oneway.exe Review: A Mystery That’s More Work Than Play | The Gamerheads Podcast

Platform reviewed: Steam (PC)

Price: $14.99

Anyone who knows me, or has followed my work for a while, knows that I’m not a fan of horror games. That being said, oneway.exe caught my attention when I saw it at PAX East last year, and I really wanted to like it. Unfortunately, I struggled to connect with the experience. The puzzles often felt too abstract to make sense of, I couldn’t connect with the trio of in-game developers who the game revolves around, and I ran into some frustrating save-state issues along the way.

I really like the premise. Three friends set out to create a game centered on internet culture with strange online stories, memes, and pop-ups. But as their friendship and the project begin to fall apart, oneway.exe turns into a mystery about a game within a game. It’s a clever and deeply meta concept, and the idea behind it is fascinating.

I enjoyed the art in the game, too. The anime-inspired style looks great, and even the monsters are impressively designed. One of the first creatures I ran into was a demon-like woman who crawled out of the darkness in a hallway toward me. I was definitely freaked out, but the art was really well done.

As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a fan of horror games. While oneway.exe includes some horror elements and a few gruesome images, it isn’t packed with jump scares. There were a few moments when I turned around and a monster was suddenly in front of me, but nothing that made me want to stop playing.

A lot of the game revolves around solving puzzles that require digging through chat logs and images saved to the computer desktop. While part of the experience involves “playing” the game the three friends created, much of the time is spent exploring the desktop and searching for clues about what to do next. That’s where I struggled, I often didn’t know where to start.

For example, after beating one of the game’s levels, I was taken back to the desktop where a strange virus taunted me. I knew I needed to do something next, but I had no idea what. With no way to save the game at that point, I spent a long while sifting through chat logs (and there were a lot of them) looking for clues. Eventually, I found a folder of cat images, and inside was what looked like a password. Finding where to enter it wasn’t too hard, there were only a few applications that required one, but the next mini-puzzle completely lost me. I must have missed something, because I “died” and had to start over. The game offers very few clues (or they’re too obscure) about what I’m supposed to do. I felt like I wasted a lot of time going down rabbit holes that led nowhere, and for someone whose time is at a premium, that was disappointing.

I also had problems with the save system. The game does autosave, but every time I tried to load my game, it started from the beginning. That was pretty frustrating, though it seems a patch fixed the issue later in my playthrough. That said, you can’t name your saves, so I was never sure which one I actually wanted to load. Having clear save slots and the ability to label them would have been ideal, especially since failing a puzzle can send you all the way back to the start.

As I mentioned earlier, the game within the game is created by three friends, and the mystery centers on what happened to them and their project. The problem for me is that I never really connected with these characters. Maybe it’s because they go by online handles, and I could never keep track of who was who. Or maybe it’s because I had to pore through their chat logs to find puzzle clues, which felt more like work than getting to know them. Since I never formed a connection with the characters, I wasn’t all that interested in solving the mystery.

Final Grade: C

I went into oneway.exe with high expectations. I love the premise, a game within a game, unraveling the mystery behind the friends who created it. But I struggled to connect with them. They felt like faceless personas I couldn’t care about. The puzzles were too obscure for my liking, and I didn’t find it fun to pore through chat logs or images trying to figure out what to do next, especially when I couldn’t save my progress during these points. I also ran into a few glitches early in my playthrough, particularly with save states. If you enjoy puzzles that offer little direction and reward persistence through trial and error, oneway.exe might be worth your time.

Review copy provided by Stride PR