{"id":20765,"date":"2021-01-13T00:01:56","date_gmt":"2021-01-13T00:01:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=20765"},"modified":"2020-12-04T13:35:34","modified_gmt":"2020-12-04T13:35:34","slug":"apparition-switch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2021\/01\/13\/apparition-switch\/","title":{"rendered":"Apparition (Switch)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>We all have guilty pleasures.\u00a0 You wanna know what one of mine is?\u00a0 You know those ghost shows on the History Channel or Travel Channel where paranormal investigators try to find evidence of hauntings?\u00a0 Yeah I know those shows are dopey and probably most of the stuff they find isn\u2019t real or overly exaggerated for TV.\u00a0 But you know what?\u00a0 I like watching them anyway, I don\u2019t care.\u00a0 Well now there\u2019s a game on the Switch where you get to be a paranormal investigator in a first person adventure perspective.\u00a0 Is it any good?\u00a0 Well you\u2019ll just have to read on to find out\u2026if you dare!<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll get it right out of the way, this game is riddled with problems and is not very good.\u00a0 First of all, you never want to play this game in handheld mode.\u00a0 The game is just way too dark and you can\u2019t see anything.\u00a0 Even after I turned up the brightness all the way I couldn\u2019t see anything.\u00a0 So only play this in TV mode.\u00a0 But it\u2019s just as well, as the text is completely illegible in handheld mode also, and you\u2019ll need to be able to read everything you can because of the lack of instructions.<\/p>\n

And that\u2019s the other main problem with the game, it doesn\u2019t tell you what to do.\u00a0 At all.\u00a0 Right off the bat you\u2019re supposed to start the game by equipping a camera and other tools, but I didn\u2019t know that so my first few playthroughs were just me running around in the dark with a candle not knowing what to do.\u00a0 Once I figured that out and played in TV mode, I could see a small area that consisted of a road, a car (not sure if it is mine), a bunch of trees, a campfire with an Ouija board, a small house, and a shed.\u00a0 If there\u2019s anything else around, I couldn\u2019t find it.\u00a0 What you\u2019re supposed to do is pull out your journal so you know you\u2019re supposed to take pictures of things to gather paranormal evidence.\u00a0 This in turn earns you experience points which you can use to buy things on the first screen so you can equip them and gather more, better evidence and start the process over again.<\/p>\n

Items that you can take pictures of include blood, bodybags, and dark demons that try to get you!\u00a0 But since it\u2019s so dark, you usually can\u2019t see the demons until it\u2019s too late.\u00a0 And the controls aren\u2019t very intuitive and I would always forget what button to push to pull out your camera and take pictures.\u00a0 You can view the controls, but by that time, you\u2019re already dead.\u00a0 You can also use a Ouija board by a campfire to communicate with spirits to get experience points.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t know what to type in and ask, the journal tells you to look for scraps of paper.\u00a0 I found one on a nearby folding chair that said, \u201cAre you good or bad?\u201d\u00a0 I typed that in and the answer I got was \u201cYES.\u201d\u00a0 So apparently the spirit I was talking to was a smart aleck.\u00a0 Then I typed in HELLO and got the answer \u201cGET OUT\u201d which is kind of scary but also expected.<\/p>\n

So after doing these things over and over again because the dark demons kill you after a few minutes, I just stopped playing.\u00a0 I never could get enough experience points to buy better cameras and such, and doing those things over again just wasn\u2019t very fun.\u00a0 What the game really needs is an interactive tutorial to help get you started, or at least get your bearings.\u00a0 That\u2019s just good game design.\u00a0 Random tips during loading screens just doesn\u2019t cut it.\u00a0 But through those, apparently you can craft items, too, somehow.\u00a0 I also thought it was interesting how you could turn off jumpscares in the options screen.\u00a0 But yeah, I really just can\u2019t recommend this game to anyone.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Apparition is rated T for Teen with ESRB descriptors of Blood and Violence.\u00a0 There is blood smeared around the floor of the little house and on a mattress, and when you die, the first person camera just tilts to the side.\u00a0 Families with strong religious beliefs may also not like the fact that you use an Ouija board in the game.\u00a0 Heck, even I wasn\u2019t comfortable with using it.\u00a0 One thing I\u2019ve learned by watching all those ghost shows on TV is those boards are nothing but trouble.\u00a0 Whether or not they\u2019re real, those boards just don\u2019t sit right with me.\u00a0 I\u2019ll never bring a real one into my house, anyway!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We all have guilty pleasures.\u00a0 You wanna know what one of mine is?\u00a0 You know those ghost shows on the History Channel or Travel Channel where paranormal investigators try to find evidence of hauntings?\u00a0 Yeah I know those shows are dopey and probably most of the stuff they find isn\u2019t real or overly exaggerated for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":20761,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20765","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20765","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20765"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20765\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20767,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20765\/revisions\/20767"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20761"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20765"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20765"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20765"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}