System: Valve Index, HTC Vive & Oculus Rift
Price at Time Of Review: £8.29
Comfort Rating: Red (Extreme Movement)
Genre: Adventure, Horror
Input: Gamepad, Keyboard & Mouse
Best Playing Position: Sitting
Multi-Player: No
Age Rating: 15+
Description: Caffeine is a quirky first-person adventure game with environmental puzzles and a touch of psychological horror. Set in the near future, the entire population of Earth is vigorously addicted to coffee. Massive space stations built by the biggest corporations roam the stars mining minerals to create a synthetic caffeine.
You awaken aboard one of these caffeine mining stations alone. Before long you realize that you are a young boy with no memory of what has transpired on this seemingly empty space station. Naturally, you set out to explore the depths of the huge structure to figure out what exactly is going on.
Review: Caffeine is a sci-fi horror adventure game that seems to be set in the near future on board a seemingly abandoned spacecraft that apparently mines caffeine for earthlings in deep space. Yep! It’s a giant spaceship Star Bucks! You play as an unnamed child protagonist, and you wake up on the ship and go searching for answers. It could happen, people are already addicted to coffee so is it so hard to imagine Starbucks conquered the stars themselves, mining planets Dead Space style to synthetically produce Pumpkin Spice lattes?!
Controls are the classic first-person shooter style. One thumbstick to move, one to aim and the buttons to interact with everything else. While there are only two environmental puzzles to solve and one “supernatural event” this is only the first episode, so I am sure there will be plenty more to come.
There’s a solid premise here and some terrifying sounds that fill your ears with tension – but none of it leads anywhere. There’s no jump-scare payoff, no feeling of overall achievement and there are only fleeting glances of a narrative to grab onto. It’s baffling that this is supposed to be an episodic experience. An opening episode is supposed to hook you in and leave you hungry for the rest of the series, but Caffeine Episode One doesn’t even have enough substantial material for a single instalment.
