It has become increasingly difficult to get excited about games featuring pixelart. Making a game seem like it could have been released on the NES is nothing new and hasn’t been for some time now. At some point, devs will make retro games based on retro games mimicking retro games, and the universe will collapse in upon itself.

Scrolling through the front page of Steam will usually yield a stomach-turning number of NES-like or SNES-like games, complete with a chiptune soundtrack and some vague resemblance to the games of yore.

And yet, uniquely entertaining games like Axiom Verge transcend mere nostalgia porn and make interesting use of mechanical and story limitations for effect. They are few and far between, but they usually possess some hook beyond a certain graphical style.

Uncanny Valley represents an attempt at transcendence. Produced by Cowardly Creations, the game touts itself as survival horror with action / adventure elements.

If Uncanny Valley can be compared to the original survival horror game, Resident Evil, then it is due to the utter simplicity of its aims. A pixelated throwback in many ways, the game features simple mechanics, straightforward puzzles, and plain writing. Unlike the above-mentioned RE, however, it does not punish the player with tank controls, improbable-to-impossible puzzles, and a frustrating save system. However, a unique premise does not manage to save what is ultimately a game too small in scope for its grand ambitions.

With its endlessly creepy score and somber-yet-detached mood, Uncanny Valley is one of the most identifiably horror games of recent memory. It’s sort of a bargain basement Silent Hill, and I mean that in the best possible way. It’s got some kind of weird and (for lack of a better word) “indie” limitations, but this is not a game merely reaching for the lowest common denominator.

In Uncanny Valley, players take on the role of Tom, a security guard at a facility in an uninhabited town. His coworker is a rotund jerk, and the facility Tom guards contains secret and off-limits areas, so a mystery is built not just into the story but into the world, as well.

Nightmares of being homeless (or at least tattered and dirty) plague Tom’s nights, creating a sense of a split world, one in which Tom is a listless vagabond in search of, well, something, and one in which he is a listless working stiff uncovering the mystery of his ostensible ghost town. There are walking shadows and empty buildings, and the constant hum of silence is almost too much to bear.

However, the selling point for this game is undoubtedly its branching story, which ultimately leads to one of several possible endings, like a Choose Your Own Adventure tale. Miss something in your playthrough, and the game doesn’t overtly penalize you. The ending may change slightly, but the game itself continues on, with the player none the wiser.

For example, there is no real fail state that drags you back to a checkpoint. If you completely botch a puzzle or manage to get yourself “killed” — it’s weird — you won’t have to replay that section. Instead, you’ll just continue on as if nothing had happened. Or maybe you won’t, but the game knows, and it subtly changes to reflect your gameplay choices.

The art style lies somewhere in the valley between Lone Survivor and Gunpoint. Though at first glance it appears to be yet another pixelart game, it’s way more complicated than that. The character models are well-designed, as is the world, and an amount of care has been placed into world-building. Granted, it’s a very small world, and the rooms are sometimes repetitive-looking, so it’s not perfect, but the way the game uses scale and space is kind of interesting.

The basic mechanics are — at best — rudimentary. You’ll pick up a few items and use them elsewhere, and in any other game the dearth of things to “do” would be a net negative, but for this particular gaming experience, it kind of works. It’s not about the puzzles, per se, because the game is funneling players into a different possible outcome.

Logically, that feels sort of weird for me. If the puzzle is merely a filtering device for the next section of the game and where you, as the player, stand within it, then how much do the puzzles and outcomes matter in and of themselves? I can’t even come down completely on the consequences-based system, however, because even bigger budget games use these tactics to move story forward. I have to say it does work here.

Kind of. And that’s what I can’t quite get over. The game is just long enough and just varied enough to be interesting, but not interesting enough to make it an automatic recommendation.

The most problematic aspect of Uncanny Valley is its adherence to the idea that replay value is one of the game’s biggest draws. The first playthrough is a relatively short experience, but the number of endings is meant to pull players back in so they can see what else could happen.

However, I found myself almost entirely without a desire to see the rest of the game once I had finished it. There’s a chance you will play the game a second, third, or maybe fourth time in order to experience the different endings, but if you, like me, felt satisfied after the first playthrough, the desire to replay it just plummets.

In that way it is kind of like Heavy Rain. Most people only played through once, and even if they googled the other endings, they largely felt satisfied with how their game ended up. On a much smaller scale, Uncanny Valley works much the same way. Since the playthroughs are much shorter, it is conceivable to dash back through to make different choices, but the experience seems depleted in a way, if you do that.

Overall, Uncanny Valley is a weird thing. It has a lot going for it that is somewhat unique. The subject matter is grim, and the music is appropriate in tone. The story is intentionally vague, and in some ways that’s a very cool aspect of what the game is trying to accomplish. I only wish the writing were a little more sophisticated. The lack of coherent writing and interesting (or at least unique) characters plays heavily into the feeling that this game could be more than it is.

It doesn’t quite work all the way for me, but there’s plenty here that is intriguing on a base story level to draw in plenty of gamers. It feels like part of a great game. Maybe with some time and tweaking, it could become a whole one.

The Final Word: For ten bucks, Uncanny Valley is by no means the worst way you could spend your money on Steam, and the confusion of picking through its many bizarre layers might be enough to tip the balance in the player’s favor, but I can’t wholly recommend it.