I just watched the opening sequence played by the author on Youtube. I think he would have been better served by using photograph backgrounds as well, but I guess the filter frenzy art creates a style all its own. And I would definitely classify this as a trainwreck. Live-action freeware is almost a guaranteed trainwreck.

Hi there, this is Matt D, the creator/"star" of Between Heaven and Hell.

You know, sometimes I wonder to myself why I decided to do the cutscenes the way I did. I never really expected to be able to accomplish anything but campiness. I mean, non-actor voice actors + digitized graphics, that was always a recipe for cheesy. I really just wanted to emulate the games of this nature that were released in the early '90s.

On the other hand, I think if cutscenes had been handled a bit differently -- for example, no voice actors, and if I'd made an effort to obscure the fact that I was using real photographs of actual people in the cutscenes -- the game might have worked much better as a whole. The campiness and the art style just don't mesh that well in my opinion. 'May have shot myself in the foot.

I think I ended up with something that wasn't really appealing to a lot of people judging from the game's relative lack of popularity, though some people seem to dig it a lot. The Czech Republic gave it some good reviews. :P To my knowledge it's still one of the only Out of This World style freeware games around, but I can see why there's not a whole lot of demand for that type of gameplay these days.

Anyways, it was an enormous project, but I enjoyed working on it and I generally like how it came out, plus it's a nice little resume piece. I might end up starting on a Metroidvania style game one of these days, the Tigsource kids'll love that! :D