I’m always going to take issue with a game that can’t determine what it wants to be in its identity. Unfortunately, Waking is yet another case of a game that seeks to brand itself by inspiration from several other games. There’s elements here from Dark Souls, Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, and Control, to an extent where Waking can’t even stand out on its own. It’s a true shame, as there are bits and pieces here that are spawned from great ideas but succumb to spawning ideas from these sources.

My playthrough of Waking kicked off with activating my Xbox controller per the recommendation of the game itself. Upon turning on my wireless controller, I saw all of the important pre-game choices selected for me. I almost speculated that this might have been done on purpose, since the game had a disclaimer preceding that screen, warning those with depressive and anxious thoughts to use discretion before playing. However, this turned out to be a bug with my controller, but plugging in my wired controller had the same effect.

I conceded and went with the keyboard/mouse approach, one I have been accustomed to for the majority of games. Why wouldn’t you optimize this for a PC release? I found that a lot of the movement was sporadic. There was no clear-cut option to change mouse sensitivity which was, by default, jacked to such a high extent that I could barely touch my mouse without moving a whole 180 degrees.

Once I got a handle of Waking‘s unoptimized mouse/keyboard controls, I noticed some glaring oddities. There was an apparent double-jump, but it was insanely convoluted. The initial jump was reasonable, but the second hop was four to five times larger than the first one! Seeing as traversal is one of the game’s main mechanics, I have to wonder what Jason was thinking implementing this drastic of a moveset into the main game was during playtesting.

Visually-speaking, Waking isn’t rough to look at. It’s pretty enough, as you traverse plenty of gloomy-looking environments akin to Dark Souls, but you keep going back to the same room through progression, diluting the mystique of the iniquity that Waking promises. The main focus of this game is that it implements your psyche based on your decisions, but what does that matter when you’re forced to deal with messy controls in a third-person romp that doesn’t know what game it wants to derive from?

Waking is a disappointment for more reasons than one. It’s a title that has no idea what it wants to be, stemming from so many titles and genres that the player can’t get a grasp on what they’re experiencing as it happens. On top of that, it’s certainly not optimized, even after years and years of development. I saw IGN give Waking a 2 out of 10 and while that score could be shocking, I’m certainly not surprised myself. If you’re looking to find a game that knows what it’s about, you will not find as much with Waking, as it is a muddled, messy experience that I wouldn’t recommend to even a masochist.

A PS4 review copy of Waking was provided by tinyBuild for this review.

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$19.99

3.5

Score

3.5/10

Pros

• Looks Pretty
• Decent Soundtrack

Cons

• Boring
• Unimpactful
• Tries to Emulate Too Much