Tidal Affair: Before The Storm

Tidal Affair mostly feels unfinished; it had potential but that potential doesn't seem have been realised. There's a strange mishmash of conflicting art resolutions. Detailed crates sit next to stretched roof top images. Sharp edged plants are drawn in with mostly blurry soft trees. The screenshots and video look good in low resolutions but even something as low as Standard Defintion easily shows how inconsitent the imagery is. Push anything higher than High Definition and the Tidal Affair starts looking pretty bad. There are compression artifacts and bad alpha blending on some of the textures that are disturbingly amateur. Some objects layering appears to be incorrect with the bottoms of tree trunks appearing on top of folliage that should be infront. The levels are large but sparesly populated. The puzzles consit mostly of running back and forth through the silly make-work mazes rather than being cerebrally challenging. There is button pushing, so much button pushing. The ...

Has this game a great concept? Oh yeah! Was it executed well? No! the concept off puppetering combined with stealth is awesome! but... the player lacks freedom. You need to kill your puppet or you will get chased by some overpowered new soldiers that are able to always find you unless you run away. You will get chased and there is nothing you can do about it. You can't kill the enemy stealthly cause the instakill is way too unreliable. And if you play it as a full stealth game the game lost it's purpose. The stealth system is too plain and you get an instant loss if you need to run from those overpowered soldiers that spawn when the alarm is triggerd cause you can't run past all those soldiers you let live. since the stealthsystem is plain and simply doesn't work well with the current way puppetering functions the game lost it's purpose and i would not recommend it

This review should be considered as neutral. I don't want to write negative review, but I can't make it positive also. The main plus of this game (and what sold it to me) was graphic style. I love it. It's interesting and uncommon. Stealth tag also have some influence, but don't rush if (like me) it's enough for you to spend some bucks on small discount. Game have 2 major minuses - bad gameplay design and controls. The whole 8 hours I have played it I have suffered from controls. Main gameplay feature require you to control enemies and their guns, but you almost can't point cursor where you want because it's jumping like crazy all over the place. And it's for joystick. Mouse and keyboard are not setup completely by default and even if you will use mouse it's even more horrible than joypad. Too bad that I asked about this on forums only at the end. Because (from developers response) it occurs that game have problem with mouse and joystick enabled together. And if you will use only K+B...

Disclaimer: This is not a complete review. After playing two chapters this seems like a cute little stealth action game in which you can posses other people and make them kill their friends or suicide in a manner of ways. The controls are a bit clunky and the cutscenes need some polish, but it seems to be the current ($8) asking price. I'll add a proper review once the game is out of Early Access, I just don't want to spoil the story for myself too much because I want to play the finished version.

Nice little indie game. +Graphics are nice, look hand drawn or painted. +15 chapters, so about 5-8 hours of gameplay. +Good stealth and unique possess abilities. +Allows for creative approaches. +Reasonable price. -A bit linear. a times

It's a cute little game with a unique art style and cool music but the controls are awkward and unresponsive. It's probably fun if you have the patience and love steath games...

If you're worried about this being a visual novel because of the title, worry not. It's a stealth adventure where you can sneak around mind-controlling people. Atmospheric, with lush jungle environments, feels like you're moving through a painting. Painted isometric games are extremely far and few between these days, so snap this up if you're a fan. The visual style is eyecatching and evocative. I was rather surprised to learn that the game itself was created in only ten months, as there's a tonne of content in it. Levels are easy at first but rapidly evolve in complexity to require careful planning and skilled puppeteering. I'm not a fan of stealth games in general, but it was compelling enough that I found myself staying up well past midnight to get to the next level... and the next... Support more original titles like these by indie devs on Steam! NB: I highly recommend using the controller instead of keyboard/mouse if you have one available.

No saving. 0/10. Amazing the number of game developers who would have you believe that coding a UI is optional.