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An alien invasion that falls flat faster than M. Night Shyamalan - Greyhill Incident Quick Review

2K View2023-06-17

Greyhill Incident

3.8

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PLAY IT OR SKIP IT?

Skip this one for sure. Greyhill Incident is a first-person horror story that tells a tale of alien invasion in a rural farm community. The setting and many of the set pieces seem heavily inspired Signs, M. Night Shyamalan’s 2002 alien horror flick. But like many of Shyamalan’s worst films, Greyhill Incident suffers from wooden dialogue, questionable acting, and a frustrating, illogical plot that never really seems to go anywhere, among other problems.

TIME PLAYED

I only got two hours deep into Greyhill Incident before giving up. Thanks to the game’s slow movement speed and annoying gameplay, that two hours felt like at least double, and every second of it a waste of time. According to Steam reviews, the total time required to complete the game is quite short, but I just cannot imagine sitting through it. No thank you.

WHAT’S AWESOME

• Occasionally cool environment design. There’s no denying that walking through cornfields and along pitch-black country roads in the middle of night is creepy. And when the alien invasion really kicks off, about thirty or so minutes into the game, I enjoyed the spectacle of a classic flying saucer hovering out the window of the camper I was in, overwhelming my senses with bright lights and screeching noise. In these rare moments I saw glimpses of the promise of what Greyhill Incident aspired to be.

WHAT SUCKS

• Terrible writing and voice acting. Greyhill Incident puts players into the everyman shoes of Ryan Baker, a non-character with no personality and seemingly no idea what he’s doing. Ryan’s son is one of the first people abducted by the aliens invading the small community of Greyhill, but you wouldn’t know it by Ryan’s lack of reaction. The handful of other characters he meets aren’t much better, constantly sending him on inane fetch quests despite being fully aware of the fact that there are literal space aliens running around the neighborhood.

• Movement. Despite selling itself as a survival-horror game, Greyhill Incident has very little in the way of actual game mechanics. The vast majority of the game is just walking, which maybe would be less painful if Ryan didn’t move at a snail’s pace. I was able to speed up from painfully slow to barely tolerable with the run button, but only for about six seconds at time; if I tried running any longer than that, Ryan would start breathing hard and switch to an even slower speed while he recovered. Mind-boggling.

• Alien enemies. Within the first hour or so of Greyhill Incident, I encountered my first alien. The aliens in this game are traditional “greys” as reported by many UFO enthusiasts, and I definitely found them creepy when I saw them off in the distance, or realized out of the corner of my eye that one was stomping around the house I was trying to enter. Once I got up close, however, any fear wore off and was replaced with annoyance.

Alien encounters in Greyhill Incident can be solved in one of two ways: Either I had to carefully sneak around areas and avoid being seen, or I had to engage in an absolutely ludicrous game of tag. When a grey spotted me, it would run up and try to grab me. I could avoid getting grabbed by swinging at the extraterrestrial with my trust baseball bat to briefly knock them out, but those swings are extremely stiff and often missed. When an alien grabbed me, I had to mash on my keyboard to attempt to escape, and when I failed, I had to reload the most recent checkpoint, which often meant another five-plus minutes of slow, boring walking.

Oh, and I did find a revolver in the game as well, but I was only given three bullets and warned that using the gun would likely draw in more aliens due to the noise. If the shooting is anything like the melee “combat,” it’s probably a good thing that I didn’t even risk it.

💬 Do you still want to believe in Greyhill Incident despite my problems? Or are you happy to leave this case buried deep in the X-Files? Let me know in the comments.

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