As you know, Russian quests had a difficult childhood – it’s not easy to grow up when everyone around you is pointing fingers at you, calling you bad words, among which “horror” is very often heard. They still matured, but their childish complexes remained. Apparently, that’s why now they’re mostly not about sex, booze and jokes about Petka or Stirlitz, but about horrors and nightmares. I recently talked about Creepy Tale 2, where they cook borscht from kids, and now it’s out Almost My Floor about an elevator ride to hell.

Nightmare on Tyoplaya Street, 9

Begins Almost My Floor Not that it’s very scary, but rather surreal. An ordinary guy Alex walks into the entrance of his house at 9 Tyoplaya Street and meets his neighbor Masha, who looks like a girl with low social responsibility (it is no coincidence that there is a sign around it: "Mashka – sh…") and takes the elevator to his floor. And he accelerates and rushes up at breakneck speed – at least a hundred floors. When he finally stops, frightened Alex leaves the elevator and finds himself in a living nightmare – scary eyes, blood and monsters all around.

He himself is not only a musician, but also a longtime fan of horror films. Maybe I rewatched it? And the neighbor’s gopniks were going to play a prank on him in revenge for the fact that Alex complained about them to the police. But no, it’s not a joke – they definitely wouldn’t be able to wrap their tentacles around the entire house, which had flown a thousand floors into the sky. And Masha couldn’t suddenly turn into a Gorgon jellyfish killing people.

Soon this nightmare surreal begins to acquire more mundane details. It turns out that a terrible murder recently took place in this house, and in general something bad is constantly happening in it. So Alex’s wife, Nika, has disappeared, and it is our hero who is under suspicion. Therefore, at some point a private detective comes into action – we will play for him too.

Horrible detective

At all, Almost My Floor – more detective than horror. All these demons, eyes on legs and lamps with handles cause not fear, but surprise and tension. And often – a smile. Well, how could it be otherwise, if even a huge monster, covering the entire room with tentacles, openly laughs at us when Alex fails to set up a trap for him?? Yes, Masha with green eyes, and a neighbor with a mop, who suddenly turned into Baba Yaga, and glasses of coffee running across the floor are touching. Considering some of the hero’s remarks, it turns out that the authors deliberately interfered with mysticism and humor.

But the detective here Nogamstop-casinos.co.uk seems to be quite serious and tense throughout most of the game. The authors skillfully and according to the laws of the genre lead us by the nose, playing on expectations and suspicions, and then deceiving us. When you begin to believe in one version, other characters appear without an alibi and other circumstances. At some point it became clear to me who the killer was, but it’s not a fact that others would guess too.

But the fact that the authors openly leaked the ending (by the way, there are two of them) is a fact. And the point is not that disgusted doctors also appear here with their bad experiments, but that in the end the writers were clearly exhausted and sewed evidence and circumstances to their idea with white threads. One example:

Here a wheelchair user can drag corpses, and no one will raise an eyebrow. It is clear that this is our disabled girl, and our women can do everything, but not to the same extent!

Click and run

Like a quest Almost My Floor looks cheerful and fresh, although not very smart – in the sense that there are no tricky puzzles. The authors relied on mini-games and exercises with objects. Set a trap for the monster by spilling water and turning on electricity; throw a stone at an incomprehensible slime so that it falls on another monster; feed bones to the demonic dogs so that when they are full, they become kinder; replace the burnt out battery – no questions arise.

Sometimes it gets funny again. How to get the attention of a neighbor who can’t hear us? Of course, blow up his door. How to fix the wiring and turn on electricity?? Of course, contact Masha, who, it turns out, subscribes to the magazine “World of Technology”. In some places it smacks of that same Russian quest, but, thank God, not too much.

Mini-games are also invigorating. Already 10 minutes after the start, we are frantically clicking on monsters to repel their attacks with a shield – I’m telling you, this is a fun horror movie. And then we run away from monsters all the way or throw off spiders when several times in a row we need to stop the slider in time in the green zone. The only pity is that there are practically no other mini-games.

I liked the situation when in three minutes it was necessary to defuse a bomb by solving three riddles in sequence. There are also more classic exercises with the correct placement of runes/books or something else. Of course, we are looking for numbers and codes, looking for clues in surrounding objects. In some places, the clues and the situations themselves look unnatural, but in the proposed circumstances it will do.

Some riddles are a little more complex, others are puzzlingly simple. And another indecently often used technique is when characters who are preventing us from inspecting the desired room leave with the words “Wait, I’ll leave for a while and come back.”. Are the writers completely lazy or is this also humor??

Angel or demon?

But the scriptwriters provided the opportunity to resolve many situations in different ways and even put an angel and a demon on the shoulders of the hero. On the right you can hear every now and then: “Yes, hit her, and that’s the end of it, it’s faster this way.”!» And on the left they parry: “No, let’s think and find another way”.

The whole game is where you decide: to slam the spider or catch it in a trap; hit the grandmother with the mop with a board or get smart, get a flower and give it to her; save the inhabitants of the house or spit on them. At first it seems that the consequences are nominal: well, a spider will come running and shout to its relatives: "Leave him, he didn’t touch me!», or grandma will say something kind. But I told you that the game has two endings..

Initially Almost My Floor I want to compare with works Remigiusz Michalski (Remigiusz Michalski) – The Cat Lady, Downfall and Lorelai: here it seems that socialism and everyday life flow into a surreal nightmare. But in fact the project of a domestic studio Potata Company still different and about something else. Less deep, more cheerful and ironic – a kind of mixture of detective, thriller, hallucinogens and comedy, slightly diluted with the smell in the entrance. Not everything worked out, of course, but overall it was interesting to play.

Pros: interesting story for the most part; colorful characters; many mini-games and riddles; the ability to solve certain situations in different ways; well chosen music.