The third Dread X Collection, released… wow, two months after the second, keeps a lot of the same ideas in play. There are still twelve games in total, all following the same prompt, all wrapped together with an interactive launcher. This time, each game is tied together with a central theme of ‘SPOOPY’ — dancing the line between scary and cute, making things that appear innocent on the surface but become evidently not as you delve deeper and deeper — and, like, man this is so my shit. Weird genre mashups. Bizarre and evocative visual styles. Throwbacks to the most out-there of things, and gameplay conceits unlike many other horror games I’ve seen. And better yet, even though the theming itself is already pretty strong, and well-realized across each of the twelve games here, almost all of them are at the very least really solid in their own right. There’s one or two stinkers in the pack, but all the others are hits, between the fun and weird things they do with the prompt, their perpetual really strong aesthetics, and just how well they play, especially for games each made in ten or so days.

There’s one continual weak point, though: the launcher. Not the game itself — developed by KIRA of Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion fame — which works fairly well as a wrap-around, solving puzzles in a castle to unlock more games to unlock more areas in the castle which unlock more puzzles which in turn unlock more games. More the… story content. How it screeches the game to a halt just so it can exposit to you for literal minutes. How if you just wanna go to a different game or somewhere else in the castle you’re forced to walk as slowly as possible in the meantime to listen to these two people babble on about whatever it even is they’re babbling on about. How you can mess the game up by walking past a dialogue trigger when you’re already in dialogue, causing it to not trigger and making you have to go all the way back just so you can trigger it and let the game continue. The way they handled the overarching story in Dread X 2 worked well: it was brief, it only popped up a couple of times the whole game, and if you didn’t care for it you could let it become background noise as you went to solve another puzzle/put another game into the VHS. Here they made it so much longer, so much less optional, and so much more boring: seriously, whatever it was they were talking about was really in-one-ear-then-out-the-other. Wasn’t necessarily something that tanked the collection as a whole for me, but man did I dread completing a game and going into the launcher for that exact reason.

Anyway, onto the individual games! In order from which I played them:

SATO WONDERLAND:
Fun! I love how everything comes together here: the retraux graphical style, the odd camera angles, the voicelines that sound cute but clash so hard with the vrrs and buzzes of the machines around you, this game sets up its vibes really well, and as a mood piece is consistently strong. It’s not let down by the writing, either: you’re set up with a breadcrumb trail at the start, and every part you uncover tantalizes you into wanting to know more… yet at the same time brings on even more questions, circling around and around before it all becomes clear at once. I… do think there was room for some more polish on the core mechanics, perhaps? Namely the part where you have to combine keywords: some sort of system where exhausting all the combinations for one particular word removes it from the list could help to ensure the player is continuously moving forward through things, in addition to preventing any situations (like what happened with me >_>) where the player forgets what specific things they’ve covered and start trying to brute force the game/repeating old combinations to try and find something that’ll let them progress. Other than that particular quibble (and some, uh, bugginess near the end) this was solid! Doubt it’ll end up my favourite of the pack but certainly an encouraging enough start.

BUBBO: ADVENTURE AT GERALD’S ISLAND:
So this game takes the style of, say, a Banjo-Kazooie, a Mario 64, like one of those N64 early-3D platformers where you run and jump around a singular large level, doing quests and searching for hidden nooks and crannies to get all the Jiggies and get all the coins. What I think I like most about this is how hard it commits to the aesthetic: characters grunt noises as their dialogue unfurls across the screen, the character models are simplistic but not obviously blocky, and even as the ~spooky~ things start it does so in a way that never truly undercuts the idea of this theoretically being an N64 platformer. Or at least, never really does anything that Mario 64 or Banjo Kazooie wouldn’t, tonally. It’s also fairly fun as a platformer. The platforms are simple, floaty enough that you can get away with some jumps you maybe shouldn’t, yet some of the coins/objectives you need to do require enough engagement with the mechanics that you can’t just waltz through the game (let alone all the stuff you need to do for the secret ending). I think perhaps the final challenge is kind of annoying? It’s a fun idea to have to run across the entire island in one mad dash, and there are a lot of cool shortcuts you can take if you’re confident enough to try, but it’s so rough having to go back to the start every time your chaser nothin’ personnels right in front of you when you’re in the middle of a jump. Bittttt of a lowlight on what’s otherwise a pretty fun game. Would otherwise rec, though!

SPOOKWARE @ THE VIDEO STORE:
A horror… microgames collection? I’ve… never actually played any WarioWare, or anything else of that ilk (other than the Smash stages) but when I found out there was a game pack in my game pack I was rather amused, to say the least. And I stayed that way going through it! It almost feels… roguelite/endurance run in nature: to clear a level, you have to complete ten randomly chosen microgames in succession. If you clear one, you get to continue, but fail three times, you’ve got to go right back to the start. It becomes a macro game, both of desperately trying to figure out the rules of the game while you still have time to clear it, and then also hoping you’ll roll the levels you're good at and also come to understand the games that are a bit more ??? to you. There’s nothing more stressful than trying to figure out how a rotary phone works under a time limit. It’s great. Not to mention how cool the individual games are: how divergent they feel from each other, the layered-photorealistic-patchwork aesthetics going on, and all the little jokes when you pass or fail a game, this was super fun. Enough so for me to actually try the endless mode for a good bit once I was technically done with the game. Good stuff. Found out there was actually a full release for this one and honestly… I’m a bit surprised, but I’m happy. Always glad to see which out of all of these games manages to go the extra mile.

SOUL WASTE:
…Another N64-styled get-all-the-coins platformer. Huh. At the very least, it’s considerably different than the one before. You’re barely given any instruction beyond the premise, no real direction the game points you to, you’re merely just left to explore the wastes, searching for the things you need to find while fighting enemies and collecting all the things you can. It’s a vibe, honestly. The game achieves that Goldilocks-esque middle ground between requiring your attention if you don’t wanna die yet also letting you zone out and listen to your friends talk about whatever it is they’re talking about. Patricia Taxxon did the music and it works well: synth-heavy tracks that run the gamut from sparse to simplistic to suddenly loud and complex and frenetic. It’s great. Maybe wish the physics didn’t feel as icy? Maybe also wish some of the enemy encounters didn’t flood you as hard as they do? Made some sections feel a little rough playing through, but otherwise… yeah, I enjoyed this a good deal. Honestly if there were a solo release of this I’d one hundo percent play it again. This was a fun time.

NICE SCREAMS AT FUNFAIR:
Well, they can’t all be winners. I guess sometimes when you only have a few days to make an entire videogame you sometimes won’t be able to make the deadline. Nice Screams at Funfair is, theoretically, a game that involves you scooping ice cream for customers at an undead amusement park. The reality is that it’s a rather buggy mess. Customers think about the ice cream they want for a split second before standing there, listlessly, endless patience in their eyes as they watch you fumble with the tray doors as you desperately try to keep their order in your memory. Putting scoops on the cone requires you to throw your scooper, for some reason, and my booth quickly became littered with pitches that missed or bounced off the cone, almost all the challenge having to navigate the rather fiddly physics. There’s a system where you can try to avoid the gaze of the security drone in the booth to attempt to sneak in tips but also it’s bugged and even if you do it when it’s not looking it’ll catch you out anyway. I tried this once and then a customer came in and gave their order while I wasn’t looking so I was forced to restart the whole game. There’s no real rush to complete orders in time — no mounting pressure of, say, more customers coming in as you try to complete the order currently on hand — so even if the game worked as it was meant to there… really isn’t much depth here. You do like five orders and then the game ends. Perhaps, if this had more time in the oven, there… could be a little bit of something here, but as is it mostly feels like the side of game jams nobody tells you about. Sometimes you make something that’s honestly incredible given the constraints in place. Sometimes those same constraints force you into putting out a rushjob.

CHIP'S TIPS:
I’m sorry, I can’t not love this. It might not necessarily have as much as some of the other games in this pack do but it makes up for it in sheer charm, and just how hard it kinda goes for it. A Blue’s Clues style horror game is a silly idea in theory, and frankly just as silly in practice, but the game does a fantastic job at making you laugh with it, from its rather irreverent sense of humour, its animation, the way the FMV interacts with the pre-rendered backgrounds, it certainly leans towards humour harder than any of the other Torple Dook games I’ve played, but it does it so well. And not to say the game isn’t without its substance: it’s a fairly solid puzzle game as you explore and unlock new parts of the house to tick off all the items on your checklist, and honestly? as a horror game? it actually got pretty unnerving, to the point where I was loosely dreading what was going to happen as things started going more and more off the rails. I… don’t think I can particularly say more about this. It’s very much one of those games that appeals specifically to me. It’s also very much one of those things that you’re gonna have to see for yourself.

SUBMISSION:
(spoilers for this one. this game buries the lede on what it is for a non-zero period of time but tragically to talk about requires one to loosely ruin the surprise. if you were at all interested in playing this one skip this review I guess)

Having played and liked The Open House, a previous game by the same developer, I was eager to see whether this game would be just as fun and inventive, and it didn’t disappoint! Beyond the intro — which is fairly on point for what it’s trying to parody — the core of the game is you, the player, going through the same perils most game devs go through having only a few days to make an entire video game. Find the store-bought assets that don’t clash with your vision! Physically fight the code of the game to get basic mechanics to work! Solve the mystery lying at the heart of all these disparate indie horror stock locations! On sheer conceptual level it’s very, very strong. In practice… it’s a rather solid puzzler, with a decent core of mixing and matching areas and mechanics to open new spaces up and eventually complete your very own video game. It’s fun, clever, and at one point honestly a bit unnerving, though it admittedly did get rather tedious manually creating the mechanics over and over again every time I had to switch from one to the other, especially when I was stuck and a bit confused on what I’m meant to be doing next. Also awkward when you manage to break through and progress with one mechanic… only to then have to go back out and switch it out for another mechanic. Kinda wish there was a way it could’ve been streamlined because it felt rather clunky as was. Not enough to ruin the game — the concept alone super carries this, let alone just how well the game’s style of parody characterizes the whole thing — though perhaps enough to knock it below the upper echelons of this pack.

MATTER (OVER) MIND:
The… third collect-the-notes style platformer, though I wouldn’t necessarily call this retro-styled — the top-down camera, I think, pushes it out of that realm and more into letting it feel like its own thing. On the other hand, I think the top-down style also makes this game feel a lot clunkier than I think was intended. You play a goopy thing that jumps onto people’s heads to take them over, but there’s no way to really be able to judge your height as you jump, which often led me to sail past people’s heads or accidentally hit a platform I’m trying to jump onto. And even if it weren’t for the camera, your jump feels so clumsy: you have to hold down the jump for a little bit to be able to get any height at all which is great when you need to climb up a staircase while one the guards are firing 18 times into your head and chest region. The stealth… felt rather borked too, guards detecting me through line of sight blockers, remaining procced on me even when I’ve left the room, in general not feeling like it works the way it should. There’s a secret ending you can collect if you get all the coins, but dying resets the counter back to zero, meaning that should you mess up a platforming section or should the platforming stop you from getting away from a guard you have to scour the entire facility all over again. There’s certainly a good concept here: I love the “organism wrecks shit in the lab he was born in in an attempt to get free” genre of horror, and I did like the general sense of humour, but I think if any game here suffered from the game-jam time limit it was this one. Polish wise it only feels like it's only partway there.

REACTOR:
Neat little walking sim. Perhaps doesn’t truly go anywhere out there — you can kinda guess the way the story’s gonna go once it gets in motion — but it’s competently told, and even then a lot of what this game is going for is stylistic. The endless desert landscape outside your little station. The stark, blinding black and white all around you, only broken up by the pink of your AI assistant and the red of the meteor. The way walking across the ground feels: the smooth floors and staircases of the station compared to the grooves and bumps of everything else, there’s a lot that characterizes the experience even if the main story doesn’t quite feel so unique. The game was also rather buggy? Driving the car through the desert felt like I was fighting against the game a little bit, and by the end I managed to get myself stuck in such a way that I couldn’t move and had to start the game over again. Maybe gave me a bit more time to notice stuff I didn’t before, but, uh, perhaps something that would’ve been nice to avoid. Sticks out a little for the worse amongst the rest of the pack given how standard this feels compared to the… varied ways the rest of the anthology goes out there, but I’d still say it’s solid.

DISPARITY OF THE DEAD:
My favourite of the… wow there were four separate N64-era collect-the-notes platformers this pack, weren’t there? Not especially a genre I look at and naturally think ‘horror’, but this game in particular I think works in how it leans into it. The afterlife is desolate — disparate platforms dotting an endless void, the denizens left with nothing but to contemplate their life and death for eternity. Plays… a bit odd with the whole “you are a detective finding CLUES and figuring out a MYSTERY” element, thinking about it, but even then I think the writing is one of the strongest parts of this. Death and suicide are fairly common topics of conversation as you jump across the wasteland; specifically, what happens after somebody makes that choice to end their life, and how one ultimately copes with the reality of eternity. At the very top of the world is a payphone that delivers a constant stream of last words, and what struck me most was... forgive me, the disparity between how those about to die approach the end: how much consent they have in the choice, how at peace they are with what’s about to happen. It all builds up to you crossing over and visiting the land of the living, and while aesthetically it’s rather striking… it perhaps plays less well than the 3D platforming you’ve done before. The game suddenly takes on fixed-camera tank controls… and it does not control well: your perspective frequently changes and so do the controls, to the point where I honestly never knew what direction I was going to move when I tried to move. It’s at least a fairly minor part of the whole experience, and doesn’t take away too much from… just how strong this is in general. At least thematically, at least for most of the game's runtime. Honestly, the fact that it’s not first place really just speaks to the strength of this pack. There's some real heavy hitters here.

BETE GRISE:
This one is carried at least a little bit on its aesthetics but man do its aesthetics carry it far. The pixel art is just gorgeous: the bright yet off-colour… colours present everywhere you go, all the little things you can find in the background, and the way Pom always looks ever so off model whenever she’s on screen, there’s so much effort to making this all look a little off and yet at the same time just so visually striking. It made me so happy to see new things for the sake of seeing these new things. Also loved the grid movement, how reminiscent it is of, like, the flash games they used to have on the Cartoon Network website, how it always feels like you’re going to open up the elevator to something you don’t particularly want to see. Do wish there were more minigames to do as you go through the hotel — especially given that the most tedious of the three is the one you do the most — but honestly that complaint feels a bit pocket change: even if it is a bit sparse in terms of content it more than manages to make up just for how well it does atmospherically. Really wanna see what else this dev has done. Perhaps not the most memorable on paper, but not something I’m going to forget any time soon.

EDEN: GARDEN OF THE FAULTLESS:
Have you ever wanted to play the Chao Garden from Sonic Adventure 2 but instead of raising Chao you’re raising biblically accurate angels? Well, be not afraid, EDEN: Garden of the Faultless might just be the game for you. The gameplay loop is simple: you get gifted a biblically accurate angel from above, you ram them into trees to collect fruit, and then you send them off to the races. Winning a race makes all the angels you have obsolete due to stat caps, but that’s fine, all you have to do is get God to give you a new angels, then command all your previous angels to kill themselves at the altar so that your new pet can be even stronger! It’s simple… if rather finicky. Getting your angels to go where you want them to is this whole process where you gotta click on the angel you want, go to the place you want them to go, then watch them slowly move over from where they randomly drifted off. Not to mention how buggy the game is: angels randomly switching names, angels ramming into you and throwing you into the bottomless pit below you, angels randomly despawning and making you think they’ve just disappeared forever… even despite this, though, there’s a fun, if maybe a slightly tedious core. I like that the game… doesn’t actually go full horror with its concept. It’s morbid, sure, but it always makes sure to be a little cute about it, never suggesting a particular tone around anything you’re doing, which then makes the point where it tries to sneak something past you feel much more potent. Perhaps not a favourite — having to grind up an angel’s stats became a bit tedious after a bit — but it was cute, a fun way to spend an hour or so.

Chip's Tips > SPOOKWARE @ The Video Store > Bete Grise > Disparity of the Dead > Soul Waste > Submission > Bubbo: Adventure on Geralds Island > Sato Wonderland > EDEN: Garden of the Faultless > Reactor > Matter OVER Mind > Nice Screams at Funfair

P

☆

Some games were definitely better than others but overall it was pretty cool.