Tenebris Lake Full Conversion

[Hunter of Shadows]

Here's my thoughts and feelings on Tenebris after finishing playing it

A lot of what this CS does is really cool, the way saves are done, a lot of the music is good, and it starts building an interesting atmosphere...up until I discovered that the plot is fairly nonsensical, and I stopped trying to make sense of it half way through.

Many of the models are quite good, if a large percentage of them being pointless for enemies, you have SO many different enemies, that to be frank the overall effect of the enemies is kind of washed out, especially since...so many of the enemies don't make sense

I mean, some of them do, like the miner enemy, but some of them just seem to be there for the sake of having a new monster, and while a new enemy is still cool, the effect is washed out by the fact that they just come off as thrown in.

Not in terms of how scary they are, the scares in this story are quite excellent and had me reaching for my brown pants numerous times, as compared to so many custom stories that think jump scares are scary.

Levels are all quite aesthetically pleasing, but the design of them caused me to want to quit the whole story then and there, I got lost so many times I got pretty irritated with the whole damn thing, most of the puzzles are good...other then the few nonsensical ones(like the one that required 'lubricant', which immediately made me think of condoms and anal sex and stuff...seriously, just try and think of that puzzle and the 'dry lubricant' without snickering), and most prominently...THE ROCK DEPENDS


The story itself is bloody awful, with so many plot holes, logic gaps, confusing narrative and more that it made me honestly wonder if any serious effort was put into it, the story was so inane that I more or less stopped caring about the main character, anyone he knew, or the story in general, because none of it made sense or gave me a reason to give a damn.

One of the best examples of the horrid story, would be the Shadow chase at Chapter 7: The Choice...I mean seriously wtf was all I could think, why the hell is there a Shadow? I know it's probably not technically 'the Shadow' but still for christ sakes where did this thing come from and why the hell is it attacking me in this custom story, I'm NOT Daniel


Much of the voice acting is...either good, average or just plain awful, and it's sad to say that the good voice acting comes in to play when the lines being spoken aren't intended to have emotion in them, the awful voice acting is...the best example comes from once again at the end, when you run into your wife and kids, and she begs you to rescue her and your children.

Except there is very little emotion in her voice, she sounds as if she's talking about it being a cloudy day and how that much ruin things for her from the way her tone implies, which leads to some definite dissonance considering the situation she's in.

Overall, I think this custom story could have been utterly amazing, it was still fun, and that's a lot more then can be said for a lot of custom stories out there(*cough* jump scare riddled pewdiepie cs's come to mind*cough*, but it was not a blast to play, like Followed by Death, White Night or Through the Portal, all of which have cohesive narrative, intelligent story, excellent scares, good level design, and more.

If I would make suggestions to improve this...

1. Don't have so many monsters! Having so many different enemies severely hurts the ability of the game to draw you into the experience in my opinion, because the reason ATDD's original monster's are so memorable and scary is because there was only two of them(not counting lurker), because you only met those two, I'm trying to figure out how to word this...

Because there was only two, there wasn't the problem this story had, where there were so many different monsters that none of them stuck out to me, they all sort of washed out the overall experience because half the time I wasn't even sure which monster was after me.

Or at the least if you do make a lot of monsters, make sure each one is memorable for your players, that they vividly remember encountering each one...and shivering in fear to response to the memory, instead of 'what the fuck was that thing?'

2. Make your levels less confusing! I got lost so many times, in your custom story, and that's not fun, that's just plain out frustrating, make your level design more simplistic, admittedly I don't feel this is necessary your fault, I frequently got the impression you were attempting to go for the pitch black, maze like feel similar to ATDD's Prison level's, where it's easy to get lost if you don't pay attention, but can be navigated with success so long as you make a mental map as you go.

Of course some people might not feel this is necessary, Silent Hill 2 is extremely easy to get lost in, but that doesn't make it bad at all, I'm just stating my opinions though.

3. Your story needs some work mate, really bad, I'm not talking the typo's or anything else, that's forgivable, I'm talking about how so little of the story had any narrative coherence, the story simply did not fit well together and many things were utterly confusing or just plain didn't explain what was going on, for example many of the flash backs in the early game didn't explain jack, and while admittedly not all flashbacks have to reveal anything of the plot, to have nothing relevant in all of them is just plain silly.

Overall I rate this custom story 6/10, which is quite good