Developer: NVYVE Studios
Publisher: NVYVE Studios
Platforms: PC
Tested on: PC
P.A.M.E.L.A. – Review
Eden is a fallen utopian city where a horrific disease has taken most lives of its inhabitants and only left the afflicted to roam its grounds. You, as a sleeper awoken from cryogenic sleep, are the city’s last hope of finding a cure. With a wide range of high-tech weapons, equipment and buildable items, you need to survive the dangerous areas within Eden in search of a cure for this horrific disease. Pamela, and AI overseer left to watch over a dead city will guide you on your way in this once-vibrant city that glides across the ocean.
Story
In P.A.M.E.L.A., you will wake up from a cryosleep as a Sleeper, a human being unaffected by the horrific disease that has ravaged throughout Eden. This disease turns people into mindless zombies attacking all other moving things. Long-term exposure to the disease will cause your body to freeze resulting in an imminent death by slow and agonizing failure of vital organs. Pamela, the city’s AI overseer has awakened you to find the cure for the disease that has spread throughout the city of Eden.
Pamela will guide you where to go next. As there are no quest markers in this game, you ought to listen carefully to what Pamela tells you to find out where to head next. This could lead to taking many wrong turns and ending up in the wrong place where deadly enemies await your arrival and will come storming at you. The game’s story is very interesting and we’d recommend paying attention to every piece of lore you can find.
Graphics
P.A.M.E.L.A. looks amazing with a beautifully designed environment and a lot of high-tech elements found throughout the whole city of Eden. Everything in this game shouts “futuristic” as even the menus are made by holograms appearing around your left arm projected by the AARM device you’re wearing. While the simple Afflicted enemies look just like normal zombies, stronger enemies like the Reaper and the Widow look more awesome with special effects and equipment. Some enemies can even turn partially invisible with only a silhouette of red lights indicating where your enemy is. The environments in P.A.M.E.L.A. are mostly dark as Eden’s power management system is running very low, making most areas run on emergency power or even no power at all, making your flashlight the only light source available. This adds to the horror effect of this game and makes you be on guard throughout most of your entire playthrough.
Sound
The sound in P.A.M.E.L.A. is also done very well with a lot of scary environmental sounds and enemy noises that can be heard almost everywhere. As there are not a lot of voiced characters to be found in this game, not a lot of voice acting is needed, but where it is used, it adds to the whole horror experience. Robots sound exactly like they should, the Afflicted will let out a lot of scary screams and the voice of Pamela sounds just like you would expect from a female AI. Aside from the many scary environmental sounds, the small amount of background music that is used fits the whole horror genre perfectly.
Gameplay
P.A.M.E.L.A is an open-world survival horror game set in the remote city of Eden drifting on the sea. As a Sleeper, you wake up from a deep cryosleep, equipped with only the AARM and the IVG. The AARM is a device on your arm that serves as your inventory, status checker and more. The IVG is a tool that can dematerialize all items you interact with to store them in your inventory and also serves as a building tool to place and interact with buildable items to create your own small hideout wherever you want. With only these two items, you can simply do nothing but swing your fists to defend yourself. The controls are quite easy to master and the game also offers great controller support for roaming around and fighting enemies that only lacks when moving items from your inventory to containers because the cursor gets stuck between the two containers.
By scavenging every container for loot, you’ll find consumables and eventually equipment like armor, utilities and weapons if you’re lucky enough to come across some. It could very well take you a long time before finding your first weapon to defend yourself with a bit more than only your fists. For example, after playing for fifteen to twenty hours, we didn’t even find our first melee weapon yet and we still needed to rely on our bare fists or costly ranged weapons for even the weaker enemies. The ranged weapons are all powered by energy cells which you can find almost everywhere, but again, it’ll depend on luck to find enough to keep your weapons powered. Keeping some energy cells in your inventory is highly recommended as you may never know when you come across strong enemies.
Aside from getting equipped, you also need to drink and eat regularly so you won’t starve or get dehydrated. Luckily, food and drinks can be found a lot so just using them regularly will prevent you from losing health. Eden has stores where you can spend the money you find spread throughout Eden, but these and light sources need power to function. As Eden is now, it is suffering from a huge power shortage. There are power stations where you can regulate the power distributed to sectors, but power will run out fast if you ask for too much. There are back-up batteries spread out in Eden to provide sectors with additional power and repairing the power infrastructure will make the power last longer. You will walk around through many dark areas where there’s no power at all and your flashlight will be your only light source. Paying attention to the power of Eden is quite important to make your journey a bit easier.
The game will really become fun and manageable after you’ve found yourself some gear and weapons to defend yourself, because if you don’t, fighting the easiest opponents can be a hard task, let alone when you encounter two of them at the same time. And this will only include the standard Afflicted that will only attack you with melee attacks. Stronger enemies like the Reaper, Widow and Revenant are much harder to kill and can have stronger melee and ranged attacks that will prove deadly most of the time when you encounter them while not having some decent weapons to defend yourself. There’s quite a wide variety of enemies you’ll encounter, which makes you be on guard every time you enter a new area. if you’re lucky enough to find equipment that can detect enemies through walls, it will make exploring areas a much easier task.
If you’d like an even bigger challenge than the game already offers in the standard gameplay mode, you can adjust some modifiers to increase the game’s difficulty and even enable permadeath which makes the game more intense experience than when you could simply die and recover your lost loot by heading to where you died last. Around Eden, there are several places where you will find cryo bays that serve as respawn points after you’ve powered them with a cryo core. When playing with permadeath disabled, investing one cryo core will make them a permanent spawn point, but when you have permadeath mode enabled, you NEED to find yourself a cryo core and put it in a cryo bay before you die, or it’s game over. Choose wisely when starting the game as you can’t change these settings after you’ve started playing.
Sadly, with a lot of good points mentioned already, the game still struggles with some flaws. For starters, in the main menu, each description when hovering above an option won’t be the right one. Like when you point at continue, the description says it will let you start a new game, and this is seen with every button there and the problem with controller support has already been mentioned, but this is nothing yet. The biggest problem in the game is that it will freeze and crash mid-game very often, which deletes all your progress after the last time you manually saved, or the game was saved automatically. We had this happen to us multiple times in a session of an hour or less and this needs to be fixed as soon as possible.
Conclusion
P.A.M.E.L.A. is a very interesting horror survival game with a futuristic setting and quite a fascinating story. The game plays very well and will prove to be fun and exciting to play, as danger can hide in every corner. There is a wide variety of weapons and equipment to use, but some luck is required to find the ‘good’ equipment. Needing to power up districts can be quite a hard task, but will prove to be interesting as well, and forces you to make choices for where you want power, and where not. P.A.M.E.L.A. is not a game where you just rush in, as it will cost you dearly. The game will become more fun to play as you get better equipped. If you’re into horror games, futuristic elements and surviving under bad circumstances, we’d recommend trying this game, but only after the crashes have been fixed.
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