Parental Supervision Declined

In Loco Parentis, you play as a young woman who's just moved into a new apartment. An apartment smaller than any of my dorm rooms. I don't think the room is even wide enough to have a bed, and lengthwise, all the wall space is taken up by desks and cabinets. If she's paying more than $100 a month for this play, she's being robbed. The hallways are dark, there's garbage bags and boards and desks and old refrigerators just sitting in the halls or on the landings between floors.

Oh, and there's a little girl that's calls for help as she's dragged into an apartment by an old woman. An old woman indifferent to the revolver you find to try and threaten her into releasing the kid. Which, to be fair, could simply be her being so old death holds no terror for her.

But there are also the spirits, or whatever you'd call them. Floating, translucent things with squid mouth that will float towards you if they see you. You can push them back with the flashlight you find, provided you don't run out of batteries, and bullets do disperse them. But you need the bullets for the old woman, too, and they're scarce.

If you dispatch the "crone", you then have to deal with the handyman, who the little girl also doesn't like. He made too much noise while she was trying to watch TV. I didn't get far in this game, but it seems pretty clear helping this kid is a bad idea. Which means I don't feel bad I didn't get very far in the game.

As far as I got, the levels seem to boil down to simple tasks. First, destroy or remove something the person cared about. You have to run between different floors - up or down doesn't seem to matter - chucking tools down the garbage chute or whatever. Then shoot something else. The shooting has to be completed within a certain amount of time, or you die. Which was where I got stuck, because I only had two bullets, which apparently wasn't enough, and couldn't find more before I was killed.

And the game feels very inconsistent about what you're supposed to do. The handyman occupies random objects, which you can tell because you see bugs crawling around them or hear snoring. Don't touch those objects. Until the game changes it's mind and wants you to shoot something. Except sometimes I can see the handyman as an actual person, messing with a floor's circuit breaker, and other times I can't. So am I supposed to shoot him, or the objects?

The controls are obnoxious. You can't readily open doors or drawers if you're carrying something,s o if you want to chuck something down the garbage chute, you have to drop it first, then open the door, then pick it back up. It feels like the cursor has to be in just the right spot for you have the option to interaction with something. The game relies a lot on jump scares, where you turn around and someone's swinging at hatchet at you, then they disappear.

Some games, if I get stymied, I'll go online to figure out what I'm doing wrong. Loco Parentis isn't worth the time that would waste.