Review of Saint Kotar by Doom

I invested about 5 hours into this game and I think I’m done with it forever. With a solid 2.5D presentation Saint Kotar looked very promising, like a new Black Mirror, or a new Black Mirror 2. Unfortunately, all similarities ended right there. After 5 hours I still can’t understand what the game tries to be: a dark fantasy of the Twin Peaks legacy, with characters acting “weird” for the sake of it, a Gothic fairy tale by modern Brothers Grimm or an Italian-inspired horror that just throws nasty stuff at you. It doesn’t work either way around.

Both writing, storytelling and puzzle design are of very poor quality. There are plenty of locations to visit, but there’s very little to do since there are no challenges to be found anywhere. 5% of the gameplay consists of such epic quests as “go to the next room and look what’s in there”. The rest of the time we are just walking, talking and suffering from what we hear. In fact dialogues were so bad that I stopped caring about characters, their motivations and those moral choices we can make very early into the game. And what kind of moral choice is it anyway when both our actions lead to a character’s certain death?

I rarely dislike games so much, but this one left me no choice. Saint Kotar is a lost opportunity. It could’ve marked a new return of quality 2.5D adventures if only the devs knew how to develop games. Instead it looks like they did the art first and only then tried to come up with some story and gameplay to accompany it. This never works, especially if you are not David Lynch. And Red Martyr are not.

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Time Played: 5-10 hours
Difficulty: Very Easy