By the most objective measure we have, Amid Evil is a great game. It has an "overwhelmingly positive'' 96% rating on Steam, and even recent reviews are at an extremely good 93%. That means every single review you see on the game's store page is positive.
Except one.
"The start of this game is a case study in poor interface and pacing," reads the sole negative review. "A new player does not want to wander around aimlessly reading difficulty labels on square blocks, guessing at the mechanism to enter a level, guessing whether an exit is present or not, and generally seeing their frustration level rise in the face of NOTHING. TO. SHOOT."
Apparently after attempting to find a way to proceed in Amid Evil for two minutes, this player gave up and decided to leave a negative review on Steam. This one negative review caught the attention of Dave Oshry, CEO of indie publisher New Blood Interactive, who pointed out that the player was foiled by the difficulty selection room.
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Amid Evil is a retro shooter that takes a lot from first-person shooters from the mid-to-late ‘90s. Heretic is the main influence here, but there’s plenty of Doom and Quake too. The difficulty selection “room” is based on Quake's and is more like three or four rooms, depending on how you define “room.”
That said, each doorway has a sign that clearly tells the player the difficulty they’re selecting should they proceed down the corridor. It doesn’t take an intuitive leap to figure out how to get to the actual game. More like an intuitive tip-toe.
There’s a demo available on Steam if Amid Evil appeals to your retro shooter sensibilities. And for our confused reviewer above, you’ll be happy to note there’s a simple difficulty selection screen where you click on easy, medium, or hard before you start.
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