Insincere

I have a soft spot for one-person studios swinging at genres outside their comfort zone, and Insincere is exactly that kind of swing. Astronomic Games, a solo outfit best known for RPG Maker titles, stepped into first-person shooter territory here using FPS Creator, an amateur game-making tool roughly analogous to RPG Maker but for shooters. That context matters, because it sets honest expectations for everything that follows. The premise has genuine atmosphere buried in it: you wake up as Joseph Walker with no memory, somewhere deep inside a derelict science facility, and a voice starts talking to you through the speakers. The AI guide is helpful, calm, and clearly lying through whatever counts as its teeth. That central tension, trusting a narrator you know is withholding things, is a solid hook. The facility itself spans 22 stages across derelict med labs, grimy manufacturing corridors, rundown offices, and AI research wings, and that variety at least suggests an attempt at environmental storytelling. You carry up to 7 weapons across the campaign, starting with a handgun and a wrench before the arsenal expands. In practice, though, the execution is rough in ways that matter. The mutant enemies, bony-fingered creatures with a habit of appearing at close range without warning, clip through walls and chomp health before you can react. The FPS Creator engine limits geometry to basic hallways and the occasional open room, and most stages wrap up within a few minutes each. The whole campaign lands around two hours. Enemy AI is passive enough that nearly every encounter resolves without much threat, and splash-damage weapons behave inconsistently. Player reviews on Steam sit at a mixed 46% positive, which is honest. Some reviewers report that cutscenes failed to load entirely, meaning the story that was apparently the whole point of the exercise just vanished. If you hit that bug, the voice-acted plot, which was described as the game's headline feature, simply does not exist for you. And yet. There is something weirdly endearing about the whole thing. One reviewer put it well: the dated visuals, odd voice acting, and synth soundtrack call to mind a kind of accidental camp that games rarely manage on purpose. The AI voice carries a strange accent that makes no sense for a synthetic entity and somehow makes the whole thing more memorable. For a certain kind of player, the one who finds value in obscure, rough-edged curios that couldn't have been made by a team with a budget, Insincere has a specific texture. It knows what it wants to be, even if it lacks the technical means to get fully there. The story ambition is visible beneath the seams. As a first entry in what was intended as a sci-fi series, it sketches a world worth being curious about, even if the execution leaves the curiosity only partially satisfied. Go in knowing you are picking up a short, flawed, solo-made FPS from 2016 with a questionable engine and you will find something that at least has personality. Go in expecting a polished shooter with reliable cutscene delivery and you will be frustrated within the first hour.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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