Clive Barkers Undying (2001)
A towering achievement of atmospheric Gothic horror wrapped up in a game with some really cool ideas at its core that's unfortunatley held back by some very old school game design. Seeing Clive Barkers name plastered all over this title, I assumed it was more of a marketing gimmick than anything else, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Barker is probably the greatest living horror author in my opinion and this game is greatly elevated by his work, starting with the decision to replace the edgy 90s badass protagonist with the much more interesting and entertaining Patrick Galloway. A veteran of WW2, he is called by his old war buddy Jeremiah Covenant to investigate a family curse and the rest of the covenant siblings being transformed into monsters. And the game is jam PACKED with Barkers writing. From journal entries by the various family members to newspaper clippings about creepy local happenings and in character descriptions of the events and tools in the game, you can find so much text and it all is brilliantly written and lets you feel Barkers fingerprints throughout. Also included in the original release was a physical diary detailing the fall of the house of covenant, which has been digitally preserved by the good folks at GOG and gives a lot of cool background and lore that is a ton of fun to read. But putting aside the writing for a moment, the gameplay also has some really cool ideas. The central mechanic here is a system where your left hand has weapons and your right has a variety of magic spells, an idea that Bioshock would later innovate on. This allows for a lot of various synergistic options and a fair handful of secret functions and Easter eggs that are a ton of fun to seek out. And the atmosphere is absolutely incredible. The mansion that acts as a central area is gloriously Gothic and deliciously labyrinthine and a special shout out to the incredibly cool other magical world you occasionally traverse while fighting your spectacularly hammy rival Otto Keisinger. However, there is one aspect of the game that has not aged particularly well, and that is the dificulty. Its fine for a game to be hard, even frustrating at times, but enemies just deal SO MUCH damage here and it leads to a lot of repeated deaths and reloads that it distracts from the game itself. For me personally, the atmosphere and story of this game was the real draw, so replaying all of these super enemy dense sections just got old really fast. Outside of that though, man what an experience. Looking forward to revisiting this around Halloween! 8/10

The graphics have not aged well. Like, at all. But I still love this game.
Bought it off of GoG a while back because I no longer have the disc.
It’s still just as weird and wtf inducing as ever. Just like grandma Barker used to make.
Anyways, this is a horror FPS with mystical amulets, cursed families, lovecraftian type horrors, and some gardener out front that you see at the beginning but never again.
I suppose the gellnhiunds got the poor bastard. He was just doing his job!
Unlike that other Clive Barker game, this one is actually worth playing.

An early FPS to bring in more adventure, puzzle, and some minor RPG elements as well as a quick selection wheel to swap between weapons and abilities. Great atmosphere, graphics (for the time though still atmospheric), music, and enjoyable gameplay for the most part. The weapons are fun to use and satisfying, one of the only games where shooting a gun while touching a wall can cause to yo injure yourself from bullet ricochets and different weapons can have stronger effects on certain types of enemies. Spells can allow you to project a shield in front of yourself, haste yourself to make all of your actions faster including your mana regeneration, skyre can eventually let you see enemies through walls and health auras, attack spells let you shoot lightning and launch exploding skulls, and one of the more unique ones is one that will revive dead enemies to fight for you, kill undead enemies, or cause living enemies to kill themselves. It's nice to play a game where you can equip a spell to your off hand and where your mana to use them just regenerates over time rather than needing to manage some separate mana potion style pickups. Spells can be upgraded up to a fifth level improving their damage output and reducing mana cost but casting while holding a certain object in the left hand raises their level by one, possibly to six. Exploring locations and being able to see into the past or hidden images in portraits with the scrye spell is a great mechanic. Good story and journal entries that you will need to find and read to uncover some of the plot.

Look, I know I nitpick a lot but I see the positive reviews for this game and I think to myself, have these people actually played this thing? I put a few hours into this but it got too unbearably frustrating to the point I just gave up on it, and that's saying something because I've powered through some hot garbage in my time on this site.
So my review of the mechanics and story will obviously be limited, but a few hours of this is enough to warrant dunking on this game to this degree.
The story had promise, and as I'm reading the cliffnotes it's pretty good. You have to read a lot of journal entries to get the real gist of it, but this is an extremely ambitious story for a shooter, even by today's standards. You wouldn't think they'd put a high drama about family strife and generational curses into a frenetic early 2000s horror themed first person shooter, but they did, and that's pretty cool.
The atmosphere is decent enough, but the entire game feels like traversing through hallway after hallway. It's very boring.
The shooting mechanics would be fine if they didn't feel so floaty and awful. The entire thing just reeks of "it's a horror game so let's make the shooting and combat feel like hot garbage". There are no health packs but enemies can and will instantly hit you and you can do very little to avoid damage because leapers move at the speed of light and other enemies practically have hitscan weapons, so you're in a constant state of save scumming. The enemies in general have this Dark Souls 2 level of hit tracking, where they can change direction mid-throw to hit you.
The guns do very little damage and something more substantial like the shotgun takes like fifteen minutes to reload. The only real viable gun that outclasses the rest is the Himalayan cannon, but even that gets annoying to use after a while.
You can't hit quickload once you're dead, you have to reload and then hit quickload after you've loaded back in. This wouldn't be an issue if the game weren't so unplayable.
The ectoplasm spell is really your only viable damage dealing spell in the beginning, yet still is inaccurate when it comes to the enemies that zip around and deals about as much damage as lightly farting on enemies. I'm sure there are more substantial weapons and spells later on in the game, and I'm sure the game gets more playable later on as Patrick gets more powerful, but overall I absolutely hated this.