Portrait of a Torn Demo - it was a fucking chore!

 

I actually own the full game, but I installed this demo ages ago, and figured i'd play it for the channel. And dude it was aggravating every step of the way. I do hope the devs fixed these issues in the full version, and I suppose I'll find out when I eventually install it. 

What is my gripe?

The Controls:

It doesn't say on the steam store page that it's optimized for xbox controller, playstation or switch, but those are the only options you have when looking at changing controls. The keymapping does include keyboard keys which makes no sense. 

You can actually play this with mouse and keyboard, but it's horrible, the walking is sluggish, and the mouse is way too fast, and that was why I was looking to turn down the mouse speed - which you cannot, because as I said, you can only choose between controllers and switch. Which also means that you can't play inverted mouse (not that I do, but some people do). For the different options mentioned you can actually tweak your controller settings both speed and inverted - just not for a pc mouse. So I had to soldier on with this nightmare setting. 

The Graphics:

I changed the settings for the graphics before I booted the game, like this

the default setting is 'epic' for some reason, and I swear it was unplayable (I recorded a snippet I will show you) - and so I went in and changed all the settings, I removed the lumen, and the anti alias (that was on and off - you can't see it on this screenshot), and other settings that I figured would make my game run smoother and perhaps I wouldn't feel like I walked through molasses. 

But you know what happened every single time I saved my settings and clicked 'new game'? 

It forgot my settings, or rather some of my settings, because it kept the anti alias off, and the lens flare, and motion blurr - but it had lumen, and epic settings, which I eventually just gave up on, and that is why everything in my game looks like it's wet. 

The jump from Epic graphics (which looks okay), to high is ridiculous, as in it looks semi potato on 'high' I did try for fun to turn them down to medium, and it looked exactly like high - don't know why. But basically there's 'normal' and 'potato' 

I tried doing custom settings, so shadows were epic and stuff, but every time I clicked 'new game' all the settings sans the ones I mentioned - reset. That was super frustrating.

And the screen... oh the screen. So I figured okay let's leave it on epic then, and make it windowed, cause not only were I walking in molasses, my poor computer sounded like it was about to take off. 

As you can see here, I did manage to get it windowed, if I kept the ratio on the windowed mode, it would snap back to full screen the moment I hit 'play' or 'return to game' - and the window/fullscreen mode was reset like all the other settings. 

I figured out that I could use the ratio they suggested 

And if I kept it on the 4:3 ratio and the 1024x768 resolution it would tay windowed, even when I clicked 'back' (to the game). No other combo of ratio and resolution would stick after I hit 'back', or well it would for a while and when I opened a door, and a new room loaded - wham, back to full screen. 

That is just bad coding, sorry but it is.

So as you can see on the steam store page, it does promise a lot - and dude I know it's a spoiler, but just for the demo cause I haven't played the full game - but not only is it obvious to anyone who ever played a 'walking sim horror game' that you're dead, within the first minute (i shit you not), but not only does dear Robert (the young man we play as) take this very calmly, it's just dumb. Again this is the demo, and I hope it makes sense in the full game - but plotwise the demo is godawful. 

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I hope they solved their tech issues, because I don't exactly dream about playing a game like this in a tiny window, where everything looks like a '2 hour horror jam' from itch. And to the ceiling swirl all the time because I can't control the damn mouse.