The Strange Story Of Brian Fisher: Chapter 1

You escape from a cabin and fall in some mud.

Pros:
It's a fiver you didn't spend at McDonald's.
You're not dead.

Cons:
It's a fiver you could have spent on moist toilet tissue.
It's only "chapter 1".

Plot
Dad disappears one night following dinner, after telling family "I discovered something amazing that's going to change the world, a few years back". He was a rocket scientist / astrophysicist / space engineer. He made a magical bullshit device which looks remarkably like a wooden ball from a stock Blender asset pack.

Unknown antagonist locks son (player) in a cage somehow, and forces him to solve a series of generic puzzles in order to escape from an old cabin. Occasionally he laughs at you ("Buyahahaha!") from old 1970s speakers on the cabin walls. He wants the magical bullshit device.

Gameplay
Throw one of any number of items dotted around the cabin through the nearest single glazed, dry-rot framed window and climb out, go home and phone the police.

Not really!

Instead, fight floaty controls in first person (awful sensitivity options) or third person (fucking useless), be baffled by an electronic keypad on a flimsy door, and solve a series of increasingly irritating puzzles to discover the keypad code and escape to freedom. This is where you (spoiler alert) escape the cabin, then immediately faceplant the mud for one of three reasons:

1) Your pacemaker has just failed.
2) A sniper has gifted you a hollow point to the face.
3) The developer is a moron.

As you wander around the tiny cabin, you'll be hunting for items which are in a different place for each playthrough. Who the fuck would want to play through this TWICE? The story doesn't change! The protagonist will also talk to himself on occasion. For example, you'll find a VCR. "Wow, I haven't seen one of these in forever!" But watching a reel-to-reel projector? Developing a photo in a dark room? Nothing. Like it's a perfectly normal thing for him to have been doing with his rocket scientist dad who was going to change the world.

Puzzles!

You've seen these before. A hundred times over. A broken fuse box with a series of cables so difficult to see you have to use the Xbox built in magnifier tools to be able to solve it. A wooden labyrinth box with rotating segments. A clock which gives you the code to a suit case tumbler lock. A videotape with a clue on it. A pair of goggles which you have to wear to see the videotape clue on the TV screen (Oh! I know the answer to the above - it's option 3!) Find a clue on a reel-to-reel projector! Develop a photo to find another clue! Transpose words to symbols! Type faux commands into an old computer! Search for keys to locked rooms! (Hint - they're all hung up in the same key cabinet by the front door and you can take all of them at once. Their default inventory position has the label for each key facing away from you however, so in order to equip the correct one, you'll have to rotate them slowly in turn until you find the label pointing out the key you need. Oh, and two of them you never use, as the developer decided to finish the story early, so no opening the shed or escaping in the car).

Story:
The terribly acted voice overs give no credence whatsoever to the awful, awful writing. "He seemed different that night at our nightly dinner. Like he knew something was going to happen to him. The next day he disappeared. Then I woke up in this cage."

Don't worry, player! There's a safe with a key inside which fits the cage door, and there are instructions for opening the safe too. Oh, and that's all in the cage with you.

Achievements:
Everything is unlocked with story progression. Solve each puzzle in the cabin to gain the four digit security code, use that code on the front door of the cabin and you've got your 1000g.

Summary:
It looks awful. The voice recordings are too loud and muffled. The camera floats all over the place when you play in first person. The environment is too small to play in third person. The puzzles have all been done before, and better. The acting is terrible. The writing is abysmal. The plot is idiotic. It's got a stupid name. It takes up hard drive space. Even the store description is fucking terrible.

1/10 because it has to have a number above zero for me to leave a rating.

BONUS!

I'm going to leave the full store description here, because half of what it says isn't in the game. At all.

Do you believe in time and space travel? Do you believe that out there is more beautiful and more powerful place than Earth? Dive into the journey and discover Brian Fisher's story about the unknown, about his father disappearance, about his journey through time and space.

"The Strange Story Of Brian Fisher: Chapter 1" is a puzzle/mystery/adventure game (type of "Escape Room") with a story behind it. It's about 38 years old police detective for disappeared people, Brian Fisher. 20 years ago, his father, who was a space and Astro-physic scientist, disappeared under suspicious circumstances. After 5 months of his disappearance, he was pronounced dead, but his body was never found. This case was the reason Brian Fisher became a detective for disappeared people.

Till now, he has never accepted that his father is dead. He wants to prove that his father is not dead and wants to find him alive. His father discovered the most important thing for the whole of humanity. So before telling the world that information, he disappeared. Brian, at the present time, is haunted by an unknown man who wants to steal the discovery that Brian has from his father to rule the world. Brian is not aware nor of his father's discovery, nor that he is the key to that discovery.

Just to reiterate: You escape from a cabin and fall in some mud.

Here's to Chapter 2, which appears to be a prequel to chapter 1 because of course it does.