REVIEW | Under the Warehouse

Under the Warehouse review | Under the Warehouse is a first-person point-and-click adventure developed by the indie dev GoolWorks and published by Eastasiasoft Limited that places you in the most surreal quest I’ve ever played: in this game, you’re going to search for an egg. Yes, that’s it: an egg. But this is not an ordinary egg: it’s a special egg.

Your adventure starts by answering a telephone call from whom a stranger wants to meet with you. Our enigmatic friend here has a task that only you can help him with. He needs you to find him this special egg inside a mysterious warehouse. Why does he want this egg? I dunno. Maybe he wants a special omelet. Or maybe he’s been looking for it since Easter. Now, I want to ask you: by reading this description, did you think this quest was too ‘generic’? Well… I’m afraid that ‘generic’ was the taste in my mouth after this whole adventure. Let’s find out together why he’s so eager about this egg.

What we Liked!

• Let’s say that things didn’t start very well in this game, since there’s nothing I’d like to add to this segment. Keep reading and you’ll find out why

Mixed Feelings

• Ambience | You will spend most of the time in this game pacing back and forth inside the warehouse of the title, visiting offices and rooms loaded with boxes. Due to the simple visuals used in this game (that you can see in some of the screenshots here), the overall ambience does not impress. It doesn’t help either that the music does very little to make things more interesting. Even with a few surprises along the journey, the emptiness of this place gave me some serious John-Travolta-Pulp-Fiction-meme vibe. This lone survivor vibe is just not greater because of the employees of this warehouse, who may be doing their things (or not) and don’t seem to care about you. And now we mentioned the other workers…

• NPCs | Throughout your adventure, you talk to a bunch of NPCs that work at this warehouse. At first, I couldn’t say for sure if they worked in this place or were some sort of prisoners since most of them don’t seem to know what to do or why they are there. Except for the pair of characters that may know something about the actual purpose of this place (hmmm… secrets), the others will simply give you empty phrases or items needed to solve puzzles – so yes, you will still need to talk to them all.

• Buggy puzzles | Since this is a point-and-click game, you may be wondering when I would start talking about the puzzles in this game. Yes, there are puzzles in this game. A good number of them, by the way. But unfortunately, most of them are from the ‘take this item from point A to point B’ kind, with only a few more elaborated than that. And they were the best part of the game to me. Even though they are so buggy: after being used to solve a puzzle, items will return to their original place. A strange thing to see in a game like this if I may. Imagine the following scenario: you find a key over a table. You pick the key and use it to open a door on the other side of the room. You turn back to the table and voilà, here’s the key again, waiting to be picked up. And yes, you can pick it up again. And if you keep repeating the process, you can occupy all the slots on your inventory with it. At some point, I was trying to finish the game with all my inventory slots occupied by a strange hot dog you can find in the game, but I stopped messing around with it because many crosshairs started to pop on my screen making me feel dizzy. I don’t believe this Déjà-vu experience was intentional, so a patch may be in order to correct it (and hopefully, the crosshair party as well).

What we Disliked

• Quo vadis? | Another aspect of the gameplay worth mentioning is the navigation. In most adventure games like this, you can count on a map to locate yourself and visual cues – be it an arrow pointing to an item or a discrete light blooming over it. Here, you’ll be totally on your own to find yourself in the warehouse (that isn’t even that big, but I was constantly getting lost inside of it). It becomes even more tiresome because you can barely differentiate items you can interact with from those of the scenario. It feels strange, but you will get used to it. Well, maybe not if want to be taken by the hand, as many games do nowadays.

• And for what vadis? | The last facet of the game that concerned me is the absence of clarity about what this warehouse is. The only insight I got about the objectives of this place is from some scattered pages (Slenderman?) I found while trying to interact with the scenario. There are probably more of them, but I didn’t feel encouraged to keep looking for them all. So, I wonder what other secrets this place hides that I’ll never get the answer to.

How long to beat the story | 2 hours
How long to achieve 1000G | 2 hours
You’ll love this game if you like these | Walking simulators and light puzzles

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Rafael Faria

With a history of gaming that goes from his old man’s Atari 2600 to his Xbox One, Rafael or RAF687, our Brazilian editor, has a love for games as old as he can remember. He has already spent countless hours in many consoles (Mega Drive/Genesis, Sega Saturn, PS1, PS2 and Xbox 360) and is always ready for more (as long as his wife is asleep). Raf has been writing for LifeisXbox since 2017, with a passion for games of almost all genres – though we know he has a special place in his heart for RPGs, racing games and anything that includes pixel art. Writing about games has always been a childhood dream to Raf, dream that he has fulfilled reviewing games for you here. You can drop him a message at Twitter, Facebook or Xbox Live at any time.