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Annoying. Aggravating. Astonishingly Vague

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 14 / 27
Date: April 12, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I had a very hard time trying to keep myself playing this game, but my own mania kept me going. It wasnt fun.

I have several other games, such as the much-ballyhood "Oblivion", that were sitting on the shelf while I fulfilled this personal quest, to complete this game. Ive often done things to the end just as sort of a challenge, I may be obsessive compulsive in that manner I guess, but I set a goal that I would finish this game before I moved on to another. Like I said, it wasnt fun. Im glad it's finally over.

The game has probably two scary parts, and the atmosphere at first is quite creepy, you think youre going to see a shadow or reflection in a mirror or something when you least expect it. You dont. As a matter of fact, as time goes on, and you see the same places over and over again and know nothing scary is in store, it becomes quite boring like a chore. Tedious, I believe is the word. Very tedious.
Click over the same things many times, nothing happens, then later something scripted happens when you do, as the previous poster said, your clicking and re-clicking everything. Over and over again, I just wanted to cry at one point when something I had done a zillion times suddenly worked, and I realized suddenly that EVERYTHING must be done a zillion times.

This game wasnt good for my mental health, not so much that it scared me to such a state, but it truly made me want to rip the disc from the machine and throw it out the window. I like difficult games, this was not difficult but deceptive. This game doesnt play fair, and adventure games MUST play fair or one grows to hate them. I hate this game.

Prepare for your adventure: making laps around some run down old house for days

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 13
Date: April 09, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The game was nice looking and sounding at first, but it soon grew quite tiresome. Aside the monotonous "adventure" of running around clicking every square centimeter of the place, the game has some technical issues, namely crashing to desktop several times a session. Sometimes before I'd saved significant progress, or irritatingly enough, in mid-save. The scary ambience is timed out to hit you with some spooky moments and music, but they are few and far between. I started feeling like I was just making laps around some old, dirty, run-down house in the dark, clicking away on everything, over and over again. Find a new item? Ok good, now it's time to run around and tap on every surface in the entire house with it, just in case it can be "used" in one of these absolutely byzantine, nonsensical, and literally not feasible puzzles.

It has some rather annoying puzzle methods which arent really puzzles in the traditional sense, being more the result of luck or as I said, just running around clicking every centimeter of the place, trying to trigger the next scripted event that is anything but satisfying or suprising, when it is seen coming a mile away and is the result of much annoyance. It's absolutely tedious, and gave me several horrible headaches.

Leave your logic at the door, just run around and click on everything, with everything in your inventory, over and over again, and youll eventuallly get through this "adventure". Well, not exactly, for there are "solved" objectives of which you are not informed, come to find out you were supposed to go sleep to move the story along. Meanwhile, making laps around the entire house, over and over again, looking for the one miniscule pixel I didnt click. So remember to also run back up to your room and attempt to rest every ten minutes or so, just in case you trigger the end of that particular "puzzle".

I was happy at first when the outdoor environs were opened up to me, but this was soon turned to dismay when I realized the joke was on me, as I now had double or triple the area I had to run around and click every square millimeter of! It's absolutely maddening at times I tell you, and just not worth the time or effort in my opinion. One starts to feel that after the solving of a "puzzle", you have to just basically search the entire house and grounds again, as I said earlier, clicking on anything and everything with everything in your inventory.
The detection cursor is woefully inadequate and small, and with the spots of detection the size of a penny, found myself resorting unfortunately to reading a walkthrough. Suprisingly, I find out more times than none that I had already searched that very spot several times! Again, this is canvassing the entire house over and over, clicking away like a madman, headache growing more instense as my "adventure" continues.

The commentary I've seen online seems to suggest that one should perhaps "read a walkthrough as you play the game". I'm sorry, I do not read walkthroughs as I play a game, that's part of the experience is solving the thing myself, yet I find this to be nearly impossible, when the solutions are so utterly obscure, do not make sense, or you are not given vital information pertaining to such.

The scary noises (which basically consist of some shuffling noise or other) are very infrequent, and they actually become quite annoying more than naything when they do actually occur. And a bigger suprise is the ambiguous ending, leaving very much up in the air and unexplained. This just stupefied me, it's as if they are getting one final dig at you, and getting a big kick out of it. Ive played quite a few adventure games, and if you truly would like an "adventure game" worthy of the title, i would suggest the Syberia series for example, not this doldrum, repetitive affair that in the end feels like Martha Stewart's ultimate "tacky, dirty old house nightmare", not mine.

Such a boring, hard, pointless game...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 15
Date: August 04, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Let me give you a REAL review. After reading all these reviews I'm like oh wow this game sounds freaky!! I LOVE horror movies and being scared, so after reading these reviews I'm like, "This game sounds great." Boy was I WRONG!!
What was scary about this game? The scratching noises?? They are only in the game a couple times and sound more like a hand saw sawing wood... NOT creepy. The ending? It wasn't really scary and ended abruptly. If you understood the story they were trying to depict in your reading of the previous owners journals, your still left questioning the ending. I don't know if they wanted you to interpret it yourself or planned on making a sequel, but it too was vague.
Heres the scoop: You are an old guy you never see. You have no instructions and walk around a huge mansion and the property alone looking for clues? Basically clicking on anything it lets you. I wonder how many hours it took people to figure these things out because I did NOT have the patience to wander around with no purpose trying to figure out what to do next! This game is so VAGUE I had to consult a walkthrough soooo many times, and when I read what I was supposed to do I'm thinking, "Who would have thought of that!!" There was no point and not a good story.
You shouldn't be scared... I CANNOT see a guy being scared what-so-ever. I even played it in the dark at 1:00 in the morning!! I'm soooo DISAPPOINTED!! PLEASE tell me someone agrees with me?

Oh so tedious

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 8
Date: August 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Don't waste your money or your time. All you are doing in this game is walking around the house and the outlying building clicking on everything about a zillion times. Several times, I had the solution to a puzzle (if you can call them that) and was unable to solve it because I wasn't clicking in the exact right location. Or I hadn't read some inane, non-crucial piece of text that I was apparently supposed to read first. Very frustrating and not fun and not at all scary.
The ending is abrupt, but welcome.

Fun if you like opening lots of squeaky doors and drawers

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 10
Date: September 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I bought this game hoping to be creeped out, but maybe I've seen a few too many horror movies. Fans of the "Myst" series will probably enjoy this, but I found it tedious, tiresome, non-intuitive and not creepy at all.

I will admit that I have a short attention span and maybe haven't played enough of these 1st-person adventure puzzle-solvers, but I felt like I wasted a few evenings with this game, and all I did was walk around the house opening doors and drawers, and looking at various photographs and meaningless journal entries and the like.

Once I had explored the house and the grounds, opened every drawer I could find and picked up everything I could lay my hands on, I was at a standstill and eventually had to resort to internet walkthroughs just to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do.

As I said, maybe I haven't played enough of these types of games, but the things I learned on the internet walkthroughs I NEVER would have come up with on my own. The game thread is NOT INTUITIVE. There are specific examples I would mention, but don't want to put spoilers up for those who might actually enjoy this snoozer.

Others might enjoy unlocking the "dark secrets" of this adventure game, but I just couldn't get into it.

Huge waste of time.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 7
Date: February 02, 2007
Author: Amazon User

The name "Scratches" must refer to scratching ones head in disbelief at how annoying this game is. I had more fun reading the 40 reviews of this game on Amazon than actually playing this tedious thing. If you've ever lost something like your glasses or car keys and you've gone through your house a hundred times, getting more and more annoyed, fatigued and angry only to find the object you searching for exactly in a place you looked a hundred times..that's what playing this game is like. If that experience is like a fun game for you - please buy this game.

I'm a big fan of point-and-click type games and have played loads of them. All the atmospherics and graphics couldn't turn this into a satisfying game. Like other reviewers point out, Scratches is non-intuitive and requires alot stupid repetitive actions and running around waiting for doors to open (yawn) to fill out the game play. In comparison, Barrow Hill, which I played right before playing Scratches, is a much better game of this scary/mystery genre. It's creepy and atmospheric (yet humorous) and has lots of things to manipulate and hold on to. Although the puzzles in Barrow Hill are "dumbed down" they follow a logical course and a walk-through would only needed for the very impatient player. With Scratches a walk-through is the ONLY way to make sense of the game, not because it's a brilliantly clever game, but because is the opposite of clever.

ANNOYING! Repetitive, boring, and the ending made zero sense.

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 8
Date: April 22, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Just got done with Scratches.

The number one problem with this game is that it doesn't really matter how hard you try to get through it without using a walkthrough, a walkthrough is essential. We spend hours going through the house, gardens, greenhouse, chapel, and crypt. We went over everything multiple times, tried everything in the inventory, retried, and still, no success. If you don't click on the EXACT spot needed on an object it will not work, which makes for having to repeat your actions a thousand times.

Also, every single time you figure out where to go next, and you use a key or solve a puzzle to open something, all you find is a new key that you don't know where to use, or a new puzzle that you have no clue how to solve. This is no fun. There is zero flow to the game, it is one annoying thing after another.

Almost all the time you spend playing is taken up with re-searching areas you have already gone over many times. It's severely repetitive.

The game will show an icon that makes you assume you can do something with an object or area, when you never end up doing anything on the object or area in the entire game! We wasted a huge amount of time on this, thinking if we used everything in the inventory on the dang thing it would work, only to find out the object or area was unusable.

The ending made NO SENSE. You go through a game thinking the ending will wrap things up, and the only thing this one did was confuse you. It had nothing at all to do with the storyline.

Don't waste your time on Scratches, it's nothing but a disappointment.

slow and boring

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 1 / 5
Date: July 08, 2007
Author: Amazon User

NO activity with another being. You also have to find objects in the correct order(frustrating). My wife and I really tried to like this but it was VERY tedious and slow. As for the gameplay and graphics, you'd think this game was made in the 90's.

Complete waste of time

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 4 / 7
Date: August 15, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I want to start by saying that I am avid adventure gamer. I have been playing adventure games all of my life and I was really looking forward to playing this seemingly scary and exciting game. I was horribly mistaken. The game is nothing like what it is advertised to be. Yeah, you hear scratches once, MAYBE twice throughout the entire game. There is no tension and the only reason to keep playing it is in the hopes that something MUST happen eventually. All you end up doing is running around trying to find an object that you must have overlooked because you can't get into ANYTHING and it seems that there is nothing to do. At points, the game really turns into a pixel hunt and becomes increasingly frustrating the more you progress through the game. Despite your aggravation, if you make it to the end, the ridiculous ending if enough to make you scream from the ridiculousness of it. It isn't in any way creative, scary, or even mildly entertaining. I can honestly say that I have not played many games that have disappointed me as much as this one. It truly is a waste of time.

Bad Plot...Vague Motivation...Illogical

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 9 / 14
Date: April 22, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The best games of this type immerse us in a world that requires to think in ways other than the usual linear mode we often use. This game doesn't do that. There is seldom any involvement with puzzles other than finding the various items scattered around the game and then combining them with something else that is usually obvious...or annoyingly otherwise.

This game fails most of all at plot. It would have been so much better if it had settled on one batch of gimmicks instead of mixing two together that don't add up -- sometimes you gotta pick is it gonna be African tribal black magic or is it gonna be creepy sociopathic behaviour that drives the story...maybe with considerable skill, you could try to work with both but the builder of this games plot doesn't have what it takes.

In the end, despite the often impressive visuals, it falls apart.

Its impossible not to be reminded of the first Resident Evil game which has set the standard incredibly high for any game that wants to put a lone character in a creepy old mansion and then have ever stranger events unfold around that character. If you're going to play on that field, you had better have brought your big girl pants. Too bad the makers of "Scratches" didn't give us the stuff.

This game will be forgotten quickly I think.

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