One of the few veins of horror that has yet to be strip-mined to feed the YouTube indie horror machine, due almost entirely to its narrative structure and ambition: a millennia-spanning story told in a dozen segments, each featuring its own protagonist. To this base, add Resident Evil-ish third-person action and light puzzles, melee and ranged combat, a magic system, enough B-movie violence to get an M rating, and the headliner: a “sanity system” where your character’s mental faculties were reflected by in-game, fourth-wall-breaking hallucinations.
At first glance, this sounds like something a JRPG developer with a coke habit would describe as “a little too much.” That the combined forces of Silicon Knights and Nintendo would make a solid game out of all of this is bonkers. (Much like Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles, Nintendo-dispatched designers were responsible for significant improvements on the initial efforts.)
So what keeps this shambling beast together for 12 hours? Most of the game’s biggest strengths flow from the sheer bravado and execution of the narrative concept. The chapters take place across four different locations, and seeing all of the ways these places change over the centuries keeps things very grounded – you’ll traverse a certain room in a Gothic cathedral in one segment and will immediately recognize it when you return to the same room in a segment set in the same cathedral several centuries later. There’s an alchemy here that other epoch-spanning stories can’t quite pull off; an oddly quotidian take on time travel. And a steady drip of horror-movie schlock, purposely overwrought Lovecraftian prose, and small doses of wry humor prevent the whole thing from getting too heavy.
Another strength is the multiple protagonists. Most of them only take the stage for a single segment, so by necessity, characterization sprawls outside of writing choices. Each controllable character has different stats based on their background – a psychologist has a firm grip on sanity compared to a journalist covering the first World War scant miles from the horrors of the trenches. Even animations contain plenty of personality: an Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist finishes off zombies with a stylish toss of his blade, while an out-of-his-depth Franciscan monk needs three clumsy blows to crush an undead spine. Each character feels different enough that there’s a basic sense of propulsion from this alone.
That said, other aspects of the game tend toward mediocrity. The combat system is serviceable but never really pushed in any interesting directions, and for all the Resident Evil inspiration, one or two more instances where players are asked to operate with limited resources would have gone a long way toward spicing things up. The pacing, while generally solid, isn’t flawless: while the final chapters wisely tend towards big guns and hordes of undead to ventilate, some mid- and late-game setpieces focused around investigation and exploration bring the proceedings to a screeching halt.
This is my personal Platonic ideal of a game to replay every year or two. It’s not too long, it does a few things extremely well, and the rest is mid enough to carry its own weight. It’s a shame that we won’t see another horror game like this for a long time, if ever: Nintendo has long abandoned their M-rated game strategy, Dennis Dyack badly mishandled multiple Kickstarters for a spiritual successor, and the horror genre itself has moved far away from big budgets, Lovecraft, and Resident Evil. These aren't necessarily bad things - I'm not trying to go Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud about this game. But someone else is going to figure out how to make a narrative this wild work in a video game again, and I'm excited as hell to see what that looks like. Until then, all I can do is hope that somewhere, the old gods yet stir in restless sleep, dreaming of a long-forgotten past when their names were still to be feared.
At first glance, this sounds like something a JRPG developer with a coke habit would describe as “a little too much.” That the combined forces of Silicon Knights and Nintendo would make a solid game out of all of this is bonkers. (Much like Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles, Nintendo-dispatched designers were responsible for significant improvements on the initial efforts.)
So what keeps this shambling beast together for 12 hours? Most of the game’s biggest strengths flow from the sheer bravado and execution of the narrative concept. The chapters take place across four different locations, and seeing all of the ways these places change over the centuries keeps things very grounded – you’ll traverse a certain room in a Gothic cathedral in one segment and will immediately recognize it when you return to the same room in a segment set in the same cathedral several centuries later. There’s an alchemy here that other epoch-spanning stories can’t quite pull off; an oddly quotidian take on time travel. And a steady drip of horror-movie schlock, purposely overwrought Lovecraftian prose, and small doses of wry humor prevent the whole thing from getting too heavy.
Another strength is the multiple protagonists. Most of them only take the stage for a single segment, so by necessity, characterization sprawls outside of writing choices. Each controllable character has different stats based on their background – a psychologist has a firm grip on sanity compared to a journalist covering the first World War scant miles from the horrors of the trenches. Even animations contain plenty of personality: an Indiana Jones-esque archaeologist finishes off zombies with a stylish toss of his blade, while an out-of-his-depth Franciscan monk needs three clumsy blows to crush an undead spine. Each character feels different enough that there’s a basic sense of propulsion from this alone.
That said, other aspects of the game tend toward mediocrity. The combat system is serviceable but never really pushed in any interesting directions, and for all the Resident Evil inspiration, one or two more instances where players are asked to operate with limited resources would have gone a long way toward spicing things up. The pacing, while generally solid, isn’t flawless: while the final chapters wisely tend towards big guns and hordes of undead to ventilate, some mid- and late-game setpieces focused around investigation and exploration bring the proceedings to a screeching halt.
This is my personal Platonic ideal of a game to replay every year or two. It’s not too long, it does a few things extremely well, and the rest is mid enough to carry its own weight. It’s a shame that we won’t see another horror game like this for a long time, if ever: Nintendo has long abandoned their M-rated game strategy, Dennis Dyack badly mishandled multiple Kickstarters for a spiritual successor, and the horror genre itself has moved far away from big budgets, Lovecraft, and Resident Evil. These aren't necessarily bad things - I'm not trying to go Old-Man-Yells-At-Cloud about this game. But someone else is going to figure out how to make a narrative this wild work in a video game again, and I'm excited as hell to see what that looks like. Until then, all I can do is hope that somewhere, the old gods yet stir in restless sleep, dreaming of a long-forgotten past when their names were still to be feared.