[Review] Facility 47 (PC)

Something about the puzzle game, Facility 47, intrigued me immediately. Not only was the price right ($0.98), but the visuals pulled me in right away. I’ll also admit, a recent rewatch of the classic film, The Thing got me interested as you play a scientist stationed at an outpost in Antarctica who wakes up in a daze, locked in a cage…

It isn’t that you aren’t supposed to be at Facility 47, it’s that something has happened to you and your crew. How did you wind up locked in a cell? You find the keys on the ground close by, and you then embark on solving this mystery. The scientists at Facility 47 were conducting experiments as well as developing a special serum on the down-low that when injected would boost one’s immune system exponentially. It did have its serious side-effects, however…and as you go through the facility, you discover your crew is either dead or missing. Diary notes from colleagues and internal memos are found strewn about the place, and reveal some of what was happening at the facility before things turned tragic.

Facility 47 is a point-and-click puzzle game that does have some good things going for it. It looks great, for one thing; some great top notch graphics. The music, although on a loop, is eerie, but tolerable. The mystery aspect also sucks you in.

However, this game suffers from poor mechanics. You pixel hunt your way through as there are no visual signals to indicate any area of interest. The game is not very linear; at one point I found myself in a quandary where I had six locked doors I needed keys for in order to advance the game, and all I had was a useless butter knife. The puzzles were tricky to solve – some of them fun, others revealed answers that often made no sense to me. I embarrassingly had to resort to the hint button or a walkthrough throughout the game. Never mind, with there being a lot of locales to access in this game, and with all the backtracking you need to do (go here, go there…), this game did not provide any map, dammit! Facility 47 does not suffer fools!

I was close to 5 hours in, and at that stage, I was keeping a walkthrough on my phone on constant standby. Facility 47 just got to be a slog. I know this is not a popular view if one were to look at all the positive reviews for this game on Steam. Too bad, I feel the game had some potential, it just wasn’t executed well.

2.5/5

Facility 47
Inertia Game Studios
2014

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