One Final Breath

One Final Breath is a first-person horror game that plunges you into an already familiar setup. You’re a semi-deadbeat dad who along with his drinking issues heads out into an abandoned boarding school to find his daughter. Since the place closed, she had been acting strange and this time, in a note, she mentions that she’s going back there to live with her friend. You get where this is heading.

One Final Breath is built using Unreal Engine 4, and that automatically translates into good graphics and smooth gameplay if you have hardware that’s at least decent. It also features voice acting from people who know what they’re doing, but it counts for less if the writing is poor.

This is where the ‘not so good’ stuff comes out. Build in UE4 you’d expect things to be a bit better but at times, if you look closer at the details, the graphics aren’t all that good.

Moreover, the actual design and placement of the props will annoy you in some cases. In certain classrooms you won’t be able to walk between two rows of tables and there is clearly enough room for you to pass; unless the protagonist has a cheezburger problem to go along with his drinking one. To further enforce the idea of a voluminous character, note that at times, you will get stuck between pieces of furniture and restarting the game fixes that.

If you play games like this on a casual level, you’ll immediately pick up on the small details that make a difference for both the good and the bad. The good is in the eerie atmosphere of the game, in how the place looks and how it reacts to your presence. The bad is in the little design and logic flaws.

For example, if you get scared by a TV, which instantly turns on when you approach it, there’s no need for it to do that every single time you come close. Jumpscare completed, move on. The audio has its moments when it feels out of sync or is absent. To the end of the demo, when all that buildup should be released in one glorious tense moment, it just passes by with poor audio and animations. One Final Breath needs to be a bit more twitchy; it has to have a bit more edge.

To wrap it up in a less ‘cons’ approach, even though One Final Breath has some issues to fix, it’s still worth a shot. After all, we have no idea where the story goes, and how the rest of the game looks, the updated version. We’ll just have to wait and see.