radradradish
2022
I didn’t know it was possible for one game to ape from this many different eras of indie horror. Egghead Gumpty has it all: from the page key collecting gameplay of Slender: The Eight Pages, the jumpscares on-fail (which make you stop in your tracks half a second before they happen so they’ll never take you off guard) a la Five Nights at Freddy’s, and a procedurally generated setting that totally isn’t The Backrooms you guys, it’s clear that this game is a patchwork chimera of much more trendsetty horror games, and one that… is certainly not the sum of its parts. Even what here that’s original isn’t exactly functional: the titular Egghead Gumpty’s main mechanic is that he’ll appear somewhere in the room you’re in, and you’ll have to find him before a timer runs out, which works when it happens when you’re in a room, but when you’re in any of the corridors — which are all rather long and undefined in shape given the procedural generation — he can spawn far enough away from you that you have no clue where he is and can’t really get an inkling of his location before he kills you. There’s this baby thing that… I think you’re meant to play Red Light Green Light with, but the mechanics around it are so unclear and I died every time I dared to try figure it out. The procedural generation, I feel, does more harm and good here: even other than RNG bullshit where you lose resources/can’t find the places you need to go I feel like it’s hard to feel invested into figuring out your surroundings and figuring out the optimal way to collect everything when the floors change every time you die or even when the floors sometime delete themselves and trap you inside a dead end. I tried this for about 90 minutes, sometimes making some progress before getting fucked over by the puppet baby or Gumpty making me find him in one of the huge hallways. Maybe if I put in some effort I could complete it… but also I didn’t really feel much of a need to. I feel like faffing about and getting killed for 90 minutes really got me to the yolk of the experience here.
2010
LIMBO starts with you playing as a small child wandering through a forest, braving the many horrors within in pursuit of a mysterious something. After playing the dev’s later effort, INSIDE, going through this game was… interesting, mostly in terms of what seems similar and what the dev team seemed to learn in the years succeeding. For a horror platformer, I wouldn’t really say there’s much of an atmosphere: as opposed to less tangible things sound or music design, most of what you encounter here is rather concrete, from the simple yet evocative enemy designs and the rather brutal death animations that manage to shine even if the monochrome, silhouetted artstyle does a bit more harm than good. Most interesting is how the game seems to draw a bit from masocore performers. You’re expected to die a lot, and generally not for fair reasons. From random traps in the ground, puzzles and mechanics you can only intuit in the heat of the moment, to points where you don’t know what exactly is going to happen, one thing is made clear: this world is cruel, and it’s mostly cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s certainly… bleak — and there’s never any point of relative respite in the middle of it — but it does provide a… relatively unique thematic throughline, one that characterizes the game even in lack of a more abstract atmosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I liked this as much as INSIDE, but as one of the first post-Braid-artsy-indie-puzzle-platformers, it’s fairly solid, and an interesting look at what the landscape of the early indie game boom was li- wait what do you mean there’s still two thirds of the game left to go?
…
…
LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.
The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as I Wanna Be The Guy or Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game, LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.
Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really, really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve never before this point had to go left instead of right.
Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is no wiggle room: you have to find the exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.
Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end. 4/10.
…
…
LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.
The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as I Wanna Be The Guy or Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game, LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.
Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really, really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve never before this point had to go left instead of right.
Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is no wiggle room: you have to find the exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.
Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end. 4/10.
1994
If Alone in the Dark 2 doubles down on the worst parts of its predecessor, Alone in the Dark 3, at the very least, expands on what I most happened to enjoy out of… what was otherwise a rather frustrating follow-up. Key to this is the choice in setting: as a compliment to the pirate themed Alone in the Dark 2, Alone in the Dark 3 goes full spaghetti western, taking you to a full-on ghost town in the middle of the Mojave, fighting zombie cowboys, interacting with… perhaps not the most sensitive depiction of Native American culture. It’s certainly rather unique — compared to the areas typically used even in today’s survival horror — and the game compounds this with a rather irrelevant, oftentimes silly tone. Anything can happen, and the game is not afraid of you not taking it seriously. There’s a section where you reincarnate as a cougar and you kill werewolves. Dropping down holes is the most Looney Tunes animation and it’s a coinflip whether doing so will kill you or let you progress. Carnby states that his current situation has left him Alone in the Dark at least, like, three separate times. It’s goofy as hell, and it’s such a blast. So much of the fun was just seeing what the game was going to do next.
As far as the actual plot goes, you play as Edward Carnby, one of the player characters of the first game, ascended to being the main protagonist in the second. Dubbed the ‘Supernatural Private Eye’ after his previous successes, Carnby receives another case: the disappearance of a film crew in a ghost town, amongst their number Emily Hartwood, the other player character of the first game. Heading into the town to investigate, Carnby soon finds that a curse has overtaken Slaughter Gulch, and a gang of zombie outlaws has taken over the ghost town and dispatched the film crew. Alone, and with no method of escape, Carnby must now delve into the depths of Slaughter Gulch, finding his way through, finding help where he can, all in hopes of eliminating the curse over the ghost town and, hopefully, being able to rescue Emily.
Gameplay-wise, Alone in the Dark 3 certainly feels much more iterated than previous entries. While combat returns, and while it’s still… not quite amazing, it’s dialled way back compared to 2’s constant enemy encounters, and there are also a couple changes that make it much less annoying for the player. Your animations (at least until the endgame…) are much quicker, reducing the chance that a given enemy will just stunlock you to death, you have customizable difficulty modifiers that let you fine-tune things to your choosing, and differing kinds of enemy encounters: ones where your goal is less to shoot what’s on screen, more to solve a puzzle to get them off your back. While I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say I fully liked it, it’s certainly an improvement, and I’d certainly say I preferred fighting enemies here than fighting them in either of the first two games. I also enjoyed the upgrades made to the way the game delivers its background lore. While the pages and pages worth of books were… okay enough to manage in previous games, Alone in the Dark 3 varies its approach: sometimes the pages will be annotated with pictures. Sometimes you’ll get some film and you’ll see a projection of previous events. Sometimes it’ll be addressed directly to you. While the tomes of yore are still present, they’re juxtaposed with other methods of delivering the background lore to you, varying the approach and making it so much more easily digestible.
For every step forward, though, a few are taken back. Scrounging around for items feels so much more finicky than it ever did previously. Even if you can see an item on a table or cupboard or desk, you must use the Search command to initiate a lengthy animation when just walking towards it was enough to work in previous games. The process of using them also feels so randomly specific. You can have the item you need, you can know where to use it, and you’re still going to waste time trying to use it and failing because you haven’t found the exact spot and position the game wants you to use it. Sometimes I felt like the game was glitching out and not letting me progress despite having the correct answer, which really played well when the game started actually glitching out and forcing me to reload near the end. Puzzle solutions feel like they’ve become more esoteric: I think the whole thing with the miner you have to whip/specifically kill with a gold bullet has been covered well enough, but as a whole I’m… not sure how I could’ve solved some of these puzzles, at least without major trial and error. There’s a moment where you have to jump from platform to platform to avoid falling into a river of lava (don’t ask, I don’t know why either) with a core mechanic being to jump on certain pillars to make more pillars emerge from the ground. You reach the end, with one more pillar you need to raise… which doesn’t come up. Is the answer to the conundrum to, say, go back and jump on one of the side pillars you skipped? No, stupid, obviously you need to use the amulet in your inventory you’ve already used before so a Native American man can teleport you across to the end of the cave. Obviously.
(I do also think the game veers a little long: the last third really feels like it should get to the climax quicker. this is more a minor thing imo because this could’ve just been the stress of wanting to beat the game before I had to go to class compounding on me but it really feels like you’re spinning your wheels right up until the end. given that you start getting bottlenecked by combat around this point, given that the game starts glitching out and at some points softblocking you, it’s… sure not a winner. at least gameplay-wise.)
At the very least, though, all the steps back are made up for by all the little gameplay improvements. And even beyond that, the well-realized setting and the bizarre, anything-can-happen tone really boost the game, in both quality and entertainment value. I… tragically wouldn’t go so far as to say I fully liked it — the combat still hasn’t quite aged well, and that last segment truly does its best to end the game on a sour note, length aside — but god did I have fun. Both Alone in the Darks 2 and 3 aren’t generally well remembered as the original nowadays — both because of how hard they diverge in terms of genre, and because the original is just that influential in the history of survival horror — and while I’d say the second is best left that way… I’d definitely make a case for this game. If not a reappraisal — I don’t think it could bear that sort of scrutiny — at least let it be known just how off-the-walls this game can get. It’s certainly a piece of entertainment. 6/10.
As far as the actual plot goes, you play as Edward Carnby, one of the player characters of the first game, ascended to being the main protagonist in the second. Dubbed the ‘Supernatural Private Eye’ after his previous successes, Carnby receives another case: the disappearance of a film crew in a ghost town, amongst their number Emily Hartwood, the other player character of the first game. Heading into the town to investigate, Carnby soon finds that a curse has overtaken Slaughter Gulch, and a gang of zombie outlaws has taken over the ghost town and dispatched the film crew. Alone, and with no method of escape, Carnby must now delve into the depths of Slaughter Gulch, finding his way through, finding help where he can, all in hopes of eliminating the curse over the ghost town and, hopefully, being able to rescue Emily.
Gameplay-wise, Alone in the Dark 3 certainly feels much more iterated than previous entries. While combat returns, and while it’s still… not quite amazing, it’s dialled way back compared to 2’s constant enemy encounters, and there are also a couple changes that make it much less annoying for the player. Your animations (at least until the endgame…) are much quicker, reducing the chance that a given enemy will just stunlock you to death, you have customizable difficulty modifiers that let you fine-tune things to your choosing, and differing kinds of enemy encounters: ones where your goal is less to shoot what’s on screen, more to solve a puzzle to get them off your back. While I wouldn’t necessarily go so far as to say I fully liked it, it’s certainly an improvement, and I’d certainly say I preferred fighting enemies here than fighting them in either of the first two games. I also enjoyed the upgrades made to the way the game delivers its background lore. While the pages and pages worth of books were… okay enough to manage in previous games, Alone in the Dark 3 varies its approach: sometimes the pages will be annotated with pictures. Sometimes you’ll get some film and you’ll see a projection of previous events. Sometimes it’ll be addressed directly to you. While the tomes of yore are still present, they’re juxtaposed with other methods of delivering the background lore to you, varying the approach and making it so much more easily digestible.
For every step forward, though, a few are taken back. Scrounging around for items feels so much more finicky than it ever did previously. Even if you can see an item on a table or cupboard or desk, you must use the Search command to initiate a lengthy animation when just walking towards it was enough to work in previous games. The process of using them also feels so randomly specific. You can have the item you need, you can know where to use it, and you’re still going to waste time trying to use it and failing because you haven’t found the exact spot and position the game wants you to use it. Sometimes I felt like the game was glitching out and not letting me progress despite having the correct answer, which really played well when the game started actually glitching out and forcing me to reload near the end. Puzzle solutions feel like they’ve become more esoteric: I think the whole thing with the miner you have to whip/specifically kill with a gold bullet has been covered well enough, but as a whole I’m… not sure how I could’ve solved some of these puzzles, at least without major trial and error. There’s a moment where you have to jump from platform to platform to avoid falling into a river of lava (don’t ask, I don’t know why either) with a core mechanic being to jump on certain pillars to make more pillars emerge from the ground. You reach the end, with one more pillar you need to raise… which doesn’t come up. Is the answer to the conundrum to, say, go back and jump on one of the side pillars you skipped? No, stupid, obviously you need to use the amulet in your inventory you’ve already used before so a Native American man can teleport you across to the end of the cave. Obviously.
(I do also think the game veers a little long: the last third really feels like it should get to the climax quicker. this is more a minor thing imo because this could’ve just been the stress of wanting to beat the game before I had to go to class compounding on me but it really feels like you’re spinning your wheels right up until the end. given that you start getting bottlenecked by combat around this point, given that the game starts glitching out and at some points softblocking you, it’s… sure not a winner. at least gameplay-wise.)
At the very least, though, all the steps back are made up for by all the little gameplay improvements. And even beyond that, the well-realized setting and the bizarre, anything-can-happen tone really boost the game, in both quality and entertainment value. I… tragically wouldn’t go so far as to say I fully liked it — the combat still hasn’t quite aged well, and that last segment truly does its best to end the game on a sour note, length aside — but god did I have fun. Both Alone in the Darks 2 and 3 aren’t generally well remembered as the original nowadays — both because of how hard they diverge in terms of genre, and because the original is just that influential in the history of survival horror — and while I’d say the second is best left that way… I’d definitely make a case for this game. If not a reappraisal — I don’t think it could bear that sort of scrutiny — at least let it be known just how off-the-walls this game can get. It’s certainly a piece of entertainment. 6/10.
1992
The first survival horror game! Or, well, if not the first survival horror game, it’s at least the first 3D survival horror game. Or, well, if not the first 3D survival horror game, it at least sets up the template that later genre-codifiers such as Resident Evil or Silent Hill would later popularize. Classic conventions of the genre, like exploring a non-linear map, resource scarcity, and inventory management, while iterated and simplified in the years since, originally had their place here. A lot of the issues that the developers had to work around — the use of dramatic, fixed-camera frames, and a control system where you move your character in a way akin to a car in order to obscure that the landscapes you walked around were only 2D images — would be repeated with a degree of intention, even as advancements in technology and processing power meant that later developers would not have to adhere to the limitations Alone in the Dark faced. Even despite predating what it inspired by roughly 4-5 years, Alone in the Dark… honestly still plays exactly like one of its progeny, and while it might be outshone by what came after it, I… definitely still think this game is worth taking a look at, even regardless of its place in history.
You can play as one of two characters: Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood. Regardless of who you pick, the general premise is the same: a man by the name of Jeremy Hartwood has committed suicide by mysterious circumstances, and in the wake of his death, either Edward or Emily has been sent up to his attic to investigate a piano — in Carnby’s case, to obtain it for an antique dealer, and in Emily’s case to try and search for her uncle’s suicide note. Upon making it to the attic, however, they’re placed under siege by monsters, and, afterwards, soon find Hartwood’s mansion cut off from the outside world, and beset with the undead. Now whichever player character you chose must now do their best to scavenge and explore the mansion, avoiding creatures and solving puzzles in order to access new areas, both in hopes of finding a way out, and in hopes of finding out what exactly is haunting the Hartwood mansion.
And for an early work in the genre — and for something that… didn’t quite possess the benefit of knowing where previous survival horror games succeeded and failed — it’s pretty solid. I like the way this game approaches level design. The mansion is large, sprawling, and above all else, open: it’s up to the player to find out what they can access and what they can’t, and through that, what the player needs to do to open up new areas. It creates a nice feedback loop, where by opening up a new area you’re rewarded with the means to open up new areas. The game carries some fairly disparate influences — specifically, the works of H.P Lovecraft, George A. Romero, and Dario Argento — but manages to blend them all together in a way that feels not only seamless, but to the point where the game really feels more like its own thing than it does any of said predecessors. Furthermore, while it… does feel a bit weird to talk about how something being jank actually works for a game’s benefit as if that’s just a core expectation of a survival horror game, there are moments where the limitations of the time manage to enhance the experience. Any point where I had to run away or something, or carefully navigate around traps or enemies, I felt the controls added a little degree of added stress and adrenaline to the equation, and made those parts of the game feel more standout.
Tragically, I do think that other than in that example, the conceits of the time… manifest more as downsides than things that boost the experience. Combat is bad. Instead of just using a weapon, there’s a whole system with equipped weapons where you choose which hand to use and/or which direction to swing. What it intends is a system a bit reminiscent of real-life sword-fighting, where where and when you swing is key to interrupting your enemy and landing a strike. How it works in practice is that you’re beholden to this clunky system where you have to wind your strike up before you can swing, and meanwhile the enemy can attack quickly enough to interrupt your animation before you're ever allowed to attack. Thus, it’s oftentimes a much better idea to avoid combat unless you can actively avoid it — not because of any sense of resource management, or cost vs. gain, but because if you try it’s more likely the enemy is going to stunlock you for half your health before you can even actually land a hit on them. While I do like the contrast in how the last third of the game is much more linear and straightforward than the rest of the mansion, I enjoyed much less how the game becamethe very first a 3D platformer: the clunky jump controls, the camera angles the game chooses, and the steep price for falling into the water definitely made that whole endgame section kind of a slog. It also, coincidentally, throws a bunch of enemy encounters that you can’t really run away from, so the previous issues combined with getting constantly stunlocked by enemies definitely left… a rather low mark on my experience.
Still, though, even if it does feel a little obsolete compared to the games that more directly kickstarted/defined the genre, and even if I certainly had my frustrations going through the game, I do think this is still a game definitely worth experiencing, presuming you want to. Whether it’s because you want to see what inspired the original Resident Evil, or whether you want to play the game on its own terms, it’s absolutely worth taking a look. It’s much closer to its progeny than you might think. 6/10.
You can play as one of two characters: Edward Carnby or Emily Hartwood. Regardless of who you pick, the general premise is the same: a man by the name of Jeremy Hartwood has committed suicide by mysterious circumstances, and in the wake of his death, either Edward or Emily has been sent up to his attic to investigate a piano — in Carnby’s case, to obtain it for an antique dealer, and in Emily’s case to try and search for her uncle’s suicide note. Upon making it to the attic, however, they’re placed under siege by monsters, and, afterwards, soon find Hartwood’s mansion cut off from the outside world, and beset with the undead. Now whichever player character you chose must now do their best to scavenge and explore the mansion, avoiding creatures and solving puzzles in order to access new areas, both in hopes of finding a way out, and in hopes of finding out what exactly is haunting the Hartwood mansion.
And for an early work in the genre — and for something that… didn’t quite possess the benefit of knowing where previous survival horror games succeeded and failed — it’s pretty solid. I like the way this game approaches level design. The mansion is large, sprawling, and above all else, open: it’s up to the player to find out what they can access and what they can’t, and through that, what the player needs to do to open up new areas. It creates a nice feedback loop, where by opening up a new area you’re rewarded with the means to open up new areas. The game carries some fairly disparate influences — specifically, the works of H.P Lovecraft, George A. Romero, and Dario Argento — but manages to blend them all together in a way that feels not only seamless, but to the point where the game really feels more like its own thing than it does any of said predecessors. Furthermore, while it… does feel a bit weird to talk about how something being jank actually works for a game’s benefit as if that’s just a core expectation of a survival horror game, there are moments where the limitations of the time manage to enhance the experience. Any point where I had to run away or something, or carefully navigate around traps or enemies, I felt the controls added a little degree of added stress and adrenaline to the equation, and made those parts of the game feel more standout.
Tragically, I do think that other than in that example, the conceits of the time… manifest more as downsides than things that boost the experience. Combat is bad. Instead of just using a weapon, there’s a whole system with equipped weapons where you choose which hand to use and/or which direction to swing. What it intends is a system a bit reminiscent of real-life sword-fighting, where where and when you swing is key to interrupting your enemy and landing a strike. How it works in practice is that you’re beholden to this clunky system where you have to wind your strike up before you can swing, and meanwhile the enemy can attack quickly enough to interrupt your animation before you're ever allowed to attack. Thus, it’s oftentimes a much better idea to avoid combat unless you can actively avoid it — not because of any sense of resource management, or cost vs. gain, but because if you try it’s more likely the enemy is going to stunlock you for half your health before you can even actually land a hit on them. While I do like the contrast in how the last third of the game is much more linear and straightforward than the rest of the mansion, I enjoyed much less how the game became
Still, though, even if it does feel a little obsolete compared to the games that more directly kickstarted/defined the genre, and even if I certainly had my frustrations going through the game, I do think this is still a game definitely worth experiencing, presuming you want to. Whether it’s because you want to see what inspired the original Resident Evil, or whether you want to play the game on its own terms, it’s absolutely worth taking a look. It’s much closer to its progeny than you might think. 6/10.
2007
I feel like you could madlib reviews for some of these Nitrome games. In particular their 2D platformers: because they tend to suffer from the same strengths and pitfalls. The core strength here is in its central mechanic: pressing the action button to send you careening through the air (like a proto-VVVVVV) walking on the walls and ceilings to find your way through the level. It’s well-realized on its own, and the extra enemies and mechanics do well to vary your approach and provide some frenetic moments but Jesus what’s even the point of having health if over half the obstacles one hit kill you? What’s the point of finding pickups to restore it if you place them before it’s even possible to take damage? How am I meant to experiment and figure out what I need to do if I get instakilled within two seconds of reaching the next part of the level? Like, maybe if it just did damage and levels were a bit more of an endurance test I’d be able to live with it a little better, but it feels so fucking draining to get sent right back to the start despite being on full health, especially given how long individual levels get after a certain point. And I get that maybe I’m just repeating myself at this point but I feel like this is like, the fifth game with these exact problems. I certainly don’t regret doing this project — and even here it’s so fun to see just what exactly I remember playing these games when they were originally released — but at this point I could stand to play something a bit different. It's a bit clear that there's a consistent design ethos between all these different games.
2015
There’s not much that can be said about Morphine that can’t be more adequately gathered by seeing it for yourself. It’s one of those bad creepypasta serial killer fan fiction sort of stories, about a high school student named Peter Bundy and how he’s constantly tor society and also Ted, who’s the leader of both the football team and the Rich Club. Again, you kinda have to play it for yourself to see what I mean, but the stilted, amateurish writing, the overwrought way it handles its content, and the… incredible way it ends lend it a really good so-bad-it’s-good quality, where you’re propelled through just to see what silly shit the next part brings (shoutout to how everybody calls Peter ‘Peter Bunny’ when it was, in fact, Peter Rabbit who had a fly up on his nose) (also shoutout to how the game completely misunderstands what morphine does despite the game being named after it). This is… both accentuated and impeded by the gameplay: while the… distinct graphical style and the cheap, ineffective jumpscares lend something to the charm (<3 the cutscene where the dev clearly didn’t want to animate all the people moving so he just turns the camera away to stare out the window), it’s quite rough to actually play, from rather unclear objectives where you have to search for something but you don’t even know what the something even looks like, this… awful lock-picking minigame, and how the game can at points crash and send you back up to twenty minutes. So long as you can stomach that (presuming you’re even the one playing it), though, you… have something special on your hands here. Great for a laugh with friends.
I’m not a loser!
I’m not a loser!
1993
As a promotional game, meant more to show what Alone in the Dark 2 could offer rather than stand as its own experience, Jack in the Dark, on the surface, seems quite limited. With only one room to walk around, and a handful of puzzles to solve, the whole thing can be completed in ~ten minutes, but even regardless of that there’s a good amount on offer here. The setting of the toy shop is fairly aesthetically pleasing and well-utilized — all the puzzles lean into the setting of the store, near-exclusively using object and enemy models that weren’t otherwise recycled for Alone in the Dark 2. The fixed camera does well to capture some rather clever and cool-looking angles without ever getting in the way or accidentally hiding anything from the player. The rather goofy tone manages to come across even with the little runtime it has, the enemy (and player!) animations being rather charming as they plod across the room and the plot going into… what’s ostensibly a rather off-the-wall direction with an entirely straight face. The limits of this being a tech demo, in a way, become a strength: the game can focus purely on the things it's best at, and strip back most of the systems and complexity that otherwise… have historically held more full-length Alone in the Darks back. Maybe a shame that this is as simple as it is — I would’ve loved to see something like one of Alone in the Dark 2’s stealth sections in here — but I can’t deny that it does basically everything it wants to. It gets into the action, shows off what Alone in the Dark 2’s engine is capable of, and does enough to stand out a little on its own merits, too. Frankly, the fact that I’m left wanting more is a good thing here. Would've loved to have seen this expanded on.
2001
One rather noticeable thing about the first Fatal Frame is that its localization... has issues, at least from my perspective. It’s immediately evident, whether it’s how every single voice actor sounds like they’ve overdosed on cold medicine and really could be doing more important things right now, or the subtle grammar errors — tense, plural conflicts, that thing thing in optical illusions where the last word of one line is repeated as the first word of the next line except that here, here, apparently, it's done completely unknowingly. A friend informed me before I started playing that I’d absolutely need a walkthrough, and while at first I chalked that up to general survival horror esotericness, soon upon starting the game I happened to stumble across a puzzle that was… completely untranslated. I was meant to press four out of ten buttons, on a circular structure, with an epitaph telling me to look at a note I’d collected which had a bunch of numbers highlighted in red. Presuming, maybe, that this was some sort of clock (albeit, one which used specific kanji for the numbers I’d never seen before) I tried to input the numbers roughly where they’d be on a Western clock, only for that to be incorrect. I decided that maybe this was why I was meant to have a walkthrough, looked the answer up, only to find that… I was correct. It was a clock. The buttons on the interface did represent numbers. I just happened to lack the cultural context to know that this specific clock… ran anticlockwise. Something that might have been much easier to figure out had any of the elements of the puzzle itself been translated.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.
You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.
I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.
What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.
However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.
(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)
I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.
At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point — Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA, Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West, Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.
You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.
I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.
What differentiates Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.
However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part, Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.
(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)
I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.
At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it. 8/10.
Man, I wanted to like this game more than I did, especially since it starts out so well. I really love the way this game looks: the way the game integrates its FMV actors into pre-rendered backgrounds without either of these disparate styles clashing with each other, particularly the way both utilize colour scheme in a way to create a sense of seamlessness as to where, say, the FMV ends and the background begins. I liked a lot of the writing, especially how it handles its tone: the game really manages to capture the feel of, like, this grand historical adventure fun for the whole family (with an understated, yet effective sense of humour) but also, at points, becomes genuinely kinda grim in a way that’s rather dark for a piece of edutainment software, partially in some of the ways it shows the living conditions of the time and particularly in the story of its main character: what he goes through, and what he gets. I also appreciate how it attempts to cover subject matter in its historical period that might not be as well known as what’s in the public consciousness: rather than the direct conflict of the Crusades, it instead chooses to cover the internal conflict that resulted in the fall of Jerusalem. Instead of starring, say, the English or the Byzantines, it instead takes a uniquely French perspective on the time period, with an eye towards showing the Franc end of the conflict. This theoretically sets the stage really well to be a comprehensive learning tool, veering away from what the player is likely to already know in a way that encourages the beginning of an in-depth coverage of this particular period of history.
Unfortunately... I'm aware this is mostly a bit of a me thing, but also I think this game does have issues as a piece of edutainment software. The main way the game teaches about the historical period it covers is through the in-game encyclopedia: a fairly extensive tome for which reading and recalling it is key to solving the game's puzzles. This works really well!... if you're somebody who learns by reading and writing. If you're not — if, say, you have cognitive stuff that makes focusing on something and retaining the information from it really difficult — it's kind of painful, and on my end it eventually devolved into an exercise of brute forcing the puzzles, pixel hunting for things in the background, doing my best to try and focus on what the encyclopedia was saying... but eventually devolving into skimming because trying as such exhausted me, something not helped by how this game, I felt, veered a good bit longer than it should. And if going through an encyclopedia, looking for the fun facts you need to progress through, isn't quite how you learn, then... what this game offers in terms of edutainment is rather surface-level: perhaps if one was going through this without much historical or religious context then they'd learn something, but mostly what I got were things about the Crusades and Islam that I already knew from osmosis. Perhaps if I were more capable of being able to use the in-game encyclopedia then I would've been able to get more out of this, but if I wanted to try and fail to get something out of whatever wall of text is put in front of me, I'd rather just go back to high school.
Unfortunately... I'm aware this is mostly a bit of a me thing, but also I think this game does have issues as a piece of edutainment software. The main way the game teaches about the historical period it covers is through the in-game encyclopedia: a fairly extensive tome for which reading and recalling it is key to solving the game's puzzles. This works really well!... if you're somebody who learns by reading and writing. If you're not — if, say, you have cognitive stuff that makes focusing on something and retaining the information from it really difficult — it's kind of painful, and on my end it eventually devolved into an exercise of brute forcing the puzzles, pixel hunting for things in the background, doing my best to try and focus on what the encyclopedia was saying... but eventually devolving into skimming because trying as such exhausted me, something not helped by how this game, I felt, veered a good bit longer than it should. And if going through an encyclopedia, looking for the fun facts you need to progress through, isn't quite how you learn, then... what this game offers in terms of edutainment is rather surface-level: perhaps if one was going through this without much historical or religious context then they'd learn something, but mostly what I got were things about the Crusades and Islam that I already knew from osmosis. Perhaps if I were more capable of being able to use the in-game encyclopedia then I would've been able to get more out of this, but if I wanted to try and fail to get something out of whatever wall of text is put in front of me, I'd rather just go back to high school.
2007
This was my Sonic as a kid. And honestly, playing it today, the comparison feels rather akin to my impression of what the 2D Sonic games are like. You control a cable car, tasked with driving it through the level, avoiding the obstacles along the way, and what’s most important is your momentum: you can go fast, of course, but that’ll often just lead you to crash directly into something, or lose control and flip over. You can take it slow… but oftentimes you’ll need to hit something at a certain speed to get past it. It becomes a matter of knowing what’s coming ahead and knowing what speed you want to hit it at, and, as you begin to get more familiar with the level, refining your movement over and over again until you can attain the most optimal path through the level. It’s a fun loop, and levels are generally short enough that it’s loosely addicting to try, try again at each death until you eventually get the winning run. And once again Nitrome does an excellent job at mixing and matching all their different elements to make each level feel distinct from the other: even something as simple as moving left through the entire level brings so many things you have to learn and consider. I’m maybe not as into how little you get to see ahead of yourself — sometimes you won’t be able to do a section first try because you straight up won’t see it coming until you’re past the point where you can reorient/change your speed. The last level, too, is also… a rather lame way to finish the game off, supplanting what was a pretty inventive and challenging and fun climax with something much lamer, demanding a kind of ridiculous precision and not even having the courtesy to end right after the level’s most difficult point, forcing you to have to do it over and over again just to have a chance at doing the rest of the level. It… kinda sucks, and maybe eclipsed the rest of the game enough to derail my feelings about the experience as a whole but barring that this is a recommendation. It’s cute, it’s got a neat core mechanic, and it bends and tests your mastery of it in a way that really scratches that difficult game itch. Maybe not Nitrome firing on all cylinders... but it sure gets pretty close.
2007
Nitrome’s first multiplayer game, and, as if to celebrate the occasion, a game that seems geared under the assumption you’re doing it co-op. You play as a troll (or as two trolls!) trapped inside a dungeon, the only way of escaping being to eat every other living thing inside. It feels… a lot like a top-down Kirby, if Kirby’s abilities ended at being able to suck things in and then projectile-spit them out: to beat enemies, you must first stun them by eating a part of the environment, which you then spit out to stun and then, hopefully, eat them. This game feels… slow: you can only complete levels once all enemies are dead, and this is a whole process of finding a block, spitting it at the enemy (potentially having to wait for it to start moving if it is one of the “I’m a turtle who’s invincible when I’m in my shell” dudes) and then walking over to eat it, all while levels tend to have at least ten enemies. Presumably, this is much smoother in co-op, where you and your partner can split off and do two things at once, but even then, this game feels too simple and braindead in difficulty to feel fun or rewarding to play. There are a bunch of different block types which all interact differently with you swallowing them up/spitting them out, in addition to all the different enemy types, but you stop seeing new things after the first third of the game, and even as late as the penultimate level you’re still dealing with the same enemies as you did right at the beginning, and while there are… sometimes frantic, sometimes finicky moments and mechanics, these are dispersed through a whopping 50 total levels (when the most a Nitrome game had before this was a measly 30) which mostly feel like a slow, inevitable trod to victory. When I was a kid, and when a lot of other Nitrome games weren’t ones I managed to beat, it felt great to actually clear one of these (and correctly guess what I at the time thought was a twist ending in the process). Now that I’m older, and now that I’m much more able to work through what… do still genuinely feel rather difficult, beating this doesn’t feel as rewarding or fun anymore.
2007
Skywire is a game where you use the arrow keys to move a gondola across a linear path, avoiding all the obstacles in your path in hopes of getting at least one of your passengers to the end of the stage. What initially seems like mostly a matter of proper timing soon, however, betrays a fairly complex system revolving around gravity, and how that impacts your momentum: the path curves up or down, the former causing your gondola to move slower, the latter causing you to rocket forward, even if you’re not holding that specific direction. Soon it becomes a matter of controlling your momentum — knowing how long in advance you need to start climbing something, knowing when exactly to start slowing your roll so that you don’t accidentally veer directly into another obstacle, and, sometimes, knowing exactly when you can abuse i-frames to gun it to the end. Its simplicity is complex, and the varying obstacles are mixed and matched in a way Nitrome is clearly adept at at this point. There are… technical issues — obstacles that spawn right on top of you in a way that’ll force you to lose a life unless you explicitly know they’re coming, obstacles with funky hitboxes that at points guarantee you lose a life when the level forces you close up to them — and there are some levels which are, like, three minutes of waiting for obstacles to go through their cycles (which if you mess up sends you right back to the beginning) but as a whole this is definitely the first game I’d consider to be above 'pretty good': just really solid execution where its quibbles don't hold it back as much. Plus! Iconic music! And uploaded to YouTube with decent recording quality this time! Can’t wait to replay the sequel and remember just how it iterates.
2023
The story of Garten of Banban is a simple one: somebody makes a thing, somebody else calls the thing cringe, everybody dogpiles on it, and the thing gains attention and sales and notoriety it wouldn't have gotten had it never received that initial derision. In the case of Banban, somebody made a tweet making fun of how they were already trying to sell merch upon just releasing the game, causing a snowball of Youtubers and other commentators decrying the game as the ‘death of mascot horror.’ How Garten of Banban represented the apex point in how indie horror had ‘fallen’ into a vector of cheap commercialization: the use of lore and episodic releases merely a vehicle to sell merchandise (which, believe me, real rich when those critiques come from the Bendy & The Ink Machine dev). This brought upon a wave of people to shit on the game, in a way that pretty directly gave it success in a way the developers had never been able to capture before — I was loosely aware of their output before they released Banban, and lemme tell you, they weren’t exactly doing numbers before it became cool to dunk on them. It’s the type of thing where the hate train based on its obvious bid for commercialization vs. low quality gave it the exact attention it wanted, one where the game itself isn’t as important but what it represents, and what it then managed to do.
So what’s the game actually like?
…It’s mostly just kind of whatever.
Not good, mind you, but not nearly worth the attention it got, nor does it really deserve to be amongst the worst games ever. Frankly, playing it, I was mostly just amused by just how hard it apes from Poppy Playtime’s first episode. It’s far more well known today about how its attempt at making as much money as possible caused it to burn out and lose all the goodwill it had, but something people tend to forget about Poppy Playtime is that part of how it got the opportunity to get to that point was because of the genuine promise its first episode showed. It had a really solid core mechanic and some neat puzzles to go along with it. The chase scene at the end is a rather well-done climax, forcing you to think on your feet and working well to pay off all the tension that'd been slowly building as you went deeper and deeper — as the reception area became a factory, and as it slowly became clear that something's wrong with the place around you.
Garten of Banban tries these things… and doesn’t quite reach the same success. The drone you direct around the facility mostly just feels like it’s there so the game actually has mechanics, and it’s clunky and finicky and awkward to direct around, especially when you’re trying to change its vertical position or corral it through a door. The one puzzle the game has is braindead until it's not, the last step requiring rather specific use of the drone in an unclear order of operations which makes it feel rather oblique. It never really quite makes use of its setting: while Poppy Playtime uses its setting in a factory to inform its puzzles/setpieces and let the player do fun things, it feels like you could transplant Garten of Banban to virtually anywhere else and it’d play the same way (you don’t even get to go down the slide :c). Any attempts at building tension, or atmosphere don’t work. The messages on the wall might be a decent idea, but the writing chops are not there to make it work, and all the attempts at having the kindergarten… teacher… mascot… things try and be scary just feel laughable: the weird and simplistic designs combined with their really loud colours just makes anything they do feel rather goofy.
Its attempt at imitating the climactic chase sequence of Poppy Playtime’s first episode is also rather ineffective. While I do like the idea of Opila Bird’s AI trying to imitate a bird of prey, the setting fails to take advantage of any of that: depending on your positioning when the chase starts you’re either immediately fucked or can clear the whole thing in like, five seconds. There’s no music, no difference in the sound design, no real attempt at a change in tone to signify that this is the big climactic threat: it’s treated with the exact same gravitas as everything else you’ve done up to that point. The main reaction I had upon completing the chase was ‘wait, that’s it?’ spending what was left assuming that something more would happen, beyond the "oh boy, next episode's gonna be real wild!" cliffhanger I knew wouldn't mean anything. That there'd be something concrete, here and now, that’d deliver a tangible climax. That there’d be one last attempt at a scare.
…There wasn’t.
Frankly, I’m not sure I can name anything this game executed to its intended effect, but on the other hand, I personally can’t manifest enough in me to truly dislike or hate this. Like, it functions, it's short, I wasn’t actively having to fight the game to try and beat it, most of its flaws just feel... goofy, if anything. Is it good? No. Should my score for this maybe be lower? Probably. Is it really worth all the vitriol, all the negative attention, all the claims that this game is the death of indie horror as we know it? Frankly, I don’t see it. 3/10.
So what’s the game actually like?
…It’s mostly just kind of whatever.
Not good, mind you, but not nearly worth the attention it got, nor does it really deserve to be amongst the worst games ever. Frankly, playing it, I was mostly just amused by just how hard it apes from Poppy Playtime’s first episode. It’s far more well known today about how its attempt at making as much money as possible caused it to burn out and lose all the goodwill it had, but something people tend to forget about Poppy Playtime is that part of how it got the opportunity to get to that point was because of the genuine promise its first episode showed. It had a really solid core mechanic and some neat puzzles to go along with it. The chase scene at the end is a rather well-done climax, forcing you to think on your feet and working well to pay off all the tension that'd been slowly building as you went deeper and deeper — as the reception area became a factory, and as it slowly became clear that something's wrong with the place around you.
Garten of Banban tries these things… and doesn’t quite reach the same success. The drone you direct around the facility mostly just feels like it’s there so the game actually has mechanics, and it’s clunky and finicky and awkward to direct around, especially when you’re trying to change its vertical position or corral it through a door. The one puzzle the game has is braindead until it's not, the last step requiring rather specific use of the drone in an unclear order of operations which makes it feel rather oblique. It never really quite makes use of its setting: while Poppy Playtime uses its setting in a factory to inform its puzzles/setpieces and let the player do fun things, it feels like you could transplant Garten of Banban to virtually anywhere else and it’d play the same way (you don’t even get to go down the slide :c). Any attempts at building tension, or atmosphere don’t work. The messages on the wall might be a decent idea, but the writing chops are not there to make it work, and all the attempts at having the kindergarten… teacher… mascot… things try and be scary just feel laughable: the weird and simplistic designs combined with their really loud colours just makes anything they do feel rather goofy.
Its attempt at imitating the climactic chase sequence of Poppy Playtime’s first episode is also rather ineffective. While I do like the idea of Opila Bird’s AI trying to imitate a bird of prey, the setting fails to take advantage of any of that: depending on your positioning when the chase starts you’re either immediately fucked or can clear the whole thing in like, five seconds. There’s no music, no difference in the sound design, no real attempt at a change in tone to signify that this is the big climactic threat: it’s treated with the exact same gravitas as everything else you’ve done up to that point. The main reaction I had upon completing the chase was ‘wait, that’s it?’ spending what was left assuming that something more would happen, beyond the "oh boy, next episode's gonna be real wild!" cliffhanger I knew wouldn't mean anything. That there'd be something concrete, here and now, that’d deliver a tangible climax. That there’d be one last attempt at a scare.
…There wasn’t.
Frankly, I’m not sure I can name anything this game executed to its intended effect, but on the other hand, I personally can’t manifest enough in me to truly dislike or hate this. Like, it functions, it's short, I wasn’t actively having to fight the game to try and beat it, most of its flaws just feel... goofy, if anything. Is it good? No. Should my score for this maybe be lower? Probably. Is it really worth all the vitriol, all the negative attention, all the claims that this game is the death of indie horror as we know it? Frankly, I don’t see it. 3/10.
The original Alone in the Dark, while certainly not the first survival horror, planted the seeds for which the genre would soon flourish. The story goes that it served as direct inspiration for the original Resident Evil, which would then define and popularize what survival horror was and would be for the next few years. Where, then, does that leave Alone in the Dark, having not had another release since the underperformance of Alone in the Dark 3? Reinvigorated, apparently. The success of Resident Evil brought forward a slew of other studios trying their hand at survival horror, one amongst their number Infogrames, the original developers for Alone in the Dark, who hired developer Darkworks to capitalize on its status of fathering many of the things that Resident Evil went on to popularize. This… was loosely a double-edged sword, however. While it is true that many particular aspects — the mansion setting, giving their player a choice of two different campaigns to go through — were things originally devised by Infogrames, Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare ends up feeling more like Resident Evil than any of its survival horror contemporaries, and in some ways feels like an imitation: a comparison that does not lend New Nightmare any particular favours.
New Nightmare imagines itself a reboot of the original Alone in the Dark, and as part of that, reimagines the series for the (at-the-time) modern day. You have the choice of playing as either Aline Cedrac, a young university professor searching for her missing father (a spiritual successor to the original Alone in the Dark’s female PC, Emily Hartwood), and Edward Carnby, a private investigator and possible descendant of the Carnby you played in the three AitD games preceding. When Carnby’s close friend winds up dead after attempting to investigate mysterious goings on at Shadow Island. Teaming up with Aline to investigate, their attempt at approaching the island is foiled as their plane crashes, leaving both separated as it soon becomes clear there are dangerous forces on Shadow Island. Regardless of whether you're Aline or Carnby, it’s up to whoever you pick to reunite yourself with the other character, find out the goings on of the island, and try and stop the Morton family, and their attempts to bring about the... "World of Darkness(c)."
The game does a decent job of making both these campaigns feel distinct from each other. While it doesn’t particularly matter doing both, or which one you do first — ala Resident Evil 2’s Leon/Claire A/B routes — the game you play is considerably different depending on who you choose to play as in the beginning. Each character takes a separate path through the game, does different things at different times, and goes through whole areas the other player character doesn’t, up to the point where both main characters have different final areas and bosses. Playing as Carnby hews a bit closer to your traditional survival horror experience: you’re given ammo from the start, you’re able to scrounge for resources, you must solve puzzles and fight increasingly tough enemies in order to find your way out. Aline, however… plays loosely like a proto ObsCure. Emphasis on loosely: because she’s a woman Aline doesn’t get to start with weapons like Carnby does, and instead must use her flashlight to repel monsters, either to kill them directly, get enough distance for you to get out of the room, or for you to find the lightswitch and instantly kill everything in the room. It’s… rather clunky in execution (and the game does go back to familiar survival horror tropes after a certain point, giving you weapons and pitting you against a Nemesis-like recurring boss) but I love there’s a concerted effort into making both characters feel different to play. Really works to add replay value (even if I was rather ready to call it quits once I’d gotten a cursory taste for how Aline played like), and it makes those moments of slight intersection — meeting the other character face to face, having them radio you what you need to do — a little bit potent, making you curious about what's going on in the other side of the story.
It’s a bit of a pity, otherwise, that this game doesn’t particularly iterate much on the formula it takes from. Or even particularly feel like its own thing. If you’ve played the original Resident Evil... you haven’t quite played Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, but you’re certainly not playing anything you haven’t played before. Again, it could merely be a consequence of how the original Resident Evil took inspiration from Alone in the Dark — and how any subsequent attempt to make a new Alone in the Dark would then provoke comparisons — but I think the real problem is that anything it does to stand out does not stand out for the better. Aline’s flashlight combat immediately shows how clunky it feels to use: feeling visually unclear whether your flashlight is damaging the enemy or merely forcing it to move, having to hold the flashlight in place for a long time before it kills the enemy/pushes it back far enough to matter, and enemies having long enough range that they can attack you from halfway across the room the moment you dare move the flashlight off them. Carnby (or even Aline, once she gets methods of fighting back) doesn’t fare much better: enemies freely, constantly respawn upon you killing them, which… is loosely horrible juxtaposed to the limited resources you’re capable of picking up. It’s never worth killing anything you theoretically could avoid, given they’ll come back the moment you re-enter the room, and eventually most rooms become flooded by enemies you’re just constantly running from. You have more ammo than you need to be able to get through everything, sure, but it doesn’t stop combat from feeling mostly irritating: fighting the same enemies again after going in and out of a room, getting hit an enemy spawned right in front of you when you entered a room, having to backtrack and having to duck and weave around every enemy on your way there and back.
There are other things that bog the experience down. The game goes rather overboard with its background lore: while previous Alone in the Dark games (and survival horror as a genre) were fond of their diary entries explaining the background lore, it never went quite so far as to give you any that was nearly 50 pages long. Nor do they ever tend to give three 15+ page diaries one right after the other. The game is kind enough to highlight any information you actually need to progress through the game but I feel like if the goal was for the player to understand the grander picture of what went on in the past that particular approach feels rather counterintuitive: if the player (especially someone who… rather struggles to learn via merely reading the information, like me) isn’t immediately compelled to skip it all under the sheer weight of how much there is to read, it’s rather difficult to retain anything in particular when it’s all dropped on you at once, and when it’s all in the midst of so many other things. The game feels… quite buggy and unfinished in places: there’s a boss I faced with Carnby, who, because I had happened to save in a specific room, would not go through its death animation upon reaching 0 HP unless you hit it during a certain part of its pattern, which caused me, at least, to reload the fight several times wondering what exactly I was doing wrong (not helped by the rather specific/non-indicative way of actually doing damage to it). The final area… is aesthetically interesting in how it jumps between several different biomes and inspirations, but is a total slog to play: throwing endless respawning enemies in your face as you wander through constant mazes all while you think ‘okay, this has gone on long enough, maybe the end is somewhat soon’ right before it gives you another maze for you to find the exit to. It’s mitigated, partially, because it gives you a gun that obliterates everything it comes in contact with and respawns ammo for it everywhere, but it’s rather clear just by spending what felt like a full hour inside it that it doesn’t feel quite as polished as the previous two acts of the game, and as a finale… is certainly the weakest point of the game.
Overall… this is honestly rather complicated to talk about. While I certainly do like the way the game utilizes its choice between which character you play as (and, in addition, what campaign you go through), it’s a bit hard to talk about how the game mostly… just feels like I’m playing a knockoff Resident Evil. Most of what it does competently is something I feel other games of the time did well, and the things that do differentiate itself from the pack… aren’t exactly fantastic. As a game meant to revive Alone in the Dark as a big name for the horror genre (the credits outright say “Edward Carnby will return”), The New Nightmare feels like a thing of the past compared to its contemporaries, and perhaps not the boost needed to bring the series into the modern day. 5/10. And while Darkworks’ attempts at a direct followup eventually became something else entirely, Edward Carnby did, eventually, return… for better or worse…
New Nightmare imagines itself a reboot of the original Alone in the Dark, and as part of that, reimagines the series for the (at-the-time) modern day. You have the choice of playing as either Aline Cedrac, a young university professor searching for her missing father (a spiritual successor to the original Alone in the Dark’s female PC, Emily Hartwood), and Edward Carnby, a private investigator and possible descendant of the Carnby you played in the three AitD games preceding. When Carnby’s close friend winds up dead after attempting to investigate mysterious goings on at Shadow Island. Teaming up with Aline to investigate, their attempt at approaching the island is foiled as their plane crashes, leaving both separated as it soon becomes clear there are dangerous forces on Shadow Island. Regardless of whether you're Aline or Carnby, it’s up to whoever you pick to reunite yourself with the other character, find out the goings on of the island, and try and stop the Morton family, and their attempts to bring about the... "World of Darkness
The game does a decent job of making both these campaigns feel distinct from each other. While it doesn’t particularly matter doing both, or which one you do first — ala Resident Evil 2’s Leon/Claire A/B routes — the game you play is considerably different depending on who you choose to play as in the beginning. Each character takes a separate path through the game, does different things at different times, and goes through whole areas the other player character doesn’t, up to the point where both main characters have different final areas and bosses. Playing as Carnby hews a bit closer to your traditional survival horror experience: you’re given ammo from the start, you’re able to scrounge for resources, you must solve puzzles and fight increasingly tough enemies in order to find your way out. Aline, however… plays loosely like a proto ObsCure. Emphasis on loosely: because she’s a woman Aline doesn’t get to start with weapons like Carnby does, and instead must use her flashlight to repel monsters, either to kill them directly, get enough distance for you to get out of the room, or for you to find the lightswitch and instantly kill everything in the room. It’s… rather clunky in execution (and the game does go back to familiar survival horror tropes after a certain point, giving you weapons and pitting you against a Nemesis-like recurring boss) but I love there’s a concerted effort into making both characters feel different to play. Really works to add replay value (even if I was rather ready to call it quits once I’d gotten a cursory taste for how Aline played like), and it makes those moments of slight intersection — meeting the other character face to face, having them radio you what you need to do — a little bit potent, making you curious about what's going on in the other side of the story.
It’s a bit of a pity, otherwise, that this game doesn’t particularly iterate much on the formula it takes from. Or even particularly feel like its own thing. If you’ve played the original Resident Evil... you haven’t quite played Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare, but you’re certainly not playing anything you haven’t played before. Again, it could merely be a consequence of how the original Resident Evil took inspiration from Alone in the Dark — and how any subsequent attempt to make a new Alone in the Dark would then provoke comparisons — but I think the real problem is that anything it does to stand out does not stand out for the better. Aline’s flashlight combat immediately shows how clunky it feels to use: feeling visually unclear whether your flashlight is damaging the enemy or merely forcing it to move, having to hold the flashlight in place for a long time before it kills the enemy/pushes it back far enough to matter, and enemies having long enough range that they can attack you from halfway across the room the moment you dare move the flashlight off them. Carnby (or even Aline, once she gets methods of fighting back) doesn’t fare much better: enemies freely, constantly respawn upon you killing them, which… is loosely horrible juxtaposed to the limited resources you’re capable of picking up. It’s never worth killing anything you theoretically could avoid, given they’ll come back the moment you re-enter the room, and eventually most rooms become flooded by enemies you’re just constantly running from. You have more ammo than you need to be able to get through everything, sure, but it doesn’t stop combat from feeling mostly irritating: fighting the same enemies again after going in and out of a room, getting hit an enemy spawned right in front of you when you entered a room, having to backtrack and having to duck and weave around every enemy on your way there and back.
There are other things that bog the experience down. The game goes rather overboard with its background lore: while previous Alone in the Dark games (and survival horror as a genre) were fond of their diary entries explaining the background lore, it never went quite so far as to give you any that was nearly 50 pages long. Nor do they ever tend to give three 15+ page diaries one right after the other. The game is kind enough to highlight any information you actually need to progress through the game but I feel like if the goal was for the player to understand the grander picture of what went on in the past that particular approach feels rather counterintuitive: if the player (especially someone who… rather struggles to learn via merely reading the information, like me) isn’t immediately compelled to skip it all under the sheer weight of how much there is to read, it’s rather difficult to retain anything in particular when it’s all dropped on you at once, and when it’s all in the midst of so many other things. The game feels… quite buggy and unfinished in places: there’s a boss I faced with Carnby, who, because I had happened to save in a specific room, would not go through its death animation upon reaching 0 HP unless you hit it during a certain part of its pattern, which caused me, at least, to reload the fight several times wondering what exactly I was doing wrong (not helped by the rather specific/non-indicative way of actually doing damage to it). The final area… is aesthetically interesting in how it jumps between several different biomes and inspirations, but is a total slog to play: throwing endless respawning enemies in your face as you wander through constant mazes all while you think ‘okay, this has gone on long enough, maybe the end is somewhat soon’ right before it gives you another maze for you to find the exit to. It’s mitigated, partially, because it gives you a gun that obliterates everything it comes in contact with and respawns ammo for it everywhere, but it’s rather clear just by spending what felt like a full hour inside it that it doesn’t feel quite as polished as the previous two acts of the game, and as a finale… is certainly the weakest point of the game.
Overall… this is honestly rather complicated to talk about. While I certainly do like the way the game utilizes its choice between which character you play as (and, in addition, what campaign you go through), it’s a bit hard to talk about how the game mostly… just feels like I’m playing a knockoff Resident Evil. Most of what it does competently is something I feel other games of the time did well, and the things that do differentiate itself from the pack… aren’t exactly fantastic. As a game meant to revive Alone in the Dark as a big name for the horror genre (the credits outright say “Edward Carnby will return”), The New Nightmare feels like a thing of the past compared to its contemporaries, and perhaps not the boost needed to bring the series into the modern day. 5/10. And while Darkworks’ attempts at a direct followup eventually became something else entirely, Edward Carnby did, eventually, return… for better or worse…
2006
According to an interview, Hot Air — Nitrome’s first game — was allegedly inspired by Lemmings, with one of the developers getting the inspiration by using the fan tool in Lemmings 2. Sandman, their second game, takes its inspiration more directly. Your goal is to guide a bunch of sleepwalkers through fifteen levels by sprinkling sand on the ground, either to force them to change direction and stop them from killing themselves, or to change the terrain to allow them to scale walls. It’s simple, and… unlike Hot Air, mostly remains that way. While new obstacles, like instant death water, or evil sleepwalkers who will kill your sleepwalkers on touch, are added in as the game progresses, there’s no real spike in difficulty, and remains fairly basic from beginning to end. This is… more to its detriment, than anything. While there are moments of tension where you spend the entire level thinking on your feet, and levels where you have to figure out where exactly you’re meant to place your sand, the game, otherwise, is overtly willing to take it slow, trapping your sleepwalkers in one area while the player can do everything they need to beat the level. It’s fun, certainly, and there’s a decent cerebral loop in terms of figuring out what you’re meant to do, but as a whole… this is a game that really wears its particular influences on its sleeves, and while decent, doesn’t particularly stand out on its own because of it.
As a side note, as one of the (few) games so far ported out of Flash, I thought “okay, so I won’t run into anything that stops me from beating the game like in Hot Air,” I started it in HTML5 and for the most part that was true… but then I reached the end of level eight and the Sleepwalkers weren’t inclined to go through the gate, no matter what I did. I tried restarting to see if it was a one-off, and (after fighting through another glitch where your additions to the terrain stick around even after a restart) found that I couldn't actually beat the level. I was ready to call it a day and a DNF, but… then I returned to the Flash version and found that neither of those glitches were in effect there. While there did seem to be lag in how much sand you could put down, and while there seemed to be a different glitch where sometimes the Sleepwalkers would just ignore you when you did the thing that’s meant to change the direction they go in… the emulated version on flash runs better than the HTML 5 port? Maybe there are bugs only present in this particular port, but… I wouldn’t lie in that this might not bode well for the future…
As a side note, as one of the (few) games so far ported out of Flash, I thought “okay, so I won’t run into anything that stops me from beating the game like in Hot Air,” I started it in HTML5 and for the most part that was true… but then I reached the end of level eight and the Sleepwalkers weren’t inclined to go through the gate, no matter what I did. I tried restarting to see if it was a one-off, and (after fighting through another glitch where your additions to the terrain stick around even after a restart) found that I couldn't actually beat the level. I was ready to call it a day and a DNF, but… then I returned to the Flash version and found that neither of those glitches were in effect there. While there did seem to be lag in how much sand you could put down, and while there seemed to be a different glitch where sometimes the Sleepwalkers would just ignore you when you did the thing that’s meant to change the direction they go in… the emulated version on flash runs better than the HTML 5 port? Maybe there are bugs only present in this particular port, but… I wouldn’t lie in that this might not bode well for the future…