Uncanny Valley is a Mystery – Review (Switch)

Uncanny  Valley is a story driven survival horror game currently available on multiple platforms and now available on the Nintendo Switch.

Story

Set against the backdrop of an isolated area not unlike that of the Alaskan wilderness seen in the film 30 Days of Night – Uncanny Valley tells the story of Tom, a newly hired security guard already plagued with nightmares who is about to live one out as well. The unoccupied facility is being guarded round the clock until someone decides what to ultimately do with the abandoned property. As Tom works through the night, he explores the grounds uncovering a mystery that will haunt him worse than his dreams.

Your days are broken up into two parts – sleeping during the day and working your shift at night. As your shift ends you head back to your apartment to rest up for your next night of work. What you do during your shift is entirely up to you. You can explore the facility in any order, searching the various floors and surrounding area for clues as to what happened here that caused such a promising scientific lab to be abandoned overnight, yet still require 24-hour surveillance. Without the help of your workmates you are tasked with exploring on your own and discovering the clues to help you solve the mystery.

Choices you make will have a lasting impact on the game and each time you play you’ll want to try different things in order to experience different endings and set pieces along the way. While death isn’t really a fear, bodily and mental harm can change how you must play the game. Break an arm and you can’t fire your weapon. Find someone dead and they won’t be able to help you. At roughly 2 hours per play through you can log quite a few hours in the game in order to fully experience everything that it has to offer. The main problem with this is you’ll probably tire of the game shortly after, if not before, your first play through is over. For a game that requires this much backtracking and replay, it really isn’t interesting enough to entice you to do so.

The terrifying moments are in fact terrifying, but they are few and far between and most of the time you’re just wandering around searching for clues and what to do next.

Gameplay

Uncanny Valley is primarily an exploration game with some puzzles and combat thrown in from time to time. The puzzles can be challenging, not because of the puzzles themselves but because of the graphics. Over exaggerating the pixelization of the game makes anything you have to read during a puzzle difficult and nearly impossible in handheld mode. While the Switch does add a nice mobility factor to the game, it can be really difficult to see things on the smaller screen due to the ever-present darkness that really makes visibility tough even with your trusty flashlight.

Most of the gameplay is simply walking around interacting with objects in the facility with the occasional human interaction to break up the monotony. There are some tapes located around the facility that you can pick up and listen to – think Bioshock lite. These tapes help piece together what happened here as well.

Recommendation

Uncanny Valley feels like a lot of good ideas poorly executed. While it may hold your interest for one play-through it’s hard to recommend sticking around much longer than that in order to really piece it all together. While the Switch version adds a nice on the go factor to the game. it’s so hard to see what’s going on that it makes more sense to play it on your big screen – making your choice of console irrelevant if that was the reason for playing on the Switch. With other slightly similar yet better executed games out there (Oxenfree comes to mind) it’s hard to recommend this game unless you’re in need of a way to kill a couple of hours.

*Uncanny Valley was provided to the reviewer by the publishing company but this fact did not alter the reviewer’s opinion*

Check out our Review Guide to see what we criteria we use to score games.