If he were to describe what Rise of Insanity is in the simplest way possible, I would describe the game as "little Layers of Fear". The mechanics are very similar and are mainly limited to moving between small locations. Unlike Bloober Team's production, there are more logical puzzles. However, they are not a big problem and they are overcome quickly and efficiently. Another similarity to Layers of Fear is the style. Most of the time we spend on moving around the old mansion, which in terms of style strongly resembles the house of a LoF painter.
Rise of Insanity has also chosen a similar way to frighten us. There are no opponents in the game that we can fight or that we must avoid. Instead, designers regularly build up tension with different sounds or scripted actions to scare us. When I was playing, I used to say to myself in such moments that it was just a virtual world and nothing threatened me. It helped, although a clear acceleration of the heart rate is in many moments a natural reaction of the body. I would have to be a psychopath, so that sometimes my pulse wouldn't jump up. The Rise of Insanity is horrifying, but the game doesn't scare as much as Layers of Fear. It uses the same, proven mechanisms, but it does it less often. There are even fragments where nothing terrible happens.
This is not a big problem, because Rise of Insanity has much more to offer than just scary scenes. The game tells the story of a psychologist, a friend of Abraham Maslow (the one from the famous pyramid of Maslow's needs). The American scientist does not appear directly in the game, but we can read the letters he exchanged with the protagonist. Both gentlemen had cause for discussion. The hero has enough of a specific patient who is tired of nightmares. In one of them he dreams that he kills his wife and child. The problem is that he is a bachelor. So where do these disturbing dreams come from? How to cure them? This is how the story begins in the Rise of Insanity.
The narrative is conducted mainly by numerous audio recordings or notes. Through them we get to know the successive scraps of history, especially those connected with the main character's mysterious patient. The scriptwriters cleverly give us information, thanks to which the story is constantly on the lookout for suspense. Rise of Insanity doesn't even have a problem with many similar stories. Throughout much of the story, the information mixes so much that you don't know what's going on. Only at the end of the story does everything start to form a meaningful whole. But here it is different. From the very beginning I had a vision of what happened and why. As befits a good thriller at the end, the whole, seemingly sensible intrigue, is turned upside down. All this in order to make it turn out in the finale that the truth is completely different. Like in Christopher Nolan's Prestige, in which only the last scene explained everything. She did this while surprising the viewer and not disturbing the logic of the whole script. The same is true of Rise of Insanity.
I didn't expect much from Rise of Insanity, and I got a very successful horror movie. This is a must-have position not only for the fans of the genre. The others, unless they are deterred by a few pressure-raising moments, will experience a very successful thriller. Addictive, suspenseful to the end and, most of all, finally surprising. It's easy in the thicket of another, bigger and more promoted titles to skip such productions. All the more reason to bend over to Rise of Insanity. It's worth it!