The Cat Lady (2012)

Started this, played through the first chapter (of 7) and a little of the second. This is a horror/drama adventure game that seems to be very well thought-of, but so far I'm not a big fan. My overall impression is of playing through an emo teenager's sketchbook in 1998, and I've spent more time laughing at the game than getting creeped out.
The graphics are an incohesive mish-mash of styles and fidelity; it could be argued that this is to make it creepier but to me it just comes across as amateurish. It's not helped by the fact that it's in a fairly low resolution and 4:3 aspect ratio, which feels very low-rent for a 2012 game charging £8.50, especially when a lot of the graphics are photo montage, and certainly doesn't work well with the post-Se7en preference for scratchy Courier type fonts.
The music is too loud and often ill-fitting, the dialogue audio and quality is inconsistent, and some of the acting is quite amateurish. There's a lot of 'old man clearly played by 17 year old drama student' happening, and lines are often misread.
The dialogue is clunky - it's over-written, unnatural, and often feels like it's badly translated or at least written in a second language (often it uses "this" where it should use "that" or similar grating choices). So is the storytelling and puzzle design - you spend a lot of time wandering back and forth, using keys on doors or knives on ropes, passing by bodies in nooses or dead animals, or having too-long conversations. So far, the story is 'you attempt suicide, have a dream where a being tells you that you have to kill some evil people or you won't be allowed oblivion, then you wake up in a hospital and must wait for a doctor to sign you out'. It's taken far too long to tell that little amount of story.
Finally, the control system is a bit irritating - it's keyboard only, with direct control. Presumably this is to help with immersion, but that doesn't work when you're still tapping through verb menus, so all it really achieves is a clunkier UI than necessary.

Having glanced at some reviews, it seems like this might get more interesting as it goes, so I might give it a while longer. But I strongly suspect it's a beneficiary of the 'PnC bump' where every reviewer gives it a bunch of leeway because it's an adventure game and that genre is dead, after all, so we should be grateful that this one even exists. (This despite the fact that the genre only died for a couple of years and we're drowning in the fuckers now.) It may also be getting the 'mature themes' and 'arty' bumps.

I can't be bothered to give Cat Lady any more time. I mean, I clearly wasn't enjoying it, and I looked at a walkthrough to get me past the bit I had got stuck at, and it was because two things I had tried should have worked but didn't. Sooo fuck it.

Rating: clunky.