Review - Open Trail

[JSH357]

Game #4: Open Trail

Open Trail is the most chilling horror game released for the engine. What starts as a bad port of the classic Oregon Trail evolves in to an unsettling piece of nightmare fuel that will haunt you for hours afterward. Distorted character portraits, statistics that make no sense, random screamers accompanied by acid rain, and a feeling of entrapment when the game screeches to a halt in the end... it's so effective that I was left in awe.

Unfortunately, Open Trail was not trying to be a horror game. It was trying to be Oregon Trail with a hat, and it ends up being less fun to play as the original. Walking around the towns adds nothing to the game, and the creator does not make the map design interesting enough to make blazing the trail manually any fun. I think that the concept has a lot of potential. A full Oregon Trail RPG could work a bit like the original Final Fantasy in a weird way: choose a party of characters with different strengths, avoid dangers on the way, see who survives to the end. However, this product seems rushed and conceived as a bit of an afterthought.

The game has some nice touches like mouse controls and thankfully has gotten with the times and used MP3 music. None of this distracts from everything else wrong with the game, though. It's flawed down to the very core, and there's not much that can be done about it. The creator needs to re-examine the idea of a more interactive Oregon Trail and really make it have strong gameplay. Then, I may actually pay attention: he's clearly a competent scripter who could handle such a thing.

1.5/5