Yes, hallucinations caused by the pills, just examine the pills bottle.
As for the animations, the only animation that was missing is when you enter in the dining hall and Lenkmann look at you before heading in the kitchen, where there had no animation for Lenkmann opening the door to the kitchen. So, unless if you're talking about the missing shadows on the characters, which personally didn't bother me that much, I wouldn't say it was not as well animated.
All those animations where the Tall Man slashes, crushes and thrusts all these persons in gruesome ways just don't draw themself all alone.
![wink.gif](http://www.chefelf.com/forums/public/style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)
Plus all those characters that you see just once in the flashbacks that need to be imagined, designed, drawn and animated walking, talking, sitting, being harvested for fresh meat, walking in their pyjamas... There had a whole lot more animation in TN than in 5/7DaS and a whole lot more energy invested in them IMO.
Nah, if there is one thing I didn't like with TN it was the puzzles which offered no difficulty except four. One "find the exact words" puzzle, one where you needed to think about the problem for 10 seconds to find the solution, another one where in the worst case scenario you to explored every rooms of the game, long but requiring no mental activity, and the last puzzle which was really tough if you didn't got the hint, and I'm kinda glad I didn't since the game would have been a whole lot shorter. GFW had tougher puzzles which kept me playing for 3 nights to complete the game at 100%. TN felt more like a movie than a game, in a bad kind of way. A movie I played under a shell of security blankets in a fortress of pillows, unlike other movies, but a movie none the less.
But then again, TN was all about story. Having brain exploding tough puzzles would probably have broken the flow of the game and after an hour on a puzzle, people would have probably forgotten details and wondered "What the heck was I supposed to do again?", which wouldn't have been good at all. GFW and other games with a bit less story can afford to have tougher puzzle because you can easily get stuck for hours if not days on a puzzle and still remember everything about the story.
As for the character's development, it's more a matter of comparison. The characters were well developed, even those who's only purpose were stock characters to be slain, but not only you see the events thru Trilby's eyes, Trilby passed from the shady silent protagonist you don't know much about from the 2 first games to the emo, tormented, multiple layered person he is in TN, and the other characters' personalities seems pale in comparison, making it seems like only Trilby had a personality while it wasn't the case. But it didn't made the story more creepy for me. The fact I had no idea what the heck was going on until I first got the pills and figured those weird random things were hallucinations, scared me enough. The constant impression something would pop out of nowhere to slash me in half did the rest of the work.
*Re-re-re-re-re-read post again
Ach, enough rambling, time to sleep.
This post has been edited by Blueskirt: 25 November 2006 - 01:37 AM