Your Toy is a game built around the horror of getting lost within a familiar nightmare, more specifically your childhood, where innocence gets creepy at moments.
Descent into Confusion
Your Toy starts off as a spooky escape game, wherein the fear is molded from the environment which you are deployed to. The atmosphere is on point, throughout the game and can be anticipated just by that factor most of the while. The suspense is really built well as you thread through the shady situations, and you’ll need a fair amount of guts to play. But as a puzzle game which they claim it to be there are a lot of flaws, even for an indie game. One most worth mentioning is that you won’t be given much clue even from the start where you would struggle to even find the smallest possible advance you’d take to progress. And even if you do, you won’t notice that you passed through a certain stage in the game. It just gives you near random results which will lead to more baffling questions. Whereas even games that are too shady to solve the puzzles give you slight ideas on how progress in the game works.
The levels are merely pieces mashed in together to form one random nightmare you’d get stuck in sleeping after a long day from work. Though they may argue that might be the point, the lack of polished smoothness in the puzzle designs are too non-revered.
Dissatisfaction from Affliction
We love horror for the suspense it creates, the thrill it injects into our systems. Your Toy delivers just that, but only up to a certain point. With my best trying to not give you spoilers; the main threat is a total letdown. Once you figure out how the game works, the whole point of the game just falls off at the latter part of a specific level; wherein the main heat of a puzzle game should be located. As the game goes on you’d find little surprise to them, due to the fact that the early part of the game ate all the good sequences up. Further on, the finale does some justice though, the ending for a such a tight budget game is pretty satisfying as contradiction to the disappointing mid levels of the game.
Feel the Torment
The game alone is fairly short, but adding up the fact with all the hindrances that will stop you, it’s going to get pretty bumpy and frustrating. The controls for even for a horror game is extremely unsatisfying and clunky. Whenever there are chase sequences, the best option is to just button mash every single corner of the level in order to find a way out. And as terrible as that sounds, the enemy virtually has no way to eliminate you, unless you have reflex of a ten ton african elephant of course, and it’s ways aren’t even the slightest of creative. The threat feeling just leaves, as mounded repetition will just bore you.