P.A.M.E.L.A is not the game I thought it was heading into doing this review, right from the start my mind was thinking it would be an adventure game with fun and adventure much like Deus Ex. What I ended up with was Bioshock meets, Dead Island meets survival and it messed me up something fierce.
The story starts off with your character waking up from a long slumber with little to no back story on how you got there. Congratulations though you’re an untainted human being! Because of this, you’ve now been called to save the entire facility that you’re in! This weird zombie virus thing has caused every other human whose not infected with it to go delightfully mad and full of rage.
What a time to wake up, right?
The AI who wakes you up tasks you with helping save the facility and the remnants of humanity that remains as you take your footing and learn the controls. You begin to realize it plays exactly as most survival horror genres would.
Its inventory management is loosely based on the Resident Evil style of Inventory management moving things around for optimal storage efficiency. One of the things I noticed about P.A.M.E.L.A sticks towards the air of familiarity in a lot of its design, playing it safe while innovating only when absolutely needed or when it would benefit the visual feel of the game.
The mechanics you use during the game all run from a computer on the player’s wrist giving access to the menus, inventory, tutorials, and anything the player might need as they try to survive in the facility and solve the problems they face. This level of design stands out to me, they’ve taken a lot of the tropes we’ve come to expect in survival horror genres and tweaked it in a manner that you don’t normally see in third-party titles, only in big triple-A industry titles.
In terms of its horror setup, it feels very similar to Dead Island most of the time you see the enemies standing around doing almost nothing and you can fight them if you want, or sneak past them if you’re careful that solely depends on your play style when it comes to survival games.
Collectively the game is really well made, my only criticism is that the voice acting while good doesn’t feel appropriate, for a sophisticated AI, I would have wanted a more robotic maybe synthesized slightly voice. The voice actress they brought in did a wonderful job it just wasn’t what I was expecting.
Personally, I think P.A.M.E.L.A. Is a pretty solid game despite some bugs I encountered early on in that game… (Like trying to get out of the starting room I was in.) and I would recommend it if you’re into the horror survival genre give it a try out on Steam if you can!
An autistic gamer with opinions on games who also enjoys making dumb videos on the internet!