The Painscreek Killings is one those delightful games that fall under the category of “Walking Simulator”. For those not familiar a walking simulator is a narrative-heavy game where interacting with items in the environment is the primary gameplay. You are normally tasked with recovering information about why something has gone wrong, where someone or something has gone missing, or simply filling in the backstory of events that took place before you arrived at the location.
The Premise
In the Painscreek Killings you are a reporting sent to uncover any information you can find about a series of murders that took place in the town of Painscreek two years prior. The land of Painscreek is being auctioned soon and once sold any possibility of uncovering the mysteries held within the town will be lost.
The decision to make you a reporter instead of someone with greater detective skills is an excellent one. You are dropped into the game with zero resources excepting a camera, which is very useful throughout the game, and your unpreparedness would not make much sense if you were a more experienced investigator.
The Positive
The game, like most walking simulators, is pretty
That is a solid looking church. While definitely not on the level of 4k the textures are decent and overall the game looks nice.
The game doesn’t hold your hand in regards to what you should be looking at or where you should be going. So long as you are reading all the notes and examining all the keys your next areas to seek answers in are very logical steps. The camera feature also helps with this a great deal, since you can take a picture of everything you can take much lighter notes than in other walking simulators.
Discovering the story and all the sordid details of this little town is most enjoyable, it unravels piece by piece with each section seemingly unrelated at first until they start merging together. By the time you are nearing the end of the games reveals and understanding starts coming at you hard and fast. Much like how turning over a log and revealing the rotten mulch and squirming termites is both disgusting and entrancing so too is discovering the festering and hidden secrets of Painscreek.
The Frustrating
Walking is a big part of this game and over the course of your investigation, you are going to do a lot of backtracking. You have the option to both run and walk but this only helps so much. Walking speed is perfect for inside buildings when you want to make a careful examination of a room, running speed is almost a little too fast in the often cramped houses but works well if you want to just quickly leave. Walking speed through the town is painful, you aren’t going to walk anywhere because it will take the rest of your lifespan to accomplish anything. Running feels like the natural pace for investigating the outdoor areas but rapidly ends up feeling too slow once you have to backtrack. It would have been better with four variant speeds: current run and walk for indoors with current run speed and a faster variant for outdoors.
Let’s talk hitboxes. hitboxes are a major part of any game, they are the interactive space around a clickable object be they enemies or items. For the most part, the Painscreek Killings has very solid hitboxes but there are a few locations (which I won’t mention due to spoilers) where you almost have to know that the object is interactable before trying to pick up because the hitbox is very small or slightly off center of the object. I got stuck at least a couple times because It was so unclear an object was able to be interacted with.
My final issue is very minor, most people probably wouldn’t even care. Every drawer and cupboard in the game has an animation that you cannot interrupt. In games animations literally, make the world go round and create the feeling of fidelity to the real world. Drawer and Cupboard animations are immersive and a good idea but uninterruptable ones mean that you have to wait for the animations to be completed fully before you can close them again. In the cramped quarters of the houses, this gets annoying fast as you have a fair amount of drawers to go through and they often block access to the ones beside them once opened. Every, single, time, I had to keep waiting for the animations to finish and it was this niggling frustration for the entire game.
But Should You Buy it?
If you are a seasoned connoisseur of the walking simulator genre I think you will enjoy this game. If you like a go at your own pace murder mystery games where you get to read a lot of diaries and find out about peoples sordid activities most definitely pick this up. However, If you find yourself frustrated in puzzle games without clear directions or always gotta go fast then avoid this game at all costs. The Pinescreek Killings is a solid walking simulator murder mystery and I definitely enjoyed it but this won’t be everyone’s cup of tea.