Alan Sharp Demo First Impressions

Content warning: This article contains light spoilers for Alan Sharp, and some images of mild blood/gore.

June 16th, 2020, was the first day of the Steam Games Festival: Summer Edition. Fortunately for me, working with Phenixx Gaming made me aware that the festival was happening, which I might not have been on my own.

Don’t worry; this isn’t an article about Steam’s messy communication habits, though I could probably write one. This is an article about Alan Sharp’s newly released demo, from Mystive Studios. Described as a “first-person, mystery horror, story-driven video game, focused on exploration, survival, puzzles, and open-world investigation,” the game sounded promising enough to be worth a shot.

Indeed, for the most part, it was. There are some definite learning curves that still need to be scaled between now and its release date, but who am I to judge? It will be releasing on July 28th 2021, for those of you who are wondering. Okay, setting aside the fact that being judge-y might be a lot of my personality. No one asked you, internal-critic-brain.

My point is: a lot can happen in a year, and my first glance at Alan Sharp leaves me with a cautiously reasonable dose of confidence that the kinks will be worked out.

The game has simple yet evocative graphics, with a pleasant degree of facial variation between the characters I’ve met so far. Though it bears noting that the characters have all been very white. The creature designs that I’ve encountered so far are fun and aptly unsettling when they need to be for the most part. Though I did not see as much of them in the demo as I would have liked.

On the auditory side of things, the soundscape is well-balanced, making effective use of both noise and quiet. I look forward to seeing how that can be expanded when there are greater physical threats at play. The voice acting when our playable character, Sam Whithers, is talking to himself about the case at hand is a little thin in places. However, it becomes warmer and more believably animated when he enters into dialogue with others. This seems to bode well for more fleshed-out material in the full version of the game, too.

Mechanically,, there are some clear wrinkles still to be ironed out. While the controls are intuitive and movement is mostly fluid, I did get stuck next to pieces of furniture a few times, and essentially had to button smash until I could move again. Maybe this was something funky going on in my download, but here’s hoping that gets smoothed over with more work on the game as a whole.

The point-and-click approach to gathering clues works just fine, but it lets itself down when Whithers’ commentary describes something as “creepy” or “strange.” It breaks “show, don’t tell” in a fairly fundamental way, and threatens my immersion to be told how I should feel about an object, rather than being led to feel that way.

Meanwhile, the exploration aspect of the game becomes somewhat fuzzy through a strangely inverted “fog of war” effect. Again, this may only be something that glitched out in my version of the demo, so don’t take my word as law. Yet walking around with my flashlight off but being surrounded by a fairly wide circle of light all the same was a little confusing. The more troublesome part was that it led me to miss some pretty important things once I headed to the basement, because I got overconfident about not needing my flashlight to see.

Lastly, given the emphasis on visual exploration and gathering important parts of the story from documents and notes, Alan Sharp could really benefit from offering a “clean text” version of all of its key documents, not just some of them. Accessibility is pretty darn sexy, folks.

Coming back to narrative, though, I have to say, I’m intrigued. What initially presents itself as a fairly straightforward murder and/or paranormal mystery reveals itself to be more of a story about the foibles and flaws of the playable character, presumably, the titular protagonist, come the full game. The lore at the center of the demo material also hearkens more to Jewish mythology, which was interesting in a genre that tends to pull on threads of Christian and specifically Catholic imagery more often than anything else.

To Alan Sharp’s very great credit, so far, it also doesn’t over-rely on jump scares. There were perhaps two in the entire demo that I came across, and they were both effectively atmospheric without being excessive.

Now, of course, mileage may vary as to how much or how little people like in their games when it comes to jump scares. I, personally, am of the opinion that fewer is better, at least when you can wield the ones you do introduce to maximum effect. Otherwise, they essentially stop being jump scares, and start being a dog whistle for a weak, stretched-thin plot trying to skate by on bumps in the night and not much else.

Despite these interesting turns, though, many of the themes of Alan Sharp may not be especially original. It’s not entirely clear if the developers were well-acquainted with the mythology they were using, or if they’d just watched The Possession several times. The game’s imagery also certainly evoked Outlast and Outlast 2, especially in some of the glimpses we see of the full game toward the end of the demo. Not that that’s necessarily a bad thing, but it might not hurt to be a little more honest about your influences.

Incidentally, one of the things I liked most about Alan Sharp’s demo was the way it echoed the tabletop roleplaying game Call of Cthulhu. The story of an investigator who arrives at a mysterious, (often isolated) scene of some vile happenings and rapidly ends up in over their head, often exposing their own sins and weaknesses in the process, is a common theme in the TTRPG.

There were even points where, much like in Call of Cthulhu, Whithers became weakened, immobilised, or otherwise intensely unsettled by something he saw or experienced during his investigation. Maybe I’m biased, but I think Alan Sharp could benefit from a more honest callback to some of its inspirations. A fairly easy way to do that might be to introduce a Call of Cthulhu-style “sanity check” that can be passed or failed. I don’t know. I think it’d be fun. Then again, I do have the tabletop elements of Disco Elysium’s gameplay on the brain.

In short, I think Alan Sharp has a lot of potential. I also think it’s experiencing some fairly significant growing pains, but there’s enough to work with already that I’m very much looking forward to seeing what Mystive Studios comes forward with about this time next year.