Singaporean developer Choo Bin Yong recently released There Is No Tomorrow on Steam under his Koex Studio indie label. The game could best be described as a time-traveling, survival-horror. It’s a unique combination of stealth oriented gameplay with some melee, puzzle-solving, and exploration in a ruined dystopia of the future. While the concept and design goals are certainly noteworthy, the problem with the game comes with the execution.

The story centers around a young man named Leon and his talking doll companion, who find themselves having traveled into the not-so-distant future where humanity has been wiped out by gruesome creatures known as the “RA”.

The game clocks in at just under six hours, features multiple endings based on your decisions, and allows for either stealth oriented or head-on melee combat.

The trailer depicts a game that looks like something from the PS1 era, which isn’t bad for a project made by a single person. It reminds me a little bit of an updated version of Out of This World.

However, Yong’s inspiration for There Is No Tomorrow was Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.

The idea was to make a game built around tension and suspense, hence why you have the option of attempting to survive a little bit easier by relying on stealth instead of going full Rambo on the monsters.

While this comes across as a neat concept to give players choice in terms of how they approach the enemies in the game, there’s a lengthy review that points out some of the problems with attempting to engage enemies head-on, with Boozy Old Man writing…

“The combat seems to be trying to imitate the last off us, fight head on or distract the enemy for the sneak damage. Issues become apparent after the first encounter in the game. When it comes to fighting head on melee you either miss a majority of the swings because of the controls and camera angles or you become almost fused within the enemy and they just stand there while you beat them to death. Weapons will break quite often and when using a wooden weapon to beat an alien demon thingy to death it makes sense but when using items like the metal pipe or rock it is very impractical that after killing 2 or 3 enemies that it would shatter. The range combat is VERY hit or miss (Except the taser). You can be sitting still on a stationary target with the cross hair trained on the target and still manage the miss the target but also you can aim at a targets stomach and somehow get a head shot(Except the taser). This becomes very frustrating on puzzles that require you to hit a target to progress. A large majority of your combat is going to come from; running around spamming r to hear for enemies, once you find some go into sneak, perform your sneak attack, and then move on. You wont be using a lot of the throwing items like fruit or cans to distract the items partly because its unnecessary but mostly because you can only throw most items about 2 feet.”

Now if you’re thinking this is some troll review from someone who didn’t put in a lot of time with the game, think again. He’s invested nearly 10 hours into There Is No Tomorrow, which is almost as much time as three other reviews combined.

The other positive reviews also mention that the game has glitches, but fail to describe what the glitches are.

Boozy Old Man explains that he loves the game, but the glitches make it unplayable for him, and one of the biggest sins is the clip-prone camera, where he explains…

“[…] The controls and camera angle are what breaks things like combat and immersion for me. The controls are a bit slippery which wouldnt be a big deal and would actually work very well with this game but with the fact that the camera will not only clip outside of the map 90% of the time but will also bump off of objects in the map it makes it really hard to navigate the map or engage in combat. Controls are always hard to explain so I wont focus on them and the camera getting caught on objects and clipping outside of walls are something that all gamers have experienced so I dont have to go in depth.”

That’s always one of the biggest issues with third-person games: getting the camera controls right.

If it’s too zoomed in you can’t see anything but the character. If it’s too zoomed out then you run into clipping issues and the camera source getting caught on environmental entities. It’s a tricky beast to tame.

The good news is that despite the bugs that do plague There Is No Tomorrow, everyone seems to agree that the game has a lot of potential. Hopefully Choo Bin Yong spends a little bit of time investing in correcting some of the glitches and squashing some of the bugs, and maybe he’ll have a sleeper hit on his hands.

For more information you can visit the Steam store page, where There Is No Tomorrow is available for $15.99.