Crying Is Not Enough | |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Storyline Team |
Publisher(s) | Storyline Team |
Designer(s) | Akis Olsey Mila |
Programmer(s) | Akis Olsey Mila |
Artist(s) | Konstantinos Poulis |
Writer(s) | Akis Olsey Mila |
Engine | Unity |
Platform(s) | Windows |
Release | Windows
|
Genre(s) | Survival horror, action-adventure |
Mode(s) | Single-player |
Crying Is Not Enough is a survival horror action-adventure video game developed and published by Greek independent developers Akis Olsey Mila and Konstantinos Poulis under the collective name of "Storyline Team". [1] The story follows 35-year-old Jacob Helten as he tries to unravel the mystery of his wife's disappearance after a horrific car accident. The game was developed over the course of five years and was released on Steam on 15 June 2018. [2]
The player controls the protagonist, Jacob Helten, from a third-person perspective, and has to traverse through a bizarre, death-filled world that is home to grotesque monsters. Players use firearms in order to defeat enemies, reminiscent of the Silent Hill series of games. [3] [4] Apart from gathering weapons and battling the mutated patients inhabiting the island, players are also tasked with solving Resident Evil-style puzzles. [4]
The game tells the story of a 35 year-old man named Jacob Helten, whose wife Claire is being treated in a hospital after suffering a serious injury in a car accident. As Claire's health continuously improves over the next few weeks, and she is about to get discharged, she vanishes from the hospital. Following his wife's disappearance, Jacob is approached by an unknown elderly woman, who claims to have knowledge of Claire's whereabouts and offers to help Jacob find her.
Jacob boards a helicopter on the roof of the hospital and soon finds himself on a mysterious distant island filled with nightmarish creatures and toxic waste. He is faced with a series of puzzles to solve in order to make progress and slowly uncovers a far darker plot, filled with hatred, fear and intrigue. [5] [6]
The game began pre-alpha in 2013, when two friends, Akis Olsey Mila and Konstantinos Poulis set out to create their own video game. At the end of the year they had their game cleared the Steam Greenlight process. [7]
In 2015, due to the developers' limited resources and disappointing pre-alpha test results, [8] Mila and Poulis, decided to keep up with the technological requirements of the latest generation consoles, starting the entire development from scratch. [7] The game was eventually released on Steam in June 2018. Reportedly, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions were being planned for release on the third quarter of 2018, [9] but have since received no official release date.
In April 2019, the game received a 'mass update' on Steam, containing a multitude of bug fixes and many tweaks to the game based on player feedback. [10] The update also included new cut-scenes, effects and game-play elements, such as an in-game map and visible quest objectives. The game's listing on Steam was also re-titled as Crying Is Not Enough: Remastered.
In 2021, the ability to purchase the game was disabled from the Steam storefront. As of December 2023 the game remains unavailable, although a free demo for the game is still visible and available for download.
Reception for Crying Is Not Enough has been mixed. The game was well received in its home country, where it received the "People's Choice Award" during the Athens Games Festival, as well as being voted as "Greek Game of the Year" by Greek media and entertainment website GameWorld.gr users in its annual Game of the Year Awards 2018. [11] On the other hand, it received mostly negative reviews upon its release on Steam, while American YouTuber Angry Joe listed Crying Is Not Enough at third place in his "Worst Games of 2018" list. [12]
Year | Award | Category | Result | Ref |
---|---|---|---|---|
2018 | Gameworld.gr Game of the Year Awards | Greek Game of the Year | Won | [11] |
Resident Evil, or Biohazard in Japan and Southeast Asia, is a Japanese horror game series and media franchise created by Capcom. It consists of survival horror, third-person shooter and first-person shooter games, with players typically surviving in environments inhabited by zombies and other frightening creatures. The franchise has expanded into other media, including a live-action film series, animated films, television series, comic books, novels, audio dramas and merchandise. Resident Evil is the highest-grossing horror franchise.
Survival horror is a subgenre of horror games. Although combat can be part of the gameplay, the player is made to feel less in control than in typical action games through limited ammunition or weapons, health, speed, and vision, or through various obstructions of the player's interaction with the game mechanics. The player is also challenged to find items that unlock the path to new areas and solve puzzles to proceed in the game. Games make use of strong horror themes, such as dark mazelike environments and unexpected attacks from enemies.
Steam is a video game digital distribution service and storefront developed by Valve Corporation. It was launched as a software client in September 2003 to provide game updates automatically for Valve's games, and expanded to distributing third-party titles in late 2005. Steam offers various features, like game server matchmaking with Valve Anti-Cheat measures, social networking, and game streaming services. Steam client's functions include game update automation, cloud storage for game progress, and community features such as direct messaging, in-game overlay functions and a virtual collectable marketplace.
Shinji Mikami is a Japanese video game designer, director, and producer. Starting his career at Capcom in 1990, he has worked on many of the company's most successful games. He directed the first installment of the Resident Evil series in 1996 and the first installment of the Dino Crisis series in 1999, both survival horror games. He returned to Resident Evil to direct the remake of the first game in 2002 and the third-person shooter Resident Evil 4 in 2005. In 2006, he directed his final Capcom game God Hand, a beat 'em up action game. Mikami worked at PlatinumGames to direct the third-person shooter Vanquish in 2010. The same year, he founded his own studio Tango Gameworks which has since been acquired by the American company ZeniMax Media. Under his studio, he directed the third-person horror game The Evil Within in 2014. He has also served the roles of producer and executive producer for many games.
Frictional Games AB is a Swedish independent video game developer based in Malmö, founded in January 2007 by Thomas Grip and Jens Nilsson. The company specialises in the development of survival horror games with very little or no combat gameplay mechanics. It is best known for its games Amnesia: The Dark Descent and Soma.
Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a survival horror adventure video game by Frictional Games, released in 2010 for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux operating systems, in 2016 for the PlayStation 4 platform and in 2018 for the Xbox One. The game features a protagonist named Daniel exploring a dark and foreboding castle called Brennenburg, while trying to maintain his sanity by avoiding monsters and unsettling events. The game was critically well-received, earning two awards from the Independent Games Festival and numerous positive reviews.
Tango Gameworks is a Japanese video game developer based in Tokyo. Founded in March 2010 by Shinji Mikami, previously of Capcom, the company was acquired by ZeniMax Media in October that year after suffering financial issues.
Bloober Team S.A. is a Polish video game developer based in Kraków. Founded in November 2008 by Peter Babieno and Peter Bielatowicz, the company is best known for developing Layers of Fear (2016), Observer (2017), Blair Witch (2019), and The Medium (2021). In January 2018, Bloober Team received the Paszport Polityki award in the "Digital Culture" category. It owns third-party publisher Feardemic.
Early access, also known as alpha access, alpha founding, paid alpha, or game preview, is a funding model in the video game industry by which consumers can purchase and play a game in the various pre-release development cycles, such as pre-alpha, alpha, and/or beta, while the developer is able to use those funds to continue further development on the game. Those that pay to participate typically help to debug the game, provide feedback and suggestions, may have access to special materials in the game. The early-access approach is a common way to obtain funding for indie games, and may also be used along with other funding mechanisms, including crowdfunding. Many crowdfunding projects promise to offer access to alpha and/or beta versions of the game as development progresses; however, unlike some of these projects which solicit funds but do not yet have a playable game, all early access games offer an immediately playable version of the unfinished game to players.
The Forest is a survival horror video game developed and published by Endnight Games. The game takes place on a remote heavily forested peninsula, where the player character Eric LeBlanc must fight off cannibalistic monsters, while searching for his son Timmy after a plane crash. The game features nonlinear gameplay in an open world environment played from a first-person perspective, with no set missions or quests, empowering the player to make their own decisions for survival. Following a four-year long early access beta phase releasing in 2014, the finished game was released for Windows in April 2018, and for the PlayStation 4 in November 2018. The game was a commercial success, selling over five million copies by the end of 2018. A sequel game, Sons of the Forest, was released in Early Access for Windows on February 23, 2023.
Five Nights at Freddy's (FNaF) is a video game series and media franchise created by Scott Cawthon. The first video game was released on August 8, 2014, and the resultant series has since gained worldwide popularity.
Scott Braden Cawthon is an American video game developer and writer best known for creating Five Nights at Freddy's, a series of survival horror games which expanded into a media franchise.
Ark: Survival Evolved is a 2017 action-adventure survival video game developed by Studio Wildcard. In the game, players must survive being stranded on one of several maps filled with roaming dinosaurs, fictional fantasy monsters, and other prehistoric animals, natural hazards, and potentially hostile human players.
Five Nights at Freddy's: The Silver Eyes is a horror mystery novel written by Scott Cawthon and Kira Breed-Wrisley, based on the Five Nights at Freddy's horror video game series created and developed by Cawthon. The novel follows teenager Charlotte "Charlie" Emily and her childhood friends who return to their hometown of Hurricane, Utah, to commemorate a friend who was murdered at the local Freddy Fazbear's Pizza restaurant ten years ago. While investigating the now-abandoned pizzeria, the group find themselves pursued by the killer William Afton, who was never caught, as well as the restaurant's haunted animatronic characters.
A battle royale game is an online multiplayer video game genre that blends last-man-standing gameplay with the survival, exploration and scavenging elements of a survival game. Battle royale games involve dozens to hundreds of players, who start with minimal equipment and then must eliminate all other opponents while avoiding being trapped outside of a shrinking "safe area", with the winner being the last player or team alive.
Rules of Survival (RoS) was a free-to-play, multiplayer online battle royale game developed and published by NetEase Games. It was first released via beta access in November 2017 and released globally on May 31, 2018. By October 2018, the game had reached 230 million players worldwide.
Resident Evil 2 is a 2019 survival horror game developed and published by Capcom. A remake of the 1998 game Resident Evil 2, it was released for PlayStation 4, Windows, and Xbox One in January 2019 and for Amazon Luna, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S in June 2022, and a Nintendo Switch cloud version released in November 2022. Players control the rookie police officer Leon S. Kennedy and the college student Claire Redfield as they attempt to escape Raccoon City during a zombie uprising.
Kostas Poulis was a Greek footballer who played as a midfielder. He competed in the men's tournament at the 1952 Summer Olympics.
The Callisto Protocol is a 2022 survival horror game developed by Striking Distance Studios and published by Krafton. The game is directed by Dead Space series creator Glen Schofield and is considered a spiritual successor to the series.
Puppet Combo is an American independent video game development studio founded by Benedetto "Ben" Cocuzza in 2012 as Pig Farmer Games and based in Brooklyn. Puppet Combo's games, such as Nun Massacre (2018) and the critically acclaimed Murder House (2020), are mostly survival horror games developed solely by Cocuzza and modeled after early PlayStation games and VHS. They are also frequently inspired by 1980s horror films, specifically grindhouse and slasher films. Puppet Combo primarily releases their games through Patreon and Itch.io. Cocuzza launched Torture Star Video, a video game publisher for lo-fi horror games, in 2021. Such As Inspiration Game For Resident Evil/Silent Hill And Mortal Kombat.