CAYNE

17 hours ago3 min read

You don't have to be psychic to finish this game, but it'd help.

Hadley prepares for an operation - from CAYNE

MOVIES

- Back to movie stuff next week with 21 Bridges, and Alien: Romulus has been watched too, so that'll follow the week after.

- Then it's back to the Prime Video watchlist as I look to cut that down to size before my cheap subscription offer runs out.

GAMES

- CAYNE plot summary: Hadley, wakes up in a facility. Where is she? Why is she there? And why do they want her baby? (IMDb)

- First things first: CAYNE is a free game, so despite some of what I'm going to say and the score, I really don't want to be too harsh on it.

- It's from 2017, but looks 5-10 years older than that, although the visuals are helped by some excellent H.R. Giger-style design work.

- The audio is fine too, with the unmemorable score balanced out by some excellent voice acting.

- I really liked a lot of the world-building too, most of which is done through messages and logs you can read and pick up extra information about the sci-fi setting.

- However, the game logic is all kinds of screwy and I'm going to demonstrate the problem with a mini-walkthrough of the first room.

- It starts off simple enough as Hadley wakes in a grim 'medical' area on a table-pod-thing with a bio-mechanical arm preparing to extract her unborn baby as a large brute of a figure walks back-and-forth across the room.

- Grabbing the scalpel and killing the brute is easy and logical enough to begin with, but that's where the logic ends.

- The next step should be to escape, but there's no doors (and no explanation of how Hadley and the brute got in the room in the first place).

- The only interactive items in the room are two computer terminals: one to scan the pod, and one to trigger the 'extraction' arm.

- Figured out how to get out of the room yet?

- Genuinely, the game doesn't give you any extra information beyond telling you each terminal's purpose and one-line descriptions of items you can mouse over that are not relevant for exiting the room.

- What you need to do first is activate the scan and rush Hadley into the area being scanned (the brute's corpse not counting) to confirm that the operation can go ahead.

- You then go to the terminal controlling the bio-mechanical arm and confirm the operation should start.

- For no explicable reason, the arm ignores the pod where you were and now the corpse of the brute does count as the arm stabs into it and tries to basically rip it open to get to its insides.

- This effort breaks the machine, resulting in a lot of damage to the room, including a hole in the floor you can now use to escape.

- And that's the kind of logic CAYNE operates on 95% of the time.

- I used a walkthrough to get through the game (it's only a couple of hours long) and, even not getting frustrated having to solve the problems myself, I still didn't understand why a lot of things worked the way they did.

- I really can't recommend CAYNE, because it's a game where the gameplay is what gets in the way of the rest of what is otherwise a very well-produced free game.

- If you do want to give CAYNE a try, do like I did and use walkthrough just to keep the playing time down to basically the length of a movie and just try to enjoy the excellent visual design, performances and world-building instead. [4/10]