There's an appeal to the Horror B-movie that games have scant captured. Stuff like Resident Evil gets a part of it, but there's a certain vibe to a Horror B Movie where multiple layers of self awareness, weird egos, overambitious ideas, lack of awareness, camp, and low budget somehow all intersect. And to it's credit, Illbleed is maybe the only game that gets that feel down quite right. I ca appreciate that. The dialogue has that vibe of a bad giallo movie and is bizzarely paced, the story setup is incredibly weird in what it devotes time to and doesn't, the sense of location and space is blatantly flimsy and the production values are completely all over the place. I can appreciate that illbleed has grabbed something here, latched onto a feeling very little else does.
Still, it kinda fucking sucks. Illbleed's pretty strong momentum from it's opening and initial exploration of the hub and the start of the first level comes crashing to a halt as you've found yourself in maybe one of the worst gameplay loops imaginable. Even if you've got a friendly person in your discord VC to point out the easily missable key item hidden in a cranny at the start of the game, you're left dealing with this stop start game of wandering down hallways, equipping some goggles to spot weak-ass jumpscares in advance, indicated with blue dots. The blue dots can be jump scares, items, enemy encounters or nothing at all, and most of them are gonna trigger if you walk past them anyway so the only point on putting the goggles on is so you dont get fucked by them.
And getting fucked by some pathetic, annoying jump scares, is like, the game. The player's involvement is in, of all things, meter management, of blood, stress, etc. There would be some tension to this, slowly bleeding out over the course of a spooky level, but this is completely the wrong game for it to be in. The entire tone of this game is this fun goofy b movie horror and then the game itself is this slow burn, patience rewarding, fucking aggravating survival experience.
There's also some predictably dogshit combat. I kinda don't care enough to comment more than that on it.
The real crime here is the dissonance for me. Illbleed's tone is great, and I don't think the gameplay had to be anything spcial at all for this to be worthwhile. Honestly, even that dogshit melee combat system just being the whole game on a mechanic level might have been fine, like the B-movie Horror drakengard we all needed. But what's been chosen is both pretty bad and worse, slow and repetitve. Managing meters and analysing the world through goggles every ten yards. It's a system better suited for an abject survival horror game where the feeling of slowly bleeding out might actually be tense, and even there i'd say it'd be too much. For what's basically a comedy? Fuck off.
I have heard that the first level is notoriously terrible and a massive filter on the game. Sure, i can buy that, but the core of the game still feels absolutely rotten. When I was playing this, I had Border Down installed in the same folder, taunting me on the flycast boot page. And Illbleed does nothng to hook me back in outside of what i could probably experience in a youtube cutscene compilation.
Still, it kinda fucking sucks. Illbleed's pretty strong momentum from it's opening and initial exploration of the hub and the start of the first level comes crashing to a halt as you've found yourself in maybe one of the worst gameplay loops imaginable. Even if you've got a friendly person in your discord VC to point out the easily missable key item hidden in a cranny at the start of the game, you're left dealing with this stop start game of wandering down hallways, equipping some goggles to spot weak-ass jumpscares in advance, indicated with blue dots. The blue dots can be jump scares, items, enemy encounters or nothing at all, and most of them are gonna trigger if you walk past them anyway so the only point on putting the goggles on is so you dont get fucked by them.
And getting fucked by some pathetic, annoying jump scares, is like, the game. The player's involvement is in, of all things, meter management, of blood, stress, etc. There would be some tension to this, slowly bleeding out over the course of a spooky level, but this is completely the wrong game for it to be in. The entire tone of this game is this fun goofy b movie horror and then the game itself is this slow burn, patience rewarding, fucking aggravating survival experience.
There's also some predictably dogshit combat. I kinda don't care enough to comment more than that on it.
The real crime here is the dissonance for me. Illbleed's tone is great, and I don't think the gameplay had to be anything spcial at all for this to be worthwhile. Honestly, even that dogshit melee combat system just being the whole game on a mechanic level might have been fine, like the B-movie Horror drakengard we all needed. But what's been chosen is both pretty bad and worse, slow and repetitve. Managing meters and analysing the world through goggles every ten yards. It's a system better suited for an abject survival horror game where the feeling of slowly bleeding out might actually be tense, and even there i'd say it'd be too much. For what's basically a comedy? Fuck off.
I have heard that the first level is notoriously terrible and a massive filter on the game. Sure, i can buy that, but the core of the game still feels absolutely rotten. When I was playing this, I had Border Down installed in the same folder, taunting me on the flycast boot page. And Illbleed does nothng to hook me back in outside of what i could probably experience in a youtube cutscene compilation.