Moving on from a relationship is hard, especially if you weren’t the one who broke it off. It’s a complex emotion and everyone deals with it in several ways. The main aspect is what you do about the loss of love in your life. Do you move on and live your life to the fullest? Or do you agonize about what could have been and yearn for them back? Before you figure out the answer, a demon decides to sink their claws into you. You must deal with them before your life moves on.
Sorry We’re Closed, a survival horror game by à la mode games, looks at the final days of a cursed girl who desperately tries to break free. It’s an interesting adventure that makes you think about how you react when you are in love. The gameplay is also intriguing and covers lots of aspects. But love can be a double-edged sword, equally amazing and also painful. The game is a jack-of-all-trades but as a result nothing particularly shines. It’s a decent experience, but hurts itself as it tries to climb to greatness.
You play as Michelle, a woman struggling to move on from her breakup three years ago. She has a dream where she is cursed by a demon and only has a few days before the demon “claims” her. Michelle must team up with some of her friends to figure out how to beat her curse. Along the way, she figures out what love means to her and decides how she lives her life.
Sorry We’re Closed isn’t long and can be finished in a single sitting. You spend three days with Michelle as she figures out how to remove the demon’s curse. Along the way you meet a cast of characters whose side stories you can affect. Your decisions influence the endings you can choose at the end. The characters are nice and you quickly learn the game’s vibe after spending time with them.
Each character’s personalities are exaggerated in some way, some for comedy and some for drama. They each deal with the topic of love in their own way, letting you see the consequences of their actions. As the story progresses, you learn more about the troubles they share and the solutions they want. It’s a great mirror into the definition of love and how different characters want it. Whether it’s healthy or unhealthy, you understand their reasoning and can act on it.
The story’s biggest weakness is that you don’t spend enough time with each character to learn more about them. You mostly see the extreme parts of their personality and get some humor out of it. However, it’s also hard to get attached to any character outside their struggles with love. The cast feels one-dimensional and thus it’s hard to take them seriously. They feel less like people and more like caricatures of love-obsessed individuals.
Sorry We’re Closed’s length also doesn’t give the story time to develop. Ending the curse feels somewhat rushed and the side stories have simple endings. More time to develop the story and understand a character’s feelings is helpful especially if the theme is love-related. Otherwise, it feels like characters are running purely on emotion and not thinking about their actions. The story itself isn’t bad, but it feels forgettable other than the curse’s resolution.
Gameplay resembles the early Resident Evil survival-horror games with fixed camera angles and limited resources. You walk through abandoned locations and fight creatures with firearms. While you do have a melee weapon, it’s more likely you will fight enemies using guns. You aim and fire in a first-person view, using your mystical third eye to reveal weak points. These weak points can shift locations when you shoot them and you must watch out for them.
Sorry We’re Closed captures the feeling of survival horror well because you must watch your resource usage. Enemies hide in small gaps and come out to fight you. Sometimes you must deal with groups of enemies at once. It might even be better to run without fighting. Boss fights are also tricky but have a pattern you can learn. You feel like you are in an old survival horror game fighting for your life and it’s exhilarating.
However, gameplay runs into two problems that bring it down. First is the weak point targeting as it is a big part of combat. In theory, it’s a high-risk-high-reward mechanic that helps you take enemies down faster. However, switching to weak point targeting is clunky and inconvenient. There’s a stun time when you use your third eye but it’s barely enough. While some of this is down to adapting to gameplay, it leads to inefficient combat.
Running away from most enemies is usually not recommended since you get hurt and healing is limited. You can also get surrounded by enemies and must restart or die. But targeting weak points takes lots of time and demands quick reaction times. That’s not easy to do for controllers or players who can’t react quickly. Weak points also rapidly shift locations after being targeted, wasting more time.
Thankfully Sorry We’re Closed does have accessibility settings that make aiming easier or give you unlimited heals. While they can take away from the challenge, it makes up for any player disadvantage. It doesn’t completely remove the inconvenience from the targeting shift, but it does even the odds in the player’s favor. You can also enjoy the game at your own pace or take risks that you normally wouldn’t.
It wouldn’t be survival horror gameplay without some puzzles and Sorry We’re Closed has some good ones. Some quick thinking and careful analyses should guide you through most of the puzzles. However, it does feel that later in the game, the puzzles get somewhat ridiculous. It feels like the game shifts away from survival horror in favor of a puzzle game. This drags it down because you want to feel the tension, not frustration at the number of puzzles.
Sorry We’re Closed is a decent experience overall and it’s definitely worth a look for survival horror fans. It also explores love in a manner that most games don’t dare to approach. However, it does feel that the game tries to be too many things and falls short every time. If you want something to pass the time, this is a good experience. However, you probably won’t revisit Sorry We’re Closed more than once if you even get to the end.
Victor reviewed Sorry We’re Closed on PC with a review code.
