Betrayer

Only recommending this game because it is free on GOG.
Betrayer has an interesting setting, an engaging mystery, and an incredible ambience. Some elements feel like they were designed by expert developers who know what they are doing; other aspects of the game feel so basic and unrefined even for the standards of a junior game developer. For example, the way in which exploration is handled in the game is awful. Having to run circles around boring forests to "discover" clues takes a lot out of a person. I would argue that this is what will turn most players off initially. I know that is what did it for me when I first tried this game back in 2016 thinking I would get Bethesda-like exploration and world design. However, sticking with the game really does pay off eventually. In my eyes, the second-half vindicates and justifies the slow-starting and supremely boring first-half.
There is something enchanting about the girl in red, the spirit world, the enemies you fight, and the clues you gather along your journey. I was anticipating this loop to become boring towards the latter-half of the game, but the progression system succeeds in making the game interesting all the way to the end. Eventually, you'll backtrack to areas where you got wiped by enemies previously and find it much easier to mow through them with all your new shiny upgrades.
I cannot praise enough how much the game succeeds in capturing the early-colonial/new world spirit. It really does feel like you are treading new and uncharted land in an attempt to tame it. The game is also surprisingly elegant in how it handles depictions of Natives and other factions that were attempting to colonize the Americas during the early 1600s; a rarity for games to be sure.
I will mention that this is by far the most crash-heavy game I ever played, even above modded Skyrim. I'm not sure if the free GOG version comes with any patches, or if the game even received the same patch treatment as other titles such as Dues Ex, but my personal experience with performance has been abysmal. The game crashes even when running everything on minimum. If your game crashes, you will always begin at the central hub of whichever map you were in prior to the crash, meaning that if you were close to your objective and the game decided to "run out of memory," you'll have to restart your trek and run back to your objective again. While tedious, I would not say it's particularly detrimental to the overall experience. The maps are small in size and getting from point A to point B takes like 1 to 2 minutes maximum.
I'm glad I finally got to experience Betrayer. It didn't necessarily exceed my expectations, but I walked out with a fondness of the world crafted here, even if the execution is not the greatest.

Betrayer caught me completely off guard — the stark black-and-white visuals and oppressive atmosphere pulled me in immediately, and the sound design is genuinely some of the best I've experienced in a game, with wind noise and enemy audio doing more heavy lifting than most AAA titles manage with full orchestras. The colonial setting is refreshingly underused in gaming, and piecing together the dark fates of the colonists through scattered clues scratches a satisfying mystery itch. That said, the formula does wear thin by the midgame — each new area boils down to the same loop of ringing bells, collecting evidence, and clearing corrupted totems, and the enemy variety runs out of steam faster than the story does. For five bucks, though, this is an easy recommendation: it's a flawed but genuinely memorable indie that sticks with you long after the credits roll.

One never forgets the first time one rings the bell. Auditive climax all throughout the game.

Graphics are a nice touch. I like the feel they bring to the game. The game is interesting and fun. I also like the wind.

Quite funny, the reason I bought this game in 2015 was because around that time, I watched a theatre play called Betrayal by Harold Pinter and liked it. So when I saw an almost the same title on Steam on sale for $2.99 I decided to give it a try.
I had a vague memory of this game and remembered that I wasn’t into it back then, I mostly just farmed trading cards. I decided to try it again and see whether my thoughts had changed after all these years and all the games I’ve played. Well honestly, not much changed.
The only thing worth mentioning is the day/night shift looks interesting when you strike the bell. And that’s about it. The gameplay has you wandering around a large map, collecting pieces of notes and trying to figure out who those ghosts people are, what happened to them and return their lost memories. However, the notes are too random. You may pick up 4 lines from 4 different stories and none of them is particularly interesting, just sad deaths, sudden incidents, family misfortunes.
To get through each world, you have to do a lot of tedious walking with the same enemies appearing along the way, and there’s no leveling up. You only have 2-3 weapons to choose from, they’re expensive, and the rewards after difficult fights are minimal. When I finally make it to the next area it’s more of the same: same kind of landscape, the same scavenger hunt for note tied to another uninteresting story.
I didn’t leave a rating when I first played it in 2015, and now 11 years later, I hesitate to rate it. Part of me wants to rate it positively for old times’ sake, and because of the relatively low price I paid even the enjoyment I got from it was very limited. Well, at least the movement feels smooth. So in the end, this is a Mixed rate disguised as a positive.
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A dark, spooky, atmospheric adventure is what awaits you in Betrayer. There's this uncomfortable stillness that hangs in the air. Untold tragedies that lurk beneath the surface with their pieces scattered about.
Essentially the game is one big scavenger hunt but you're better off waiting until the late game when you get all the tools needed to uncover everything one area at a time; it'll save you some time in the long run. In the mean time you have monstrous conquistadors roaming all over the place to worry about. You're encouraged to the use stealth but as long as not too many enemies are aware of you at once you can usually get away with a direct approach. Long and short bows are the most reliable weapons but sometimes they lack the punch you need so that's where the guns come in. But those have a long reload so my main strategy in combat was to lead with a Musket shot, and if that didn't kill it then follow up with the pistol and then just pelt it with arrows as needed.
There are definitely rough edges but I consider it to be interesting enough for a playthrough. A shame the dev team isn't really around anymore. Even though it's not on Steam anymore, It's on GOG for free so check it out.

Was not bad game in it's moment but currently since it's not available in Steam anymore u will probably just exclusively get it in a discount anyway xD
In general i liked it, simple, enjoyable story and pretty much the whole game overall, really loved the sounds in general, It doesn't have that much variety but they used well what they had.
Some achievements asked for too much, but since it counted all the 4 almost full runs i did in this game that i always forgot had no Steam Cloud, and ended up having to restart the run, got pretty much all by the end of this run.
- - - There is a bug related to how the game loads the map, u can avoid it most of the time lowering everything before you change areas, but still will happen altho way less. Also apparently taking cores of processing off, also helped, seems like this bug started with quad-core processors but i can't confirm that, i forgot to change it XD