Blackmail Simulator 2024 - Envelope Review

Contents

• Envelope
• The Plot Thickens
• The Gameplay
• Infiltrating the Mansion
• Out of Breath
• It's a Roguelite?
• Final Thoughts

Envelope

Envelope is an Early Access game I discovered after a series of Twitter posts from its creator showed up in my feed and I was intrigued by the screenshots and videos. The videos showed off a multitude of mechanics that immediately told me it was some kind of atmospheric immersive sim, which I am totally into.

There was a strong emphasis on choice which is something that I always love to see, as someone who loves trying different approaches to the same scenario I was excited to see an indie game trying to have that level of emergent behavior.

The Plot Thickens

The game starts you out working a night shift at a convenience store, you find yourself in your car talking to your girlfriend Amanda before heading inside to work your shift. You're introduced to your boss, who's a huge asshole and left you a ton of stuff to do, mopping the floors, restocking the shelves, basically, everything they should have had already taken care of during their shift(classic management moment)

The creepy atmosphere is great, and keeps you on edge, not having any music or any background sounds besides the humming of the gas station fluorescent bulbs and the crickets outside makes the whole thing unsettling. The atmosphere here isn't anything we haven't seen before it follows a lot of other similar indie PlayStation horror first-person games, but it's still effective.

You're eventually given a note in an Envelope(OMG That's the name of the game!) the note tells you that some group has captured your girlfriend, and given the ultimatum that you have to kill Mistashur Ramanesh before the night is over, or they'll kill your girlfriend. In a panic, you get in your car and take off for the main section of the game.

The Gameplay

This is where the game gets really interesting, you're given a map of the road you're on and told to find a guy who gives you a gun, but the game opens up here and lets you just travel wherever you want, you are given a fairly large open map to explore and not told much, the goal being you have to figure out where to go.

The main goal of this area is to do small quests to get gear because it turns out that the guy they want you to kill practically lives in a fortress. Surrounded by hazzards meant to protect him, and since your goal is to kill him, you'll probably want to gear up for that.

So in this area, you're expected to talk to NPCs find out info, and do some tasks to get items. As an example after getting the gun you find that the guy who brought the gun didn't bring any bullets, and some nearby teenagers offer you a bullet if you buy them some beer from the supermarket, to do that you need money, how do you get money? Keep exploring!

There are tons of ways to get items and gear for the mission, and this is a fun way to handle this kind of thing. It very much feels like a modern Tabletop RPG like D&D where you're tasked with "Defeat the Archdemon" and then the DM gives you a bunch of ways to level up and get new weapons and gear, by taking quests.

That said there doesn't tend to be a lot of overlap between the missions, so doing a mission doesn't tend to affect others adversely, I only found a few that would be different if you talked to one NPC first over the other, but this is not that important for reasons I'll get into later. I didn't really mind that much though, I recognize more depth would be a significant challenge to build.

Eventually, you'll be satisfied with the gear you've collected and talked to enough people to feel confident and head off to try and kill Mistashur. After poking around you'll find the tunnel that will take you to the mansion.

Infiltrating the Mansion

Now you're at Mistashur's Mansion, there's no turning back now. You need to find a way inside the mansion, and then kill Mistashur. I won't go into too much detail to avoid spoilers, but there are a handful of ways to deal with the threats outside, and eventually, you can find your way inside. Once inside you need to scour around to find out where he is located to take him out.

The mansion itself is fairly large but after exploring it thoroughly there are a bunch of rooms and areas you can find but they don't seem to have any purpose except for some environmental storytelling. Some of the areas are really creepy, and I expected to find something there, but maybe I didn't have the right items to trigger something to happen who knows?

My only complaint in the mansion is that there is an instant death mechanic that can be pretty easily walked into that ends up feeling pretty bad, I hit it on my first playthrough after just over an hour of playing the game. It makes sense in some context of the story if you dig enough, but it would be cool if there was at least a way to discover this through thorough investigation, like a floor plan or note hidden around the outside of the mansion, or dropped from a guard, that would have informed you that going to this spot would be instant death.

Overall the infiltration of the mansion is a lot of fun and is something I'd like to see more of and it's a shame that it's pretty short/small so is only a small fraction of the overall playtime.

Having the mansion be more complex with more challenges to overcome and with more opportunities to utilize some of the tools would be cool. Some of the items you get are only used in the open area so adding a use for them here would be awesome.

Out of Breath

Edit: Stamina has been changed in the current version to be infinite, and the sprint speed was nerfed slightly resulting in an overall better feel than what was in the game originally.

I had originally written about how I felt the stamina bar emptied too quickly and didn't refill quickly enough, and the jog speed when out of stamina felt too slow, leading to a bunch of issues with the rest of the game's roguelite, mechanics:

It's a roguelite?

So yeah, this is the thing that caught me off guard. It turns out I'd argue in some ways it's more roguelite than immersive sim, at the very least it has a pseudo-roguelite element where if you end up dying you get one of several endings and you now have to replay the game.

Each time you can try different things and talk to NPCs differently, try different outcomes, all the knowledge of your past playthrough lives on. You slowly get a feel for where to go, what to grab, and how to maximize the gear you acquire.

This is pretty interesting over time became the focal point for my main issues. Small insignificant problems that I could ignore before, compound 10-fold into more significant problems when you need to play the same section more than a handful of times:

1. The old slow jog speed + stamina bar(which as mentioned has been fixed) made replaying the game a second/third/fourth time painful due to just having to re-tread the same paths over and over again, the improved sprint changes make this less of an issue, but it doesn't completely get rid of re-treading the same ground.

2. Most of the quests you can do for the NPCs only have 2 outcomes, 3 at most, and only a few playthroughs in and the game starts to become a slog of "go do all the things I already did again" just to get to the mansion to try to do it differently or have a different outcome. One wrong move and that's another 30-60 minutes of grabbing all the gear again to attempt to do the mansion mission again.

Like many roguelites There are challenges that you can complete and each challenge you accomplish gives you a head start on your next playthrough, which is actually awesome and a feature I greatly appreciate, these can include things like starting the game with a handful of extra money, or a small shortcut.

I'd love to see more of these, even if they trivialize the game over time. By the time you've played the game 6 or more times, trying to get all the endings and unlock all the challenges, I think it'd be better to just give fun rewards even if it unbalances the game. Like unlocking cheats in retro games by getting high scores or doing silly things(Big head mode?!)

Some examples might be things like:

• Axe Murderer: Kill every NPC on the map -> Start playthroughs with an axe
• Caffeine Addict: Drink 20 Energy Drinks over all playtrhoughs -> Start playthroughs with a 4-pack of energy drinks
• Consumerism: Consume one of every consumable item in the game in a single run at the same time -> All item effects have 4x duration

Silly things like both add even more replay value to the game, while also removing the restrictions that make the game tedious, slowly making it much easier and encouraging more exploration.

Final Thoughts

Overall I like the game a lot, and despite some issues, I found myself coming back to play it multiple times to try and get some of the other endings.

In the end, it's a fun experience while I'm in it, I do wish the game was longer. The developers intended for the game to be a short experience only 2-4 hours, so expect that to be about the game's rough length. I think this style of gameplay loop is interesting, but there is definitely a limited supply of options and quests that you can do which makes repeat playthroughs feel same-y once you've exhausted all the options.

I feel like while the developer hit their target play time, I ended up liking the content enough to want to see more, which there was some but not as much as I'd hoped.

After 12 hours and more than 10 playthroughs, I feel confident I've done and seen most of what the game has to offer and I'm now mostly repeating content.

It would be interesting to see more in the story, what happens after the canonical ending? Who are the people pulling the strings? It leaves me with questions and I want the story to continue so I can do another mission to get answers while creating new questions.

I recommend giving it a try if you're into immersive sims and the idea of an immersive sim where you play through multiple times and learn and optimize your path to become super effective and to see other characters and outcomes!

The game is currently in early access, so the game could always change! If it does, I'll try and come back and update the review.

I'd recommend you play this if:

• You like short esoteric meta-experiences
• You don't mind drawing a map for yourself
• You find joy in exploring different outcomes