Mothered – A Role-Playing Horror Game

Genre: First-Person Walking Simulator / Horror

Players: 1

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Review:

Mothered, not to be confused with the Remothered franchise, is a First-Person Walking Simulator and Horror game released in 2021 on PC and ported to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2023. As opposed to what the title states, this is not a Role-Playing game, and in fact it’s only technically Horror, since the horror present here is psychological horror. In this game, players take the role of a young girl named Liana, who we’re told is returning home after suffering a mysterious unnamed illness, trying to recover by spending some time with her mother. However, things continue to become increasingly erratic, prompting the player to question exactly what’s going on here.

… Or not, because this game seems to be practically screaming at you what’s actually going on from the moment you start playing. I was almost tempted to say that I guessed the big plot twist right away, but that doesn’t feel quite right because is it a guess when the game draws a big outline around the plot twist and dares you to guess what shape it is?

Oddly, despite the obvious nature of this game’s plot twist, I still felt like far too much was left unresolved at the end. The bizarre behavior of “mother” the exact nature of the barn behind the house, the story behind all the locked rooms, the explanation about exactly what is going on with “brother”… so much is left unexplained at the game’s end.

Yet, that’s not to say the game is over too soon. Your walking speed in the game is abysmally slow, and you’re constantly told to go to various places all over the property, making you hoof it back and forth, and that’s when you actually know just what it is you need to do to move on.

Then there’s the janky nature of the game. Some of this is clearly intentional, to heighten the surreal nature of the game, but at one point this game’s issues all came to a head for me, when you’re inexplicably told to pick eight apples in an apple orchard, busywork that seems unnecessary, and made more difficult due to the fact that there are only eight apples in the entire orchard. And then once I gathered the requisite amount to move on, the game apparently miscounted and wouldn’t let me proceed, forcing me to reset the game and start this fetch quest all over again.

The one element of this game that is at least interesting, though I hesitate to call it “good”, is the presentation. Mothered is rendered using extremely simple 3D visuals, with “mother” apparently represented by an odd mannequin-like figure that moves in awkward, unsettling ways as she talks. Add to this some interesting lighting and reflection effects that make everything seem oversaturated with color, and one of the better retro 80s-style film grain effects I’ve seen in a game, and it’s fair to say that this game nails the “stylistic suck” aesthetic in a way that makes it look like every classic late-80s early-90s depiction of virtual reality. This is all backed by a soundtrack that bounces between calming and unsettling, and you have a presentation that’s bizarre and unimpressive in a way that’s very clearly an artistic choice.

While I credit this game’s presentation for nailing what it’s aiming for, everything else here feels like it’s both too much and not enough at the same time. The story that drags out for too long while revealing all its biggest secrets right away, and the gameplay that’s somewhere between deliberately bad and just plain tedious and unenjoyable… I feel like this same concept and presentation would have worked much better in more skilled hands, but unfortunately this is what we got, and I just can’t recommend it with all these issues the game has.

tl;dr – Mothered is a Walking Simulator and psychological Horror game that puts players in the role of a young girl returning home to recover from an illness while spending time with her mother, only to find that both her mother and everything else around is acting very peculiar. The deliberately bad presentation here is perfect for what this game is aiming for, but everything else is a disaster, with tedious and at times broken gameplay, along with a major plot twist you’ll likely predict within the first few minutes of the game starting. The result is a game that had potential, but fails in its execution.

Grade: C-

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