Wicked good time

When I randomly stumbled onto Wicked Seed's Steam page a month or so prior to release, I thought to myself "Visually, that looks rather low budget with some rather poor looking assets." However, I was drawn in by the promise of 'Parasite Eve inspired combat', so I downloaded the demo and gave it a chance, and I am so glad I did. I enjoyed the demo so much that I told myself I'd buy the full game on release, which I followed through on.

Wicked Seed opens up like so many horror games do; A lone protagonist driving down an ominous road in search of a missing relative. That lone protagonist is private investigator Ella Astor. And like the opening sequence, the gameplay that follows in the first few area will feel familiar even to casual horror fans. You'll be picking up notes scattered around the environment, loot items such as health drinks, grabbing the games upgrade material: scraps, and gently being introduced to the controls. You'll also find something I absolutely adore about this game: a new costume. There are so many of these costumes to find and unlock. Some are rather unique and some are inspired by Resident Evil. None of these enhance the gameplay in any way at all, they are merely there as a cosmetic preference. Heading into the menu to equip that newly found costume also reveals the games RPG elements through statistics such as offense, defence, luck, what level you are, and more. You can tab through the menu to find all notes/files you find, costumes you've found, and there's also a bestiary, which details all the monstrous entities you'll end up killing through your nine hour journey.

Inspired by Parasite Eve

After exploring a nearby house, you'll come across your first enemy; An horrific four legged creature by the name of Skitterer. Once you get close enough to an enemy then combat starts. Pressing the action button brings up a menu. From this menu you can attack, use a skill, use an item, or switch weapons. Actions cost stamina and it's vital that you manage this at all times. Attacking an enemy with your equipped weapon could cost you 150 stamina, while using a skill could cost 200. You get a pretty generous amount of stamina in the beginning which allows you to chain together many attacks with your starting weapon, a pistol. Outside of offensive actions, you are free to move around as you please, and after making a little bit of progress in the story, you will be able to parry. The parry window is extremely forgiving and it leads to combat being easy, which you may or may not like. Speaking of progress, after gaining a level, not only will your stats increase, but you'll also learn new skills. You'll also gain the ability to upgrade your weapon and add parts to it; Parts can wildly alter your weapon of choice, adding elemental damage, or even increasing the effectiveness of items in battle. You'll find quite a few weapons, weapons such as handguns, shotguns and more. With the guns available and the existence of parts, it gives you all these mini builds to experiment with. For example, stacking elemental damage on a fast firing weapon can be incredibly potent.

Puzzling

The story, for the most part, is a little thin on the ground. You'll often go through large periods without much exposition and the little you get is delivered through the many letters scattered about the various locations. It's not a bad story, and in all honesty, it doesn't need to be. I won't write much because I don't want to spoil anything, but by the time the story does wrap up, you will probably think "That's just alright." It's very much a standard survival horror plot, as are the next thing I want to mention: The puzzles. The difficulty of puzzles can be a little inconsistent. Some puzzles are quite obvious. Some will require a little bit of thinking. And there's a puzzle or two that will leave you scratching your head. The difficulty of the puzzles was my only gripe with the game as a whole, those and perhaps some of the visuals but I put that down to budget. Everything else was of an impressive quality, so much so, that once the credits had rolled, I was eager to play through again. This time on new game plus with all my equipment and skills carried over. That's something I've always enjoyed in my horror games: unlockable content. Again, I won't spoil anything, but there are reasons to play through it again. And, as I write this, I remember there has been a patch which adds more content such as additional costumes and a randomiser mode.