ZERO PROTOCOL

Right, so here's the thing about ZERO PROTOCOL: it's a tiny indie horror game that's nicked the soul of System Shock, stuffed it into a 283 MB file held together with spit and Russian error messages, and somehow - somehow - it works. I'm as surprised as you are. You're the head security guard at a secret Antarctic research base where everyone's gone spectacularly mad, and your job is to find out why before you join them. That's it. That's the hook. And honestly? It's brilliant. Six or seven hours of genuinely gripping story told through computer logs and notes, the kind of thing that has you leaning toward the monitor like a lunatic. The clever bit is the sanity meter, which isn't just there for decoration like in most games where it does sod all. Hit zero and you die. But - and this is the good part - some clues are literally invisible unless your sanity's in exactly the right range. Too sane? Can't see it. Too far gone? Can't see it either, plus now there are ghosts, and the ghosts would like a word. You top up sanity with sedatives or by solving puzzles, and lose it by getting spooked or, delightfully, by saving the game. Yes. Saving costs you sanity. Whoever thought of that i…

Humanity deserves better than this.

In [b]ZERO PROTOCOL[/b] there's a lot of [spoiler]jump scares if you run a lot[/spoiler] and haunting audio. Immersive PS1 low poly graphic style appeals on my eyes, saving system luckily forgiving on each “stage”. Only issue had with mouse aiming for stuttering / accelerating automatically quite a lot making the aiming process annoying. Couldn’t find the option to disable this movement. [h2]Final score: 8/10[/h2]

A delightful, small scale survival horror that feels like a love letter to sci fi and psychological horror more broadly. Definitely worth a play-through.

Quick, simple and kind of tedious most of the time. The enemies are really really bad. The sprites do not telegraph their attacks properly, meaning you basically just have to keep distance and unload, issue is, a lot of enemies are put right behind closed doors, behind corners and so on. The enemy placement is honestly scummy most of the time. The atmosphere is great, the story COULD be great, if it was expanded on and the story was longer, but its a finished game, so as it is, its honestly half a game. The puzzles are great tho! There is potential, there are glimpses of a good game, but its ruined by bad enemy design and placement + the short game time.

Meh