Don't Lose Control of the Kitchen in Psychological Horror Game While We Wait Here

Marche, Italy, 3rd October 2024: Seasoned Indie development studio Bad Vices Games, known for their breakout hit Ravenous Devils, has officially announced that their much-anticipated psychological horror kitchen management game, While We Wait Here, will launch on October 23rd, 2024. The game will be available on Xbox, PlayStation 4 & 5, Nintendo Switch, and for PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store. The game will be priced at $4.99 and will receive a launch day discount!

To celebrate this announcement, Bad Vices Games invites you to watch the brand-new trailer, offering players the deepest look so far at the unsettling world of Cliff and Nora’s diner.

Set in a desolate highway with a looming global disaster filling the air with tension and growing unease, players take on the role of Cliff and Nora, as they manage their diner. Conversations grow tense, food is served with heavy hearts, though what is happening outside the diner’s doors may just be the last of their worries.

Players can expect a game that focuses heavily on narrative choices, offering deep, emotionally charged dialogue and multiple endings shaped by the decisions they make. The full true nature of While We Wait Here remains under wraps however, with the gameplay centered on the diner, but the developers suggest players should prepare for unexpected twists beyond its walls.

“We’ve been waiting for this moment for so long, and we’re pleased to finally have a release date for While We Wait Here on consoles and PC,” said Cristian Gambadori of Bad Vices Games. “After the success of our last project, which was actually our third title to date, we took a completely different artistic direction, pushing ourselves even further with this game. We can’t wait for players to experience the dread, suspense, and surprising choices that While We Wait Here offers.”

Key Features:

• Explore Complex & Completely Dubbed Interactions: Engage with customers and each other in rich, deep conversations as the world around you begins to fall apart, managing both the diner and your emotions. Characters are completely dubbed in English and subtitled in a variety of languages.
• Multiple Endings: With a unique psychological horror narrative, players’ choices will determine the fate of both the customers and the diner’s owners.
• Short Yet Impactful: The game delivers a focused and poignant experience, with a first playthrough lasting an average of two to three hours.

Bad Vices Games promises While We Wait Here will pack a powerful punch, offering a highly replayable experience thanks to its branching narratives and multiple endings, at a full price of $4.99, set to be discounted at launch!

While We Wait Here marks the fourth title from the Marche based studio, continuing their passion for developing games that push the boundaries of storytelling in the indie scene. The game will be available on launch in Dubbed English and subtitled in English, Italian, Japanese, French, German, Simplified Chinese, Spanish, Ukrainian, Brazilian Portuguese, Korean, Polish, Catalan, Turkish and Russian.

For more information, visit the game’s official pages on Steam, the Epic Games Store or consoles via Xbox, PlayStation 4 & 5, or follow Bad Vices Games on Twitter/X and join their Discord community to stay updated on the latest news.

About Bad Vices Games: 

Founded by Cristian Gambadori and Eleonora Vecchi in 2020, Bad Vices Games is an indie development team based in the Marche region of Italy. Known for their award winning title Ravenous Devils, the studio has a mission to continue to create deeply immersive and emotionally engaging experiences for players. With While We Wait Here, their fourth project, Bad Vices Games continues to captivate audiences yet again with their distinctive blend of storytelling and gameplay.

While We Wait Here is releasing on PC & Consoles October 23rd 2024!

Article by: Susan N.

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Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure - PC Review

Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure by developer Bad Vices Games and publisher Valkyrie Initiative—PC (Steam) review written by Pierre-Yves with a copy provided by the publisher.

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

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Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure is the tale of Lord Moebius who in order to once again see his beloved Lorelei, has used a powerful hallucinogen in order to make his memories more vivid, and, much more terrifying. Sword or axe in hand to fight the horrors within, you’ll be running and jumping your way through various puzzles as you work your way through the various challenges that lay before you.

Taking it from the top, Hippocampus visually brought about a sense of nostalgia from the PS2 era of Castlevania: Lament of Innocence. It’s atmospherically dark, the colors blend together to create a heaviness to the shadows, and our protagonist isn’t wearing much in the bright color department. From the premise to the visuals, everything had been laid out for one hell of an adventure especially when there was a promise of heavy combat almost looking like Devil May Cry and some puzzles to go along for the ride. Sadly though, while all of the legwork was there, the execution is where things suffer.

From a technical perspective, I think Richard (who was over from out of town and visiting) can attest that I was getting visually mad especially with the combat sequences and the falling physics to jump off of certain spheres in order to solve certain puzzles. Hippocampus comes with so many great ideas, but the execution of them felt flawed. Starting with combat, you can either attack, power up attacks, or dodge. Attacking is easy and you just swing and it does little bits of damage. Powering up can almost instantly destroy enemies, but it comes at a huge cost, your memory / life bar. Loading up for a boost and that bar will shrink so fast if you don’t hit and defeat an enemy that it’s often better to simply attack normally and dodge if there are a few enemies on screen.

Now, this doesn’t sound like much, but at the current point in time, you can often find yourself dead before even knowing that you are. Powering up lasted a bit longer, the enemies hits registered a bit later, dead and respawn at the last checkpoint. Add-in that a lot of enemies hit very hard and can one-shot you in the first place? You’ve really got to “git gud” Dark Souls wise and fast otherwise you won’t make it far. Only upping the ante is that some enemies have nasty range so when four spawn and they refuse to seperate? You almost have to race to their spawn point, power attack the worst of them quickly, and then play the cat and mouse game for a little bit until you can finally clear them all out.

The other factor that works against a smooth gameplay experience are the physics in place for moving, jumping and falling. Moving around on the ground is fine but Moebius never seems to land where you want him to. The puzzles are well designed, but often you almost have to luck out in order to get them done. For example, a lot of puzzles require you to jump off of the ledge and onto a glowing sphere. These spheres can do one of the following. Blue shoots you upwards, green shoots you forwards and yellow creates a platform that lasts for a limited amount of time that you need to land on and use to run to another orb. Great in concept and I loved all of the ideas behind it, however, actually landing on these orbs properly is an artform to itself and often I just didn’t have it.

This is where the physics were off. If you fall off a ledge, you can move just too far to the right, or the left, behind or in front of an orb too easily. Landing where you want, your timing has to be almost spot on otherwise you’ll often not get to jump as far as you want to. Just tweaking this alone would go a long way to smooth the experience over because flying across a room at a fast speed and having to time your jump is already hard enough without having to worry about the more minute details of it all. Finally, whenever there’s a jump upwards, the camera skews to the side and it makes it harder to keep track of where you’re going in a vertigo kind of fashion.

Everything above all said and done though, including all of the frustrations, there’s a hidden gem underneath that just needs to be polished in order to truly make it shine. The puzzle format which is what you’ll be spending most of your time doing when not in combat is clever in some subtle ways. It makes you have to think both inside of the current box that you find yourself in, and, slightly outside of that box as you need to remember that it’s possible to double jump from an orb that you yourself have if you put it “down” while up in the air. So yes, I got frustrated, but it was more from not being able to do what it looked like I should be able to do smoothly instead of hte harder time that I was presented with.

Hippocampus: Dark Fantasy Adventure was not an easy one for me to cover. On one hand, you have a brilliant setup of things to come with a man needing to dive through the darkness of his own mind plaguing him in order to save his beloved. On the other hand, you have a gameplay experience that didn’t quite match up to the ideas that it presented. Overall? I’m at a loss since part of me would honestly say if puzzles and almost hardcore combat are your thing go for it, but on the other, if you like a more refined experience it may be worth waiting for an update to solve some of the issues that this adventure presents.

Score: 6 / 10

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