House of the Dead meets Resi. Fixed camera with tank steering to stab walls while walking, a motherload of closed doors and no-minimap on sight. Find a key and seek the damn door, door-by-door while zombies re-spawn in rooms you've already cleared. Makes a 3 hour stroll if you don't walk on circles. Takes on the most mansion looking boat i'd ever see and the non-canon plot is akin to mindless 80's VHS action. Exists entirely for a terribly sold light-gun. The first zombie apparition scared the living skies outta me when i first played it, but now it makes a Jehova's witness simulator growing up for the amount of closed doors i kept facing. The murky low-poly aesthetic is charming for this type of throwaway survivor horror, makes it seem like a puppet combo.

Admirably bold triumph of the high-concept kind of "story mode". Sure, it's not the first time this happens, but it's a welcoming encyclopedia of grand environmental storytelling and a cocktail of nostalgia meets the fantastically ghastly and adventurous violence juxtaposed on RPG amalgamation for bouncy trigger-happy / wrench-whacky / chaotically-spellbound venturing. This feeling of methodical exploration took wonders for my amnesiac memory as the game pushed me on the path of bloodthirsty scavengers and armored puppets of ungodliness like a newcoming spectator searching for a way out of Rapture. Having said that, not every singular element slaps as smoothly as i remembered- Some of the conceptual grandeur and ambiance immersion lags because of how heavily schizophrenic is the start/stop gameplay itself. The Vita-Chambers come to mind- Not only an accidental source of monotony by forcing you to re-route yourself back to the place where you died at, but also a gateway to exploit the game's economy by sheer patience- All it takes is waltzing right where you died at and overpower your enemies affordably instead of spending cash out of a dozen of medkits mid-combat. It placed a harsh decrease on my inmersion as well, having to face a similar lot of weariness by the incredilous amount of pirating (and granted, this is an entirely player's choice, but it's such a tiresome avalanche of pipe puzzles you must endure to avoid combats) take a slight detour to the entirely non-cinematic hayride people tend to praise to kingdom come. Affordable gunplay married to a grand, one-of-a-kind neurotic storytelling, it's such a galvanizing fairytale arranged with an audacious style: Retrofitted to outlandish wonder and asphyxiating dread, fuelled with mysticism almost belonging to survival horror until you get your hands on godlike powers to cartoonishly kill-or-be-killed adventuring. For all the tonally opposed Frankenstein of mechanics, oddball logistics (what's the deal with turrets of mass destruction on a city underwater?) and spectacle before philosophy, i take a grand kick out of this game for being a innovative jump of profound themes at the time. FIFA and Call of Duty was becoming the norm and this took the spotlight to remind ourselves how it's like to embark a guntotting odyssey of good versus evil, with ourselves as the moral compass while whacking a wrench at the face of the humanely wicked.

Atmospheric dread candy. Not quite the Edgelord driven mindless horror you're thinking (not this one at least) but it finds a pulse on a reverse-slasher cold-blooded thrills. Ingeniously harsh on difficulty to a slight degree of realism, tailors you to engage on stealth takedowns than face-to-face combats since you won't go far against crowds of goons, with a highly janky and inconvenient combat for you to absolutely praise thy heavens at the sight of firearms.
Gunplay is clunky but ensures a challenging hardship given how receiving gunfire drops your health significantly, facing off mobs of goons to increasingly more powerful firing squads face an equal amount of difficulty as you'd drop dead as easily as your enemies. Bombastic action doesn't mesh too well with this antiquated cover shooter shtick but it grooves to grindhouse horror messiness by the fantastically bonkers finale where you navel-gaze towards squads of tactical forces.
The takedown system is a neat way to face the player's fascination towards violence- It's not truly necessary to perform them as vicious as they're sold, and yet, these avoid monotony to the player's gameplay (at least until you realize there's just one animation for each gravity of execution). I kept finding amusement at the simplicity of a plastic bag.
It's an imperfect and janky action-adventure of sorts but i truly admire the asphyxiating tension and nihilistic premise as a framework for a morbidly Noir quasi-survivor horror exploitation film playing you as the hero. Carcer City stands as some of the most inhospitable worldbuildings ever imaginable by Rockstar Games right next to hospital spawnpoints on GTA.