The Land of Pain begins with the protagonist who goes to his mountain hut in search of a bit of peace. Following a path that leads to a beautiful forest, we are catapulted into a luxuriant natural environment that does not predict the horrors that we will soon have to face.
Arriving at the destination, after lighting the fireplace, the man decides to go to get some water from a nearby well; on the way back he discovers that a large sphere appeared on the lawn adjacent to the hut. Intrigued by the mysterious object,
he examines it but ends up unconscious on the ground. When he wakes up he finds himself locked up in a cage, in a place he does not recognize. Who brought it there? Why is there only death around him? What goes around the woods?
These and other questions form the backdrop to the lovecraftian story of The Land of Pain, which unfolds throughout the adventure.
The game itself is instead a horror in the first person positioned somewhere between an Amnesia and a Slender: The Eight Pages, with ample moments of pure exploration related to others in which you have to solve some puzzles , never too complicated (the only real difficulty sometimes it’s finding the objects we need).
The protagonist can walk, run for a few seconds and interact with the objects by collecting them or using them automatically on others when carrying them. Obviously not missing a monster that chases us to kill us. But let’s go in order and try to explain each point better.
CAGED
As soon as you wake up in the cage we have to solve a first, simple puzzle to get out of it. Actually already in the prologue of the hut we had a taste of how the puzzle of the game and the simple interface that governs them work: usually require the search for objects
to be used in specific points to unlock passages. For example, you have to look for keys, or a ladder, or some stacking boxes and so on. For the whole game there is only one mechanical puzzle that requires the manipulation of some valves.
In general, the puzzles are all faced in a precise order and are constructed in a linear way, so that, when you have the overall picture of the area in which you are, you can proceed fairly quickly in their resolution.
The trouble is that The Land of Pain is composed of often very large areas that force you to go back and forth several times to understand what to do, often forcing us to walk for several minutes.
This problem manifests itself above all in the initial part of the adventure, and then falls into the final part, in which the areas become denser. Just to give you an example, right at the beginning there is a passage locked inside a house that requires a specific object to continue, object that can be recovered at a certain distance, near another blocked passage.
