The Cecil: The Journey Begins Review

Player(s): 1

Extra Features: N/A

The Cecil: The Journey Begins is a first-person horror game developed by Genie Interactive Games. If you’ve played nearly any other survival horror, you’ll fall right into line with The Cecil. The game feels nearly like someone took the mold from your average survival horror and just changed the story and setting around it. I’m fine with just about any survival horror game and I will say that I have played much worse than The Cecil, so I did enjoy my time with it even though it could have been better.

“The Journey Begins” with a couple (John and Sarah) going to The Cecil hotel for a romantic getaway. After falling asleep, John wakes up to being locked in a cell. And so “The Journey Begins” as John works his way out of the cell in hopes of finding Sarah. The overall story also involves a ghost named “Raven” that John finds along his quest. The game’s story is honestly kind of forgettable. It’s really just enough to keep the game intact to say “we have a story”. I was never once truly involved. The game has several files that you can read that add lore to the overall Cecil history.

The gameplay is pretty much your standard “find this item in order to advance” type of gameplay for the most part. The game gets WAY too bogged down in this style of gameplay also. At times, you’ll have to manipulate objects in order to advance. The game does such a good job at hiding objects that I got stuck VERY often when trying to find something to interact with. The game has its fair share of puzzles as well. Puzzles are not always obvious. There were times where I had to resort to walkthroughs to figure out puzzles and I often found that it was because I wasn’t seeing an object that I could manipulate or finding some other object that was well hidden in the environment.

When not doing your standard fetch and retrieve, there are moments of actual combat. Your only weapon is a handgun (nothing else). All enemies are creatures that will walk/run toward you and try to melee attack. Standard enemies are often very boring mutant designs that take around five shots to kill. One really good thing about enemies is that you eventually run into bosses. This is where the game can shine somewhat. Boss battles require you to run away and shoot the boss enemy. There is one battle where the boss is so fast that you have to take advantage of running backwards while shooting the boss – this is very uncomfortable on controller since you have to hold down on the left thumbstick (no toggle) while running then try to shoot the boss while dodging obstacles.

The Cecil really has a problem with variety. If the game would mix more combat in between the fetch and retrieve item collectathon, the gameplay would feel much better. Moments of combat are rather rare overall. The latter half of the game has more combat, but it still has more item collecting than anything else. I also had a problem with the game not running at full screen on my gaming laptop. I had to run it in a windowed mode and then blow up the image using the resolution to make it run full screen and even then, it was cutting off the sides of the screen just a bit. I did contact the developer about this, so maybe a patch for this problem will be made eventually.

The overall sound is one of the better parts of the game. The voice acting is overall pretty good and the environmental sound is good. The environmental graphics are good enough. The game has some pretty good scares at times and an overall decent atmosphere. It is a very dark game overall, but the darkness never messes up the gameplay (to where you can’t see items because of it).

Overall, The Cecil: The Journey begins is an ok survival horror. It’s not bad, it’s not good, it’s just in between. If you like horror games, you’ll probably enjoy this game for what it is, but it’s nothing that memorable. The main problems that I have with this game is just that it’s hard to find item to manipulate a good bit of the time and also the game has a major need of variety. Just finding an enemy to shoot is such a blessing when those moments come!

The Good:
+ Overall decent horror game
+ Good overall sound (including voice acting)

The Bad:
- Technical problems (doesn’t display in full screen on gaming laptops at the moment)
- We need more breaks from item finding and looking for objects to manipulate
- It’s so very easy to skip over objects that you need to interact with