The Kindeman Remedy PC 6/10 “Shock and awe, or shock and bore?” 💉 @_Troglobytes_ #IndieGame #GameDev

“The most blasphemous, diabolical and insane management game ever created!” – a quote taken directly from the trailer of The Kindeman Remedy, and the main reason I wanted to play this game, now granted I’m not sure how blasphemous or diabolical other management games are, so I was just going to have to take their word for it. That said, it’s an interesting hook, and I was dying to see just how insane this game was.

With a hook like that it was obvious this game was going for the shock factor which is nothing new - several games have gone down that path. I remember playing Thrill Kill with my older brother, and uncle when I was 13, feeling really naughty that I was playing a game that was unreleased due to the violence, funnily enough I loved Dr Faustus - a crazed doctor with a bear trap for a mouth, he probably would have got on with Dr Kindeman. 

So how shocking is it?

Does it capture that sense of youthful naughtiness?

Well, you do murder a lot of prison inmates, and you certainly torture people, but to be honest it feels very tame and sadly does get boring - and when I’m pouring acid on someone's sensitive places, it’s not the feeling I really expected to have.

As you play through the game, you are tasked with keeping the prison running, you have to dole out medicine - which you can leave as just medicine… or you can poison it - to have more people to experiment on.

Dr Kindeman in the lab below makes it, and his colleague - Sister Anna - distributes it out. For over half of my play-through, I would say this is fun enough and I was enjoying the process of having to keep everything running, balancing how many people to kill, making sure Dr Kindeman had time for surgeries, and administering his drug that would keep the death row inmate from dying so that he could experiment on them later (aka - torturing them).

You gain reputation from not killing people, so you have to balance it out as you can use reputation for better (and more) equipment making it easier for your day to run smoothly. The problem is that every day is basically the same with only slight differences, and so you end up falling into a routine that really starts to drag you down. For the last three hours I felt so bored doing the exact same things over and over with nothing new being added - it was just pure monotony and a real shame as I had enjoyed a large chunk of the game, but once you have certain equipment you can just breeze through the days.

Talking about things that that were monotonous, disposing of the bodies is an unbelievably slow process - which did speed up after a previous update - but my god is it still ridiculously slow. The plot throughout is OK, having little cut scenes throughout did break up game play and it was entertaining enough, nothing mind-blowing but it kept up my interest and I was curious to see how it ended.

The torture in the game is how the doctor learns to get his scientific information in order to make his titular remedy. You have your choice of horrible options like using saws, acids, large stakes etc. - a wealth of choices - and you pick a body part and go to town. A mini-game then appears and you have to hit a the bar at the right time to complete the action, you do this three times and yay, you have finished torturing someone. 

Now, you usually can’t see anything (which to me isn't really a bad thing) but for a game that's trying to be shocking I’m sure some people will be disappointed. What happened during one of the torture sessions has tickled me for days - to the point that I just want to tell as many people as humanly possible. After the good doctor had just finished shoving a large wooden spike up another man's bottom, he proudly professed to himself, “I'm a genius.”

Now, I’m not a doctor, nor am I part of the scientific community - but I’m pretty sure they aren't going to be shocked to learn that, if you hammer a giant wooden stake up someone's bottom… they die. I don’t think the Nobel committee will be giving Dr Kindeman a call anytime soon.

SUMMARY

There is some fun to be had with this title, I don’t think it really lives up to the trailer’s promises and it does need some more variety towards the later days, but I think some people will get a kick out of the premise and I enjoyed it for more hours than I didn’t, so for its current price of seven pounds, it gave me enough entertainment.