All Haze Eve – Review
Follow Genre: Puzzle Adventure
Developer: xrrawva
Publisher: xrrawva
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC

All Haze Eve – Review

Site Score
7.0
Good: Interesting twist in the story
Bad: Some puzzles don't feel that logical
User Score
7.0
(1 votes)
Click to vote
VN:F [1.9.22_1171]
Rating: 7.0/10 (1 vote cast)

All Haze Eve is a short Halloween game, a puzzle adventure which takes just one or two hours to complete, with an interesting storyline. It’s perfect to get into the Halloween spirit! The game has a unique and interesting look, which really fits the outlandish atmosphere. All Haze Eve has been developed and published by xrrawva, and is available via Steam for just a few dollars or euros.

all haze eve

Story

The game starts with an invitation: you got invited to go trick or treating on the evening of Halloween, and while you’re not supposed to go out alone at night, you grab your costume and go out anyway. Out on the street you discover some more curious folks out, but it’s unclear whether they are real spooks or regular, costumed people. You can interact with everyone, but usually they don’t have much to say to you. When you look around and solve some puzzles, you’ll discover the animals and other strange inhabitants of the area have considerably more to say, and the conversations are rather curious indeed. As you use your smarts to progress on completing your mission to properly trick somebody, the story suddenly takes a surprising turn, and suddenly your role in this short tale becomes clear.

all haze eve screen 1

Graphics

The graphics are pretty hazy, as the name of the game indicates. Everything around you has interesting but simple models, which are all white and greyish against a darker background, except for colorful glowy eyes. The viewing distance is rather short: it’s really misty around you, so you’ll have to walk close to see objects. This makes the game look pretty unique; while the graphics look simple with the lack of textures, the style is definitely something else and the lack of color adds to the atmosphere. During the ending credits there are also some great looking black-and-white pictures of the scenes in the game.

Sound

The background sound as you play is a repeating music track, which changes depending on the area you’re in. It’s nice to have background music, but you’ll hear the same song for quite some time so after a while you’ll get used to it and won’t notice it anymore. The conversations aren’t narrated, but some interactions will prompt a sound. Using the interface, as well as most interactions with the environment, makes sounds, and you’ll hear your footsteps as you move around. These sounds will make you feel grounded in mostly a quiet game, where you’ll feel pretty alone and rather lost.

all haze eve screen 2

Gameplay

All Haze Eve is a first-person, typical puzzle adventure. You play as a kid who goes out to trick and treat on Halloween. As soon as you are out on the street you can walk around and interact with a lot of objects and people around you. The interactions work in an interesting way: you can select an action (for example: knock on, give to, ask, take, etc) and combine this with a target you are close to (yourself, cat, broom, witch, etc), and execute your command. You’ll be able to knock on everything and everybody, for instance.

You can collect several items, and you don’t have an inventory to keep track of them, but you’ll be able to see all you have in the interaction choices. Most items you can use pretty quickly after you’ve found them, and there are no weird combinations of the items themselves, just interactions with the environment. Because of the haziness and gray-tones, it’s pretty easy to miss small objects, so be sure to look around a lot, both up and down, to find everything! You’ll notice pretty soon that if you follow the road, you’ll be at the beginning again, so when the road seems to go in a straight line, it’s more like a circle. There’s not a lot of area to cover, but there are many locations where you can try several interactions whenever you’ve found a new object, so expect to walk back and forth quite a bit. You’ll find your way pretty quickly through the mist, once you get used to it.

all haze eve screen 3

The puzzles are not very difficult, but sometimes it’s a bit confusing what the next step would be to solve a problem, and the solution is not always obvious. You’ll have to try to use every item on everything a lot, because sometimes it’s just not very logical what you should do to progress further into the story. If you get to a moment when you are so close to giving up because you think you have tried everything, just try to wish for something to happen and it eventually will!

Conclusion

This game is mostly a fun short story in the spirit of Halloween, with an interesting twist at the end. The puzzle-adventure mechanics are fitting, and the conversations with animals and other creatures were rather cool. The game can be somewhat frustrating if an action isn’t that logical to try to solve a certain puzzle and takes you a while of trying everything to figure it out, but after finishing the game the conclusion of the story will probably make you smile anyhow. If you like puzzle adventures, then this game is a fun way to spend an hour or two!

all haze eve screen 4

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Rating: 7.0/10 (1 vote cast)
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All Haze Eve - Review, 7.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating
Anmaja


I'm a LARP writer, freelance teacher and everlasting PhD student, and an avid gamer. Nowadays I game mostly on PC, but I love my retro playstation 1 & 2 as well :) I like watching anime, movies and series, and read books & comics whenever I have time!

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