Returning to this years after the fact and I think it's kind of a crime that I sometimes see this game labelled as early 2010's YouTuber bait when it feels, rough around the edges as it may be, like a complete labor of love. There aren't a lot of games nowadays that can manage to genuinely frighten me- this remains one of them.
Setting it in this endless series of samey, dark corridors works well, in my opinion- maybe this is just me, but the fact that I know the map layout and monster spawns are random makes moving forward feel consistently risky. In most horror games I usually at least can count on the fact that a human built this level I'm walking through. Seeing someone else's design sensibilities on display means that I know specific rooms will be put together to be experienced a certain way, or that some thought went into how to best unnerve me. I do feel a palpable dread when I'm playing something like Silent Hill, but as tense as those games are I at least feel like the people who made this to scare me are keeping me company. I know there'll be a rhyme and reason to when a Creature appears. Even in Pathologic, I know that The Powers That Be put this all together, because the game seems to actively be playing cruel jokes at the player's expense. In Containment Breach, individual rooms may be bespoke or have a specific event linked to them, but for the most part I feel completely alone and cut off even from the people who made this. A totally indifferent algorithm is determining what's behind the next door. There doesn't feel like there's any intent behind the architecture of the building; I can't get the sense it was put together by a person, in the fiction of the game or out of it. There's a solid fog of darkness in front of me constantly. If something's waiting up ahead to trap or kill me, I don't know, and somehow, neither does anyone else. Whatever is out there, it certainly isn't human. Somehow the stock music and barren visuals kind of add to this for me- it feels cheap and uncanny in a way that somehow heightens the experience for me. This is a game that has a ton of soul, but a lot of it went into making the player feel alienated and alone in an environment that feels like it wasn't created with the intent to be occupied. Procedural generation is cool even if it usually isn't
Setting it in this endless series of samey, dark corridors works well, in my opinion- maybe this is just me, but the fact that I know the map layout and monster spawns are random makes moving forward feel consistently risky. In most horror games I usually at least can count on the fact that a human built this level I'm walking through. Seeing someone else's design sensibilities on display means that I know specific rooms will be put together to be experienced a certain way, or that some thought went into how to best unnerve me. I do feel a palpable dread when I'm playing something like Silent Hill, but as tense as those games are I at least feel like the people who made this to scare me are keeping me company. I know there'll be a rhyme and reason to when a Creature appears. Even in Pathologic, I know that The Powers That Be put this all together, because the game seems to actively be playing cruel jokes at the player's expense. In Containment Breach, individual rooms may be bespoke or have a specific event linked to them, but for the most part I feel completely alone and cut off even from the people who made this. A totally indifferent algorithm is determining what's behind the next door. There doesn't feel like there's any intent behind the architecture of the building; I can't get the sense it was put together by a person, in the fiction of the game or out of it. There's a solid fog of darkness in front of me constantly. If something's waiting up ahead to trap or kill me, I don't know, and somehow, neither does anyone else. Whatever is out there, it certainly isn't human. Somehow the stock music and barren visuals kind of add to this for me- it feels cheap and uncanny in a way that somehow heightens the experience for me. This is a game that has a ton of soul, but a lot of it went into making the player feel alienated and alone in an environment that feels like it wasn't created with the intent to be occupied. Procedural generation is cool even if it usually isn't