It has been sometime now since I was last able to do a The Cream of the Crap article, what with all the fantastic games coming out lately. But there is something amusing about playing a god awful game and tearing it apart. Today we are going to be talking about my personal Game of the Year nominee, I Saw IT.

Now, this is typically the portion of my articles where I give a story rundown, but, uh, there is literally nothing to go by in game. That being said, let me recite what the developers have described the game as on the Steam page. “The town of Lerry have been haunted by evil creatures for over a hundred years. Every 7 years 7 months there will be a few person went missing. You are playing as Detective Q after years of investigating. Detective Q finally encounter the evil shapeshifting monster and begins their first conflict…” Absolutely none of this is conveyed in the game.

I discovered this Steam page description after I already spent the whole 15 minutes playing the game. Yes, an entire 15 minutes. That included 1 death and then beating the game. . . twice! After my exhausting and extensive time within the game there was zero mention of anything in that description. On the game page the developer also boasts that I Saw IT features exploring a mysterious forest, different paths, puzzles to solve, and battling evil creatures to collect keys. I will give them at least one of these since you do have to battle evil creatures to collect keys. However, this mysterious forest with different paths is a fairly small square with some trees in the middle and one random hallway. There are absolutely no puzzles involved and all you have to do is kill the monsters to collect the keys and the game is over.

After an impossibly long load screen (seriously, there is barely anything to render) that also acts as a control tutorial, I was dropped into the map with several gory torso’s in a line. Following the torso trail I quickly ran into some floating green fire with an axe underneath it. Already removing the tension 10 seconds in the game by offering a weapon is a fantastic start. I then continue to follow the corpse path until something caught my eye in a little grove in the forest. I approach the object thinking it was going to be an enemy and what I got was far more frightening. It was a gory torso laying on top of a large saw floating in the air. As I kept exploring I realize the entire forest is littered with torso paths and floating torso’s on massive saw blades. It’s quite perplexing that they just left the torso blades floating, but at this point it’s already become a comedy so who cares.

With absolutely all tension removed from the game I finally caught a glimpse of a full figured shadow in the distance. The sight of it having legs gave me hope that it was actually an enemy and not just another random prop. As I approach I hear grunts and then it quickly starts stumbling towards me revealing that it’s only a zombie, yay! After an embarrassing scuffle due some horrendous hit detection, I run away to the one hallway and ran into a nasty looking clown that slurped at me like he was about to eat my brains with some fava beans and a nice chianti. Being slurped at by a clown was the scariest thing I Saw IT had to offer if I’m being honest. Distracted by the slurping clown caused me to not watch my back which lead to my untimely death. But my pride couldn’t handle being defeated within 3 minutes so I tried again.

This time I took a different route along the torso road and random floating dead body blades until I reached the back corner where I finally ran into a monster that had a cool design. I didn’t even realize until I reflected on this masterpiece of a game that this one cool monster is actually a complete rip off of a couple Resident Evil monsters mashed together. Picture the Regenerator and the Iron Maiden monsters having a hell spawn and that is exactly what you get here minus the actual creepy factor or threat.

After kicking the Iron Regenerator Maiden’s butt and collecting its key, I continued my journey around the map to find another clone of the knock off. I ventured into the hallway I died in previously with Dr. Clown Lester and with my now pro-like ax skills, I quickly knocked him out of his squeaky shoes. In the clown room is where I found the shotgun with one round in it. This kind of confused me since there is a reload button, but only one shot and no ammo at all. But there is also a jump button that is never needed so at this point I’m not shocked. After searching around for a minute I quickly realized that all the enemies are placed at the corners of the maps. Wait, did I solve the “puzzle” the developer mentioned?

I finally approach the last zombie so I can collect the last key and move to the next level. I blast him in the face and before the body could even hit the floor I am greeted by a congratulation screen from the devs letting me know I beat the game. Um, what? There is no way that was the end so I ran it back again, but this time knowing the enemy layout I beat it quite quickly. I mean, I know the game was only $.99, but come on now. A clown, 2 zombies, 2 asset flipped monsters, floating torso blades, floating green fire, and a shotgun with one bullet despite having a reload button. Okay $.99 makes sense, but I had a pretty good laugh. Check out my gameplay below and let me know what you think of my Game of the Year nominee!