlock upgrades (like grapple hook) and fight about 3 or 4 different types of enemies. Navigation is linear and the music never played - which are basically the 2 biggest issues I had with the game. There isn't any lore or backstory either, but given the game is short and meant to be a student / early developer project I won't fault them too hard. Graphics are nice and game ran without any major bugs. Overall, it is not the worst way to spend half an hour on a game to pass the time, but you aren't missing anything by not playing it either.