Foreclosed is an example of a game doing everything a little wrong. Granted, it’s nowhere near as bad as it could be, but there are enough clashing design decisions to render huge parts of the game immensely unsatisfying. For example, a “secret” ending was added into the game that requires collecting 100% of the game’s random collectibles, but cutscenes are so long and unskippable that you’re not going to want to play more than once if you miss one. You gain level-up points that can unlock new telekinetic and gun abilities, but you quickly run out of space to equip them, so experience points quickly stop mattering and you never improve. The store page invokes Deus Ex and Max Payne, but Foreclosed is so insecure about how short it is that it begins to pad things out in an obnoxious way, causing it to diverge significantly from those inspirations and become repetitive.

There are glimmers of an interesting, entertaining game here; the comic stylings and panels are reminiscent of Comix Zone and Framed, and the characters and world are decently interesting. That’s a double-edged sword, however. When I spent another 4 hours replaying the game from the beginning to get the secret ending only for it to end up being a couple of lines that have little to do with anything, the only reaction I could muster was frustrated fury. In a way, though, this is representative of the way Foreclosed consistently refuses to offer commensurate payoff for your troubles.

[Howdy, partner. If you’re planning on picking up a console copy of Foreclosed, I’d be mighty delighted if you did so from one of these Amazon affiliate links so that I can finally quit my day job of wrasslin’ steer. Or whatever it is that I do. Here’s a link to the Switch version of Foreclosed. And here’s the Xbox One/Series X version. And this is the Playstation 4 version. And the last link? The Playstation 5 version.]

Foreclosed has an interesting setup, but it’s weirdly reluctant to offer any actual payoff

You play as Evan Kapnos, a worker at SecurTech Inc. In the world of Foreclosed, people receive ID implants when they’re young that no one can actually afford, and these are then purchased by corporations so that everyone but the rich is indebted their whole life. When SecurTech mysteriously goes bankrupt, the government decides to foreclose Kapnos’s identity, essentially causing him to no longer be viewed as a person by society. He’s given until 4:00 PM to make it to the courthouse, but then armed baddies in suits begin trying to kill him. Kapnos is saved thanks to the long-distance hacking of Dalia Khari, another person involved with SecurTech who has her own reasons for figuring out what happened to the company.

If you’re expecting Foreclosed to play its cards close to its chest, though, you’ll be surprised to find out exactly what happened to SecurTech only a couple of levels in. New villains show up after that, but they’re quickly dispatched before they can be much of a threat.

Really, the only characters who have any kind of permanence are Kapnos and Khari, and they don’t have much of a dynamic. Foreclosed‘s writing tells one of those “someone wants something, then they go and get it” stories that don’t give the player much to hold on to.

I mean, the setup is interesting, but it’s used as window dressing. Kapnos’s identity is just a MacGuffin that sends him into various buildings full of Enemies, and you spend so much time in these cramped shooting galleries that you end the game knowing as much about the world as you did going in. Kapnos gruffly offers up Max Payne-styled narration about things like “the blockchain,” but it’s ultimately a meaningless sequence of techy buzzwords. He gets kicked out of society immediately when the game starts, so you never get a sense of the world he’s fighting to rejoin. He never even meets Khari face-to-face. The endings aren’t explosive climaxes so much as the story just fizzles out in each.

Okay, now let’s talk about Foreclosed‘s “secret” ending for finding all of its collectibles

Foreclosed ends with a choice, and that choice determines which of two endings you receive. One is clearly better than the other, but loose ends such as what happens to Khari are left completely unresolved. However, I saw in the achievement list that there was a secret ending that’s unlocked by collecting all of the green collectibles. The way this works is that you sometimes get a radar popup that indicates that one is nearby, then you wander around aimlessly until you figure out which direction has the strongest signal and find it. It’s possible to wander through one-way-only doors, however, and Foreclosed has an autosave-only system. And while you can replay chapters once you finish the game, revisiting them to collect missing collectibles didn’t work for whatever reason. I had to restart the game from the very beginning, sitting through a ton of unskippable animations.

But I succeeded in finding all of the collectibles during my second playthrough. No new options appeared during the ending, but after the credits, a short scene with two sentences of dialog (three if “wait…” counts as a full sentence!) appeared. This dialog doesn’t recontextualize anything. It doesn’t reveal anything new. It’s just more technobabble. Knowing that I spent 3-4 hours unlocking something so pointless filled me with a unique kind of anger. For all of that trouble, I expected a better ending. What I got was a non sequitur hastily attached to the screen on a post-it. Between replaying chapters and restarting the game, I spent 4 hours unlocking two sentences that don’t say or imply anything of note. What was the point of this?

The third-person shooting can be decent, but the rare stealth is a major annoyance

Going in, I suspected that the gunplay would feel odd. It definitely does, but that’s not always a bad thing; enemies tend to be spongey, with armored and shielded opponents being even more so, but a single headshot is enough to finish off most of them. One of the upgrades you can unlock even gives your bullets the ability to home in on enemies, which makes playing with a controller much easier. You can also unlock telekinetic abilities, though the ones that lift enemies into the air or cause them to explode are the only ones I found any real use for. Shielded enemies can have their shields removed with the lifting ability, and exploding them can take out any of their nearby friends. A few encounters can be pretty entertaining.

The shooting here is less like a Mass Effect/Gears of War third-person shooter and more like a rail shooter with free movement. Enemies appear out of nowhere when you cross certain thresholds, and then you crouch behind cover, popping just far enough out to reveal one enemy at a time. Sometimes there’ll be an explosive part of the environment that you can detonate with a quick QTE to take out a couple of enemies, and later in the game, you can use telekinesis to throw dumpsters and fire extinguishers at people for easy kills, but the combat doesn’t evolve much beyond that. It’s decent but repetitive.

Breaking this up are some more puzzle-y areas where you have to move shipping containers to create pathways. I don’t have anything negative to say about these parts. However, there are far more frequent sequences that task you with slowly tracking down 3-4 devices that are hidden on walls and floors, and these are pure padding. There’s one especially terrible part of the game that pairs tracking down these random doodads with mandatory stealth, and Foreclosed doesn’t know how to be a stealth game. There’s no minimap and no sight cones. What enemies/turrets/flying drones can and can’t see is represented by a dull light that tells you their sight direction but nothing about their range.

My gun upgrades kept getting unequipped, and some of them don’t seem to work at all

I thought I was being so clever in my first playthrough when I prioritized unlocking gun upgrades that allow my bullets to go through helmets, armor, and energy shields. Then I shot a helmeted enemy in the head like 5 times and they survived. On my second playthrough, I focused instead on telekinetic abilities and the bullets that home in on enemies. This allowed me to finish them off much quicker. The upgrade that allowed me to shoot through energy shields functioned as expected, but I never felt like I was doing more damage with the one that purported to shoot through helmets and armor. You can only equip three upgrades at a time onto your gun, so an upgrade failing to function correctly is a huge waste of resources.

Even the upgrades that work can stop working. I noticed that my homing bullets upgrade would sometimes stop working until I went into the menu and unequipped/reequipped one of my upgrades. This may have something to do with overheating (your gun and abilities are all working on the same cooldown timer, which is admittedly an interesting way of handling things). At another point in the game, though, all of my gun upgrades were randomly removed from my gun. I genuinely can’t tell if this was a deliberate design decision or a bug.

Another thing I want to criticize is the camera. It can be difficult to rein in, clipping into walls at points. And since the game keeps Kapnos on the left side of the screen (I’m so tired of games that do this) and has no FOV options, it’s hard to see what’s happening around you. Kapnos doesn’t snap to cover, so finding a safe spot can be weirdly tricky.

Foreclosed has a strong art style doused in an ungodly, unwise amount of visual noise

All of the videos included on this page have had Noise reduction added to them as a necessity. This is what they look like without noise reduction. At 1080p, the video is undeniably smudgy. At 4K, though, it flickers wildly as Youtube’s compression completely breaks down and fails to deal with that amount of fine noise. This ends up looking like the game was filmed on a cheap camera at 12800 ISO, and even the noise reduction isn’t enough to fully circumvent the problem (so you might want to drop down and watch at 1440p if you normally watch at 4K). It isn’t something that only manifests after video compression, though—there were points where I was moving around, only for the noise and character movement to create crazy moiré patterns that turned the colors into a checkerboard while I was playing. The comic stylings are pulled off really well, though, and I feel like having the option to turn off the noise (and while I’m at it, the overkill chromatic aberration) would make it easier to appreciate Foreclosed‘s art style. There are Ben-Day dots and other small touches that I barely noticed because of the wild flickering that the constant noise patterns would generate.

Foreclosed‘s soundtrack is probably its greatest strength. Each track is moody and combines orchestral and electronic elements in a way that reminds me of Remember Me‘s soundtrack, and I’ve noticed that this combination tends to bring out the best in both styles. There are some really strong tracks here that could have supported the emotion of a much more detailed story. Without that story to connect to, though, the music sort of floats in the void, suggesting more epic happenings than what you’re looking at. That’s not the soundtrack’s fault, obviously. It deserved a stronger game.

Story: 1.5/3 Gameplay: 1.5/3 Visuals: 1.5/2 Music: 1.5/2 ★★★★★★☆☆☆☆ – 6/10
*Click here and scroll to the bottom for a detailed explanation of what these numbers mean

*A Steam key was provided for this Foreclosed review. It took me 3 hours to beat the game, and 4 more hours experimenting to get the unsatisfying hidden ending that I’m currently struggling to get over.

FORECLOSED review – Player-hostile design first appeared on Killa Penguin