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Review of Bermuda

SubjectBermuda
ByHelpfulness: 0
Vote: 7
publicnuisance on 2021-02-13
ReviewBermuda does something that either enhances visual novels or dooms them: it offers some actual game play. Done right it can add to an already great game but done poorly and it can sink it. The game is broken up in that you get told the story through a kinetic novel format and after that the story has made it necessary for you to navigate the ship without getting caught. This part is a side scrolling stealth game akin to Gunpoint minus the ability to knock people out. You can turn off lights; sound alarms; disable shields; hide in the bathroom; etc. The idea is to try to herd the guards where you want them to get to where you need to go. To add variety some levels have a different goal such as turn off all the lights or lure all of the guards to the first floor. The mechanics are not bad. They can be annoying or frustrating at times but the game gives you all the tools you need it just requires more patience then I sometimes have. The guards on the other hand will never see you, even if you are right in front of them, unless you touch them. This feels like a cop out and unrealistic but given my already love/hate relationship with the game play maybe it saved me from liking the game less. On that note though guards also will walk right into a teleportation beam without asking any questions like “why is this beam here all of a sudden ?”. On the story side the novel format is kinetic as I said so there are no choices to be made and no way to impact the story. That being said the story is decent, especially near the end. There is full voice acting and it is also pretty good. The opening credits are another high point and I wish more visual novels had ones this good. The art isn’t the best I have seen, it lacks detail on characters but it is far from the worst I have seen.

I played Bermuda on Linux. It never crashed on me and I didn’t notice any spelling errors or glitches. The game has no graphics options at all. Alt-Tab didn’t work. There is no save system of any kind so each level must be played from start to finish. Strangely you can play any for the levels right from the start without having to beat them in order. So in theory if one only wanted the story you could read all the conversations and skip the game play. The game did have some noticeable lag at times that lasted for a few seconds but none of my FPS software worked which means I could never see what the frame rate was. You can’t adjust the controls at all although you use W; A; and D for everything so it’s not a big deal.

Disk Space Used: 244 MB
Input Used: Keyboard

CPU Usage: 4-37 %
RAM Usage: 2.5-2.8 GB

Overall the game play is good enough to serve it’s purpose. The art is good enough to not hate it. The voice acting is good enough to not turn it off. The story is good enough to keep playing. In no category does Bermuda blow me away but it is solid across the board and worth a play. I paid $3.39 CAD for it and feel that is worth the money. I finished the game in just about two hours.

My Score: 7/10

My System:

Intel I7-4770 | 16GB DDR3-2133 CL9 | Intel HD 4600 1536MB | Mesa 20.0.8 | Samsung 850 Evo 250GB | Trisquel 9.0 | Mate 1.20.0 | Kernel 5.10.15-gnu
0 points