Father's Island Demo

As many games proved it so many times over the years, graphics and gameplay can be entirely neglected sometimes if the story is intriguing enough to keep the players engaged. Many great games have severe gameplay issues that made them incredibly frustrating, yet the simple fact that the world, atmosphere or the story were interesting was enough to be worth the struggle.

Father's Island is a pretty weird video game right from the first few minutes of gameplay, even if it looks normal from most points of view. As such, it’s basically a first-person adventure game with a lot of exploration, an open world and puzzles to solve, plus a bit of horror every now and again. However, it’s the atmosphere and the story that make everything better, because the plot is pretty wild.

You play the role of a man who spent a few years in prison after being framed for robbery, and he decides to find out why this happened to him. For some reason, the answers to all his questions are on a creepy island, which is where the adventure starts. Hence, the goal is to unravel the island’s mysteries and explore it in order to maybe find an answer to your predicament.

Although it’s important to explore the island and make sure you leave no stone unturned, the puzzles are pretty vital as well, since you need to solve them sometimes in order to unlock the way further. Some of them are quite facile, such as finding the key to a door, but others require more critical thinking. You also have to deal with a few scary events that may take you by surprise.

As for the graphics, it’s tough to say anything too nice about them, although there are worse examples out there. The mood is pretty nice, but the actual lighting and level design are too unprofessional to make you feel anything pleasant. On top of that, the optimization is horrible, so you’ll also need a powerful PC in order to run a rather ugly game, which is not great news.

In the end, Father's Island is a very intriguing game, especially since it includes comedy, horror and adventure concepts. However, it needs a serious facelift in order to stop being so frustrating and even ugly.