“Pineview Drive” – A Mediocre Horror ‘Experience’

Pineview Drive is an indie horror game developed by Visual Imagination Studio and released back in July of 2014. I was aware of its existence but didn’t know all that much about it until a recent bundle purchase included this game. I sat on it for a few weeks and then finally decided to go ahead and redeem it on Steam to see what it was like. This video is the result of that! 😛

The game’s basic premise is that the player’s character is returning to his old mansion on Pineview Drive where his wife disappeared twenty years ago. According to local legends, no one has been able to stay in the house for more than thirty days, and thus the game is broken up into little chapters (each one being a “day”) where we must explore the house and the surrounding property, looking for clues as to what happened to our wife all those years ago.

In my opinion, the gameplay, while not horrible, is pretty boring. The graphics are nice, but the engine is poorly optimized (for me, it’ll go from 150 FPS all the way down to 30 FPS in the same environment, and worse than that perhaps is there are no options that I could see for VSync, so the game is a choppy mess at times). As you’ll soon see, the prospect of finding keys and then searching for whatever door they open gets dull very fast and even though the atmosphere of the game is somewhat creepy, the scares are limited and the game just didn’t do it for me. I’ve seen other YouTube videos of the later days of the game, and I admit that there are a few better scares later on, but I guess the game was just too boring for me to want to press on to get to those later points in the adventure.

In any event, maybe you’re opinion will be a bit better of the game than mine and if it is, perhaps you’ll be able to justify the $19.99 asking price on Steam in your head. My recommendation? If you insist on getting this one, hold off on it until you see it bundled in an inexpensive set sometime.