FORECLOSED

My first hour with FORECLOSED was genuinely arresting. Antab Studio, a small Italian outfit, built a cyberpunk world rendered entirely like a living graphic novel - speech bubbles instead of subtitles, onomatopoeic sound-effect callouts exploding across the screen when bullets fly, and dynamic panel splits that reframe the action mid-combat like a skilled page layout artist at work. The cel-shaded neon palette, the synthwave-adjacent score, the way the camera drops to isometric during a stealth section and then swings back to third-person as the tension breaks - all of it holds together with real craft. For a game about losing your identity to a city blockchain, it has a very strong aesthetic identity of its own. The setup carries genuine weight. Protagonist Evan Kapnos wakes up to learn his employer has gone bankrupt, which under the game's grim corpo-logic means his brain implants, job, and city access are all being auctioned off. It is a compact, pointed premise - identity as collateral, civil rights eaten by quarterly earnings - and for a moment the world feels like it could say something sharp. The opening chapters deliver on that promise. Evan's noir-inflected voiceover channels a Max Payne-lite vibe, which either endears or irritates depending on your tolerance, and the branching dialogue options give you some ownership over his voice even if they rarely alter the plot's direction. Where things loosen is in the moment-to-moment combat, which is the bulk of what you do. The Symbiotic Pistol can be upgraded with mods like Explosive Rounds and Machine-Gun Rounds, and the brain implant skill tree unlocks abilities including telekinesis, auto-aim bullets, and an enemy-implant overheat hack that functions as a stealth kill. On paper that is a satisfying toolkit. In practice, the implant overheats so quickly that you rarely get to chain abilities, enemy AI is passive enough to undermine tension, and the forced stealth sections carry instant-fail conditions with checkpoints spaced far enough apart to cause repeat frustration. The upgrade system asks you to spend skill points on either weapon mods or augmentations, so there is a real playstyle choice there, but the small number of enemy types - differentiated mainly by helmets and shields - dulls the payoff of experimenting. The game runs sixteen chapters and clocks in around three to four hours on a first pass, with two different endings determined by your final choice. There are hidden XP nodes to locate with a sonar-like detection ability, and some secondary paths in otherwise linear levels, but do not go in expecting replayability to carry the experience. What carries it is presentation, full stop. The panel transitions are legitimately one of the more inspired uses of the comic book format I have seen in games - when scenes change, frames slide into view and let you move across them, sometimes from multiple angles simultaneously. That craft-forward quality, the sense of a small team pouring genuine love into the look of a thing, is exactly what I find myself defending in games like this. FORECLOSED is the kind of game I would rather exist than not exist, flaws and all. It is a flawed proof of concept for something genuinely interesting - an interactive graphic novel with shooter bones - and if Antab Studio ever gets a second swing, the foundation is worth building on. Buy it at a discount, set aside an evening, and let the aesthetic do its work. Just do not expect the gunplay to keep up.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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