There are no good floors to pick while riding inside an evil elevator. Almost My Floor: Prologue gives players a taste of the nightmare-infested innards of an apartment complex bent on turning life into a horror movie through a point-and-click puzzler. Developer and Publisher Potata Company released their prologue for free on Steam with its full release coming Feb. 21, 2021.
At its core, Almost My Floor: Prologue asks players to work through point-and-click storytrees, while solving puzzles and making cascading roleplay decisions. Set in a dimly-lit complex where cigarette butts soak up the last drippings of empty beer bottles, and where neighbors and their problems are all too familiar, Almost My Floor: Prologue sends its player through the tumult of a horror-junky’s tortured psyche.
Diamonds in the Rough
Almost My Floor: Prologue is an indie project without the resources studios have at their disposal, but that doesn’t preclude Potata Company from unearthing some unique gemstones of gameplay and thematic heart while altogether not having them refined to their fullest potential.
Comic book art is making its way into more and more story based video games, and Almost My Floor: Prologue has its own appealing flair. Each cutscene with comic panels were immediately engaging while offering up story rewards for incentivizing further play. No setting felt out of place of the overall aesthetic, making the artistic representation of the core thematic idea successful.
Similarly, the butterfly effect promised by making good/evil actions at critical decision points in the story brought life to the game. I’ll be interested to see if any of the decisions made in the Prologue affect the full games’ experience, and to what extent the overall story shapes according to those decisions.
But, I would be remiss not to bring up the lack of fun, engagement, or life present in the core point-and-click mechanics. The clickable interactions both lacked depth and required too much railroading. It’s not a problem to have a progression gatekeeped by certain interactions, the problem is when there is only one progression available at any time. When that happens, the connections between interactables feel like simple, singular links as opposed to an intricate web.
There was also something left to be desired with regard to the promise of puzzles. There was only one true puzzle in the prologue, which was fine, but the story expresses how working the grey matter in the protagonist’s head (solving puzzles) was the main way to combat the horrors in the halls so I was expecting more.
Conclusion
Even without a strong point-and-click core, Almost My Floor: Prologue was mildly fun, and with the potential in its full release to be really fun I instead focused my playthrough on the fantastic artwork, cascading dilemma decisions, and what could be in future.
Check Out the Almost My Floor Trailer:
You can play the Almost My Floor: Prologue for free via Steam.
Recent Michigan State University grad and current Game Studies researcher who plays fantasy RPG's to escape, Smash to compete, and Stardew to chill. Also have a +1 to rage/toxicity resistance due to the many hours sunk into WoW, R6, and LoL.
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