No70: Eye of Basir

I went in expecting a short, scrappy horror curiosity and came out with something more complicated to summarise. No70: Eye of Basir is the debut big project of Oldmoustache Gameworks, a small Turkish studio, and the craft visible in certain corners - the winding corridors of the No70 house, the aged stone of a roadside cemetery, the quiet lighthouse in chapter two - speaks to people who clearly love building spaces. That love for world-building is real, and it matters, because almost everything else in this game is fighting against itself. The central mechanic is genuinely lovely in concept. The Eye of Basir is an ancient artifact - a kind of mystical lens - that you hold up to objects and surfaces to reveal hidden clues: footprints, spectral writing, details lurking inside portraits. In practice, you need to locate the Eye anew at the start of each chapter, which the story justifies by framing it as an object that chooses its own keeper. That is a charming bit of lore. The problem is that the Eye never gets stretched to its full potential. The puzzles built around it are minimal - keypads, fuses, a wrench found in a predictable spot - and the cause-and-effect logic underpinning them is opaque to the point of frustration. Interact with a random object in one room and a completely unrelated door on the other side of the house will silently unlock. No prompt, no audio cue, no visual signal. You just have to already know. That breeds a lot of aimless backtracking through the same corridors, and the average playtime hovers around one to two hours precisely because of how much time gets swallowed re-walking familiar ground rather than discovering anything new. The save system does not help. Progress only records at the start of a new chapter, meaning a 20-to-30-minute stretch of exploration can be lost entirely if you close the game. For a title this short, that is an odd design choice that punishes casual sessions. The story itself carries equal tension between potential and disappointment. Brothers Erhan and Aras grew up in the No70 house with their grandmother, witnessed things they could not explain, and scattered after her death. Twenty years later, Erhan vanishes. The premise has genuine weight, and the atmosphere - dimly lit interiors, self-moving doors, a calm-then-unsettling score that never overplays its hand - does real work in service of it. But the narrative leans heavily on scattered notes rather than anything felt in the world itself, and those notes describe events the player never witnesses. Several threads are never resolved. The final chapter arrives and ends abruptly, leaving the impression of a story that ran out of room before it ran out of ideas. What keeps No70 worth considering at all is its sensory quality. The lighting is genuinely impressive for a studio of this size, and the audio design - understated creaks, carefully placed ambient sounds, a score that goes almost relaxingly quiet when nothing is happening - shows real taste. This is not a jump-scare machine. The horror is atmospheric and slow-burning, closer in spirit to a ghost-story walk than a survival experience. Players who find something nourishing in that specific register - the haunted-house wander, the notebook mystery, the feeling that something just passed the doorframe - will get more from it than the Metacritic score of 52 suggests. Anyone who needs puzzles that feel earned, or a story that sticks its landing, will leave unsatisfied.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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