
March 23rd, 2020
Notovia
Truly unique and awesome indie horror game.
Experience goosebumps and scares.
Difficulty ranges from some very obvious changes in the room to very small and subtle changes that can be just pixels big.
Many different events can happen, making replay-ability value high.
I’m on Observation Duty 2: Timothy’s Revenge is a brief horror game in which your goal is to watch live surveillance camera footage and look for anomalies in the rooms under surveillance. Anomalies include everything from furniture movement to extraterrestrial invasion. You only need to file an anomaly report explaining the type and location of the anomaly when you notice one. Isn’t it simple? To make it through the night, you’ll need acute eyes and an excellent memory. I’m on Observation Duty 2 is the follow-up to the critically acclaimed I’m on Observation Duty.
We’ve become accustomed to indie horror games being shambles and indie horror developers looking for a quick buck that this game is a breath of fresh air. In Timothy’s Revenge, it takes some time to understand the chambers and get into the gameplay, but it’s well worth the money once you get used to the feel and environment.
The aesthetic was fluid in Timothy’s Revenge, and it was refreshing to see a horror game that didn’t rely on cheap jump scares. Some of the game’s scenes (which we won’t reveal) have a Kubrick-esque feel to them. Mostly because we believe one of the scenes was copied from a Kubrick film, but it still worked. They featured a nice soundscape that wasn’t a continual onslaught of background noises, and gameplay that took the basic “What’s the difference in these pictures” game and gave it a bizarre and unpleasant twist that we oh so liked.
Now, there isn’t a lot of content in Timothy’s Revenge, just one home, a few rooms, and maybe 2-3 hours of playtime, but where it shines is the sheer quantity of diverse things that happen in such a little space, which we won’t disclose (it’s only ₹ 125, we think you should go for it).
In addition, you will not be able to complete Timothy’s Revenge in less than 1 hour. Impossible. Since everything is shown in color, this game is significantly more difficult than its predecessor. The anomalies in the first game were much easier to spot because everything was the same hue. This game completely eliminates that advantage while also significantly increasing the challenge in terms of how subtle objects, corpses, light fixtures, and shadows are handled. If any future upgrades are planned, we’d like to request a brightness slider. It’s difficult to see, and we had to modify our monitor settings to finish the game due to the darkness.
Our only concern is that Timothy’s Revenge has lost all of the charms that the previous game had; in addition to the color cameras, there are no distortion “camera” effects like in the first game. The previous game did a great job of selling you as an employee of this anomaly detection organization, but the second game’s UI features are far too “Unprofessional,” killing any remaining appeal.
We’d also want to point out that instead of the fantastic morse code sliding text from the original game, the instructions are supplied by this floating head who just casually tells you what you have to do. Instead of a beep sound and a simple message, when you report an anomaly, a match stick appears, which lights up once the anomaly is removed? Why is it so pointless to replace these features with their far less “professional” counterparts? Furthermore, the addition of graphic violence and sexual scenes is superfluous and only serves to reduce the target audience for Timothy’s Revenge.