Indie games tend to be a mixed bag for me. One day, you reach in and pull out Bastion, a beautifully crafted isometric ARPG with a compelling story and memorable characters. The next day, you might find Spacebase DF-9, a game that, on paper, should have been a hit but ultimately feels incomplete. This unpredictability makes playing indie games both exciting and annoying. For every gem you find, there’s a another that leaves you wondering how it ever got released. That being said, it’s not just indie games; some recent AAA releases struggle with similar issues. Despite massive budgets, some titles feel rushed, broken, or unfinished, leaving you disappointed. This inconsistency in quality is a reminder that a higher price tag doesn’t guarantee a better overall experience. But I digress. I’m here to talk about Tiny Mold‘s 2015 side-scrolling survival horror indie game, Uncanny Valley.
You play as Tom, the new guy working night-shift security at an abandoned facility in the middle of nowhere. Right away things seem a bit …off. You can’t really put your finger on it, but things feel slightly askew. You could say it was a tad “uncanny”. Pun Nintendo. The more you explore, the weirder things become. The deeper you go, the creepier it gets. It definitely has an atmosphere to it. The later levels are even more unhinged, enemies are ever-present, and you’re only able to tank a single hit, maybe two, before succumbing to your wounds. Pair that with healing items being far-and-few between and baby you’ve got a stew going.
The game controls fine in the sense that it is, in fact, controllable, but it’s clunky at best and your character walks like his boots are made of leaded molasses. Nothing you do, control-wise, feels satisfying. It’s almost a chore to even play the game, and that’s not even getting into the “consequence mechanics.” Everything moves slowly, except for time and enemies, and sprinting drains stamina extremely quickly. I ended up getting into a specific rhythm with sprinting until my stamina was nearly depleted and then walking until it was nearly full. I get it, if you were able to sprint indefinitely then the later sections, when you encounter enemies, would become somewhat trivial. Maybe if it was implemented in a way that was affected by how long your character had been awake, that would make realistic sense and also introduce that heavy stamina drain later into the night/game.
The story is a bit all over the place. There are plenty of times where you’re pulled in and want to know more, and other times where it just drags on and on. Most of the story is held up by theme and atmosphere alone. Required actions to continue certain story paths can make absolutely no sense, be completely invisible until you look up a walkthrough, or rely on an item that you were meant to pick up near the beginning of the game. This is where the “consequence mechanic” starts to grind away at my experience playing Uncanny Valley. That and the way the game handles saves. Quick explanation: It doesn’t.
I believe part of the problem stems from the version of GameMaker they used to create the game and how that handles game saves, so I can’t exactly fault the developer. You get a single save “slot”, and once you finish the game, which also happens when you die, it’s automatically deleted. There are no additional save slots. The only way to create another “save”, so you can quickly load back up to a specific spot when you die, is to do it manually through file manipulation. This helps with how many endings there are and events you can encounter, but having to jump through file explorer is kind of a pain when every other game lets you have multiple save files. If you’re on console, good luck, have fun. If you’re hunting for achievements, your best bet is to follow an in-depth achievement walkthrough.
Since there are multiple endings and story paths, the only way to get the full story, or fully complete the game, is to play through it a good number of times. Without a guide, this can become near impossible, for reasons stated previously, but the worst part is the very beginning. Many of the branching stories/endings split right near the start, but not before you do the required intro sequence. It starts with Tom waking up in an alley, hopping a fence, walking down the main road, and being followed by a shadow man. You dash into his apartment and have to walk back and forth until the shadow beings start breaking down the doors and windows. You get got, wake up on a train, hop off the train, hop in the security guard’s car, and sit through an unnecessarily long driving “cut scene”. I’m pretty sure I’m missing a thing or two, but this happens. Every. Single. Time.
There’s not much more I want to talk about, but, in the end, it’s really not a bad game. The art is great, the atmosphere is perfect, the character design is fantastic, and the real creepy bits of the story are really creepy. So, nail on the head with that, but that’s why I have such a hard time truly recommending Uncanny Valley. It has a lot of reasons to love it, and a lot of reasons not to. It’s no Bastion and, in that same breath, it’s definitely no Spacebase DF-9.
It’s almost a good game, but something just feels …Uncanny.
