A Psychological Thriller Where You Solve Puzzles With Phone Apps

Get Even is a game that tries to mess with your mind as you shoot up guards and solve puzzles with your phone. As a mercenary, you have to rescue a teenage girl while moving through past and present memories.

Grace, the girl that Black is trying to remember, strapped to a chair with a bomb on her chest.

You start off at the beginning of the rescue attempt, in a green courtyard, armed with a pistol and a high powered rifle. You also have your phone, which has multiple apps that you can use to solve puzzles and help you progress. One app, the UV light, lets you look for fingerprints, bloodstains and footprints, while the heat vision app lets you see hot objects. These apps come in handy when you’re trying to solve puzzles, such as being tasked with figuring out what electrical fuses to switch on to unlock a door.

I reached Grace (the girl I needed to rescue) relatively quickly. Crouched in front of her, I panicked at the bomb strapped to her chest, which was quickly counting down. I assumed she was going to die anyway, but I figured I might as well try, so I just started pressing buttons. Halfway through entering the code, she cried out, “I think it’s 3001!” You should have said something sooner, Grace. I can’t exactly turn back time.

Later, you wake up outside the ruins of a mental asylum. You can’t remember how you got there, but there’s a message on your phone from a guy named Red, saying he’s waiting in the building. Supposedly, you hired Red to help.

I stumbled into the basement of the building, and Red gassed me. When I woke up, I found a memory enhancement device strapped to my face like a freaky high tech Bane cosplay. At this point, Red guides you through the asylum, helping you to remember what happened. Red’s voice becomes distorted at points, so they may not be who they say they are.

As you progress through the house, you’ll need to fight off prisoners and solve puzzles. Along the way you’ll find objects, such as photos, which will mentally transport you to another memory. Usually, these are memories of previous missions. As you make your way through the memory you’ll obtain more clues about your past.

One problem I encountered frequently in my playthrough were delayed dialogue or reactions, At one point, when I was halfway down a hallway, a patient shouted for me to open up the gate for him and help him out. I didn’t want to be a jerk and the asylum isn’t exactly sanitary or safe, so I released him.

“You won’t regret this!” he promised as he sprinted off down another hallway. Later, after watching a playthrough of the game, I found out that this man would go on to kill multiple patients for someone named the Puppet Master. That’s the last time I ever trust anyone.

Shooting can be a bit difficult in this game. Unlike other shooting games, Get Even doesn’t give you a crosshair to help you aim. You can shoot down the barrel of the gun, but it doesn’t help much. You may very well be shooting that guard’s head, or you could be putting a dent in a concrete wall. But you won’t know until after you shoot, at which point if the guard survives and alerts his friends, your mission gets that much harder to complete.

On the game’s store page, users tagged the game as a mystery or psychological horror. I went into my playthrough expecting to be scared or at the very least creeped out, and was disappointed when the scariest thing that happened was a mannequin falling out of a closet. This is coming from someone that watches playthroughs of Outlast with all the lights on.

Get Even has its moments of suspense, but I always find it less scary when I can defend myself. This game even gives you high tech-weapons, most notably the Corner Gun, which lets you shoot around angles. There also isn’t much to be scared of when Red, your captor, keeps reminding you that these are only your memories, and for the situations when you’re not in your memories, you can just shoot them down. These segments of the game should be entertaining, but I found it relatively mundane: I just shot down the enemies to progress to the next checkpoint. Rather than being thrilling, the twists I experienced during my hour with Get Even felt ordinary. 

You can check out the game on Steam here.