2025-05-14

The Painscreek Killings

I originally wrote a very negative review of this but after some time thinking about it, I have warmed up a bit. This won’t change my final recommendation score, and I won’t wave away the fact this game has an awful ending, too much backtracking, and a very straightforward story. But all the other things this game does, brings it above that of a mediocre murder mystery adventure game.

The premise: a small town in America has gone abandoned, due to the murder of a prominent and beloved figure in the community. Everyone living there was old, or had moved out, and some other murders had taken place recently. The killer was never found, and everyone moved out. You take the role of a journalist, just trying to get some facts for the story, or maybe solve the case if you’re really that curious.

Painscreek’s hook is that the game’s world is a full scale village, with almost no guidance to the player for what to explore next. Each house belonged to someone, and you will often find keys which will let you enter them. Not every single building has a unique interior (THANK YOU), but every place you can enter will have clues.

Progression is very non-linear, so there’s a lot of invisible guides to push the player along the story. Information which would spoil key plot points, usually require visiting prerequisite plot points. I found this to be pretty well handled, I was able to piece together some of the twists on my own, and others were revealed through well-timed discoveries. Especially in the early game, there were a lot of enticing questions that I wanted to learn more about. It’s highly recommended to take notes yourself, which is something I tend to do anyways with adventure games.

Still, there are way too many flaws. The town isn’t exactly a maze, but it’s not memorable enough to navigate from memory. The very end has this stupid Blade Runner Theatrical Cut summary that pretends to make the otherwise plain story meaningful. Outside of all that, there’s pixel hunting to find doors, you can get too many keys and lose track of which goes where, and there’s a half-baked photography mechanic which never had a pay-off.

I don’t think Painscreek is bad, I just recognize a lot of missed potential here. The design of the progression and puzzles are still good, and there’s good ideas in how the game uses its own world, but it doesn’t try hard enough. The developer does have a second game out, which looks to be less story-focused and dropping the open world angle. I would love to see them tackle this concept again, it’s a formula ripe for iteration.

Score: 1/3. The only thing that makes this game interesting is its nonlinear narrative structure, and I think there’s a lot of games which have done it better, with more interesting stories. It’s just not fun!