The Experiment

Sometimes there’s no other way to make sure your product is safe unless you test it on animals, which does not always end well for the animals in question. However, most of the time this is done so that human lives can be saved or improved, which is the case with experimental medicine. On the other hand, not everyone follows the rules, and that leads to a lot of abuse and useless cruelty.

The Experiment is a mystery game in which you play the role of a boy trapped in a weird facility, and your goal is to make it out alive and well. Serious emphasis is put on atmosphere and the story, but the presentation leaves to be desired most of the time, which is quite the shame. The writing seems a bit forced as well, and that’s not a good sign for a game that must impress through narrative.

As such, you wake up in a cage in some kind of laboratory, with no apparent way to get out. You also have an unusual companion, namely a cat with a floating head that wants to help you escape. In short, the world in which the characters live demands perfection from every human, which is why they perform all sorts of experiments on unwilling subjects in order to keep the standards as high as possible.

The actual puzzles usually require you to find certain objects and use them to obtain information, or to open a door further into the facility. You receive hints from the cat, although it shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out what to do. In fact, the difficulty level is not that high at all, which means that there’s no real challenge to keep you on edge.

On the other hand, the game might try to impress you in other ways, such as with a pressing atmosphere that makes every second of gameplay as intense as possible. Unfortunately, that’s not the case here, because the level design is very barren and repetitive, making it quite difficult to get in the proper mood. It’s quite a shame, really, because the story had potential.

In the end, The Experiment fails to be memorable in any way, but it still has a chance. Thus, as long as much more detail is added to the environments and the writing is improved a little bit, the game could keep you engaged from start to finish.