Early horror demake that you could play for the novelty of what it does on the Game Boy Color platform, try its full-sized console versions, or skip over without too much consequence.
No doubt about it: what you want is the Dreamcast version. It has the highest resolution, smoothest mechanics, and it's good because it's on the Dreamcast. The PSX version, meanwhile, is a scrubber, lower framerate version and even the PS2 and PC copies, handled by a different studio entirely, are junky and lower resolution, lower color palette copies.
Failing all that, there is the Game Boy Color version, now made available on the Switch, which is one of the many peculiar releases Nintendo have put on their online service. This is, however, the second version you could play, if you wanted to play this game.
"Hey, what the hell was that? Looks like trouble... better be ready for anything!" goes the game between every. single. combat. segment. There are a good handful of those and they're all exactly the same -- dropped into an isometric perspective, you shoot a few varieties of enemies and then go back to the adventure segment of the game... a less actionable approach would suit the hardware here.
What we're thinking about here, no doubt, is always the hardware: either how the game is pushing the limitations of the Game Boy Color, or how the game is limited by them. It goes in turns. There's some special small stuff: some effects, cross-hatched shading, simple bits of 8-bit geometry expanded into compact, generally readable rooms.
Shockingly it moves through the game mostly the same as the console versions, with a fixed camera, and a character that can move across all planes in faux-3D movement. Like the cancelled and much-discussed Resident Evil for Game Boy Color, there is a cool novelty to this sensation of a demake of a technically already unoptimized game, shoved onto strictly limited hardware.
The solutions given are surprising, in the adventure segment. It's often damn hard to get your barrings, so often this aesthetic approach is overstated with positivity. These games are also already hard to navigate on consoles. So, you can imagine that on a smaller room, with one-second bursts of rooms and disorienting always-shifting perspective at a small scale, the game is always throwing you for a loop.
What begins very promising, with a fairly faithful rendition of the part from the initial airplane landing, done through read text this time, which is maybe better than on Dreamcast, where characters talk, but their mouths don't move -- I must talk but I have no mouth -- but then, reading anything on the Game Boy is an ordeal.
What makes it possibly a deal-breaker is that the game flashes every couple seconds as you move from environment to environment. While the path to the mansion and sometimes the interiors of that space itself are fairly clear and readable, that's absolutely not true of later stages. Given this demade translation to a smaller screen, eventually we get to listless mazes and corridors that work hard against the perspective. It's good that besides the signposted combat sections, nothing is quite a danger to us, as trying to navigate and survive, would make this an impossible videogame.
What sells the game, and these are small and isolated moments, are flashes of what demade survival horror could possibly be with infinite resources and committed development time on an early handheld. There are minor suggestions of jumpscares, things passing by windows, small artifacts of environmental horror, which are just really astounding details to fit on the Game Boy Color.
The best way to play the game is probably to just tinker around with it for a little while and do some of the preliminary adventure sections. Find those keys and crowbars, explore the mansion, and then maybe put it away as a technical novelty that outshone the possibilities of the platform, but is fairly daunting to play today. Then check out the Dreamcast version, which is still not a good videogame, but is also pushing the hardware.
No doubt about it: what you want is the Dreamcast version. It has the highest resolution, smoothest mechanics, and it's good because it's on the Dreamcast. The PSX version, meanwhile, is a scrubber, lower framerate version and even the PS2 and PC copies, handled by a different studio entirely, are junky and lower resolution, lower color palette copies.
Failing all that, there is the Game Boy Color version, now made available on the Switch, which is one of the many peculiar releases Nintendo have put on their online service. This is, however, the second version you could play, if you wanted to play this game.
"Hey, what the hell was that? Looks like trouble... better be ready for anything!" goes the game between every. single. combat. segment. There are a good handful of those and they're all exactly the same -- dropped into an isometric perspective, you shoot a few varieties of enemies and then go back to the adventure segment of the game... a less actionable approach would suit the hardware here.
What we're thinking about here, no doubt, is always the hardware: either how the game is pushing the limitations of the Game Boy Color, or how the game is limited by them. It goes in turns. There's some special small stuff: some effects, cross-hatched shading, simple bits of 8-bit geometry expanded into compact, generally readable rooms.
Shockingly it moves through the game mostly the same as the console versions, with a fixed camera, and a character that can move across all planes in faux-3D movement. Like the cancelled and much-discussed Resident Evil for Game Boy Color, there is a cool novelty to this sensation of a demake of a technically already unoptimized game, shoved onto strictly limited hardware.
The solutions given are surprising, in the adventure segment. It's often damn hard to get your barrings, so often this aesthetic approach is overstated with positivity. These games are also already hard to navigate on consoles. So, you can imagine that on a smaller room, with one-second bursts of rooms and disorienting always-shifting perspective at a small scale, the game is always throwing you for a loop.
What begins very promising, with a fairly faithful rendition of the part from the initial airplane landing, done through read text this time, which is maybe better than on Dreamcast, where characters talk, but their mouths don't move -- I must talk but I have no mouth -- but then, reading anything on the Game Boy is an ordeal.
What makes it possibly a deal-breaker is that the game flashes every couple seconds as you move from environment to environment. While the path to the mansion and sometimes the interiors of that space itself are fairly clear and readable, that's absolutely not true of later stages. Given this demade translation to a smaller screen, eventually we get to listless mazes and corridors that work hard against the perspective. It's good that besides the signposted combat sections, nothing is quite a danger to us, as trying to navigate and survive, would make this an impossible videogame.
What sells the game, and these are small and isolated moments, are flashes of what demade survival horror could possibly be with infinite resources and committed development time on an early handheld. There are minor suggestions of jumpscares, things passing by windows, small artifacts of environmental horror, which are just really astounding details to fit on the Game Boy Color.
The best way to play the game is probably to just tinker around with it for a little while and do some of the preliminary adventure sections. Find those keys and crowbars, explore the mansion, and then maybe put it away as a technical novelty that outshone the possibilities of the platform, but is fairly daunting to play today. Then check out the Dreamcast version, which is still not a good videogame, but is also pushing the hardware.