radradradish
2021
man the real horror game is just how shitty the apartment you live in is, like seriously the first ten percent of the game is just coming home, doing the rounds, thinking something spooky's about to happen in your apartment but then realizing that no your laundry's eminating smoke because your apartment's just that shitty. it's hilarious
Otherwise... there's at least a neat concept here. You enter your home, find out somebody's murdered your girlfriend, and that you have eight minutes to figure out who they are and find a way to defend yourself before they come over to your place. It's a cool concept, and I like the feeling of frantically rushing around your shitty apartment trying to remember (or, well, find in this case, but it's the main protagonist trying to remember) where you put all your previously useless garbage... the main problem is that it takes half the game to even reach that point, and then three-quarters of the actual gameplay is spent trying to figure out who it could possibly be trying to kill you (when from the opening cutscene the culprit is INCREDIBLY obvious) instead of doing things like trying to run, blockade your home, try to figure out an escape route etc. etc. It's a neat concept wasted on something a bit too bogged down by a story that... doesn't need as much there as it does (seriously, why is the mystery aspect there at all) and combined with a really poor English translation and confusion as to who's speaking during some of the cutscene... my time with this game was okay enough, but I can't help but feel like there's potential for it to have been a lot better. 5/10.
Otherwise... there's at least a neat concept here. You enter your home, find out somebody's murdered your girlfriend, and that you have eight minutes to figure out who they are and find a way to defend yourself before they come over to your place. It's a cool concept, and I like the feeling of frantically rushing around your shitty apartment trying to remember (or, well, find in this case, but it's the main protagonist trying to remember) where you put all your previously useless garbage... the main problem is that it takes half the game to even reach that point, and then three-quarters of the actual gameplay is spent trying to figure out who it could possibly be trying to kill you (when from the opening cutscene the culprit is INCREDIBLY obvious) instead of doing things like trying to run, blockade your home, try to figure out an escape route etc. etc. It's a neat concept wasted on something a bit too bogged down by a story that... doesn't need as much there as it does (seriously, why is the mystery aspect there at all) and combined with a really poor English translation and confusion as to who's speaking during some of the cutscene... my time with this game was okay enough, but I can't help but feel like there's potential for it to have been a lot better. 5/10.
2022
Iron Lung is a game where you pilot a submarine through an ocean of blood on an alien moon, instructed to traverse the seafloor and take pictures of landmarks. As you cannot see outside the ship, barring taking photos, most of what you do is push buttons on the submarine controls, watch the coordinates go up and down, cross-check them with the map to approximate where you are, and it’s… surprisingly super engaging? Even before the horror elements set in, there’s a lot of fun in plotting where you’re going to go, figuring out how to get there, and dealing with all the obstacles along the way — every time I had to navigate my way through a tunnel felt genuinely tense, but when I managed to make it through to the other side I felt… honestly pretty excited for having been able to do that. The game also does a fairly excellent job at slow-building for something that’s only 90 minutes long, and the retro aesthetic, rustic colours, and the… unique premise create an atmosphere that carries and characterizes the whole experience. All in all… yeah, I’d say this is pretty great. Easily the winner of all the games I played on Halloween. 8/10.
1999
So I’ll fully confess: until I played Silent Hill for the first time, I never actually knew what all those ‘PSX retro horror’ indie games were actually drawing inspiration from, aesthetically. Like, I’d seen games on the Playstation before, but never anything that really… looked like what these people were going for. Even now that I’ve played it, I still feel that there’s a pretty clear distance between how PSX games look and how these throwback indie titles look, and I think at least a little of that is mostly due to intention: while the retro throwback games adapt this style and tend to exaggerate it in order to simulate an idea of what games looked like during that time, Silent Hill’s graphics which… seem legitimately an attempt to push the envelope of the time, with touches added to fight technical limitations and issues. I’ve always stressed that there’s a difference between ‘graphics’ and ‘artstyle’ — and that while there’s always been a push for graphical fidelity I’ve always felt artstyle to be more important, both to establish visual identity and to age the game well a generation down the line — and Silent Hill, to me, represents that balance quite well, blending (at the time) cutting-edge graphics with a distinct and memorable artstyle that still produces fans and imitators, even over twenty years down the line.
You play as Harry Mason, who, after a car crash, wakes up in the strange town of Silent Hill without his daughter (seven years old, short black hair, her name is Cheryl, she’s his daughter) by his side. He soon finds that the town is filled with mist and monsters, and, even worse, as he traverses through locations in an attempt to find his daughter, he finds the presence of the Otherworld — the ground below his feet changing at what seems like a whim to expose the true evil underneath the place. Armed with a map, a gun, and a revolving cast of residents and fellow outsiders, Harry must figure out what exactly lies at the centre of the Otherworld, save his daughter, and escape the town of Silent Hill alive.
I’ve heard that a lot of games in the golden era of survival horror often worked to mask their technical issues, or turn them around so that these limitations instead work in the game’s favour, and the original Silent Hill exemplifies this ethos to great effect. The fog that permeates the overworld — allegedly placed to hide issues with the rendering distance — works both to provide an eerie, unearthly aesthetic to the town, and also allows the player to enter Harry's shoes a little bit and feel how he feels. Because the fog covers up nearly everything beyond a couple metres of you — and given just how large and long the roads are — you never quite know where you are even if you know where you’re going, forcing the player to constantly check the map in order to figure out your position compared to everything else, which super simulates the feeling of desperately trying to navigate but just being lost in all the fog and unfamiliar landscape around you.
Speaking of maps: I really like how important navigation is! The various maps you pick up over the course of the game are required tools to traverse Silent Hill, and Harry is often forced to get out his red pen to point at potentially important places or cross out places he can’t traverse, be it because of a locked door or a fallen apart bridge, updating the map and making both the player and Harry have to figure out where it is they’re capable of going. I also kinda like the way realism blends in with this mechanic — you get maps for, say, the hospital and the tourist area fairly quickly given that these areas would have maps laying around (I love how you also just take the hospital’s map from off the wall, too, that’s a fun little detail) but for a place like the sewers, or the final area, where the map isn’t quickly or easily available, figuring out how exactly to navigate the place becomes as much of an objective as what you’re actually meant to be working towards. Once you’re in the Otherworld, too, using the map becomes more tricky and unreliable due to how similar yet different the Otherworld is compared to the place you actually have the map for, often causing the player to go for stretches without knowing where they are or forcing them to mentally rearrange the map to fit where they actually are. I also happen to be a fan of how the Otherworld is… mostly just a straight shot to where you need to go, as compared to the normal world’s puzzles and locked doors — it’s a nice contrast that means you’re never doing the same sort of thing for too long. As a continual game mechanic and thing the player has to work around, I really do like the way Silent Hill places emphasis on using the map and figuring out your path through the town.
Gameplay wise, it’s… surprisingly solid? Nothing I’d truly write home about, but there are some neat touches that do a good job of standing out and characterising the experience. The presence of the fog complicates combat in the overworld in a nice way: enemies tend to be high-mobility and jump in and out of your vision, often cutting off your visual on them and forcing you to listen out to figure out where exactly they’re going to come back in so you can preempt them with a gunshot or a well-timed melee hit. The radio — which automatically starts crackling whenever you’re in the presence of a monster — does a good job at amping up the tension in the gameplay, as it gives you just enough info to know something’s coming up, but fails to tell you exactly where or what it is, leaving the player wondering when the foe they know is there is going to appear, or even if it’s going to appear at all (and I love the beat when you’re in the sewers and the radio doesn’t work — it’s a fun bit of realism and it really helps to make enemies catch you off guard and put you on your back foot). I’m also into the way the music characterises the whole experience. While sometimes it can be distracting hearing somebody lay down a beat when you’re traversing through an area, I love the sharp contrast between industrial and melancholy that the soundtrack as a whole evokes, with hard sounds defining the combat and navigation through the Otherworld while the story is scored by soft, lush pieces that help to underlie the low-key tragedy of it all. My impression is that it's the soundtracks to the two Silent Hill games following this one that have the soundtracks everybody raves about, but even then I liked what I heard from this — enough to maybe give a listen outside the context of the game.
While I do like how some of the technical limitations help to characterise and improve the overall experience, there are other things, however, that… maybe don’t work as well. I’m not particularly a fan of the tank controls — it’s kind of finicky to try to get Harry through/into certain spaces and interact with certain things, and it often means you never have any true control over the exact direction Harry runs, which… both feel like things the player has to deal with throughout each area as opposed to things that naturally compliment the game’s strengths. There’s a weird tempo to the usual survival horror routine of resource management: while the beginning and end of the game are very happy to just dump ammo and health onto you, this cannot be said about the middle section, creating an awkward period where I was surprised to run low because I was expecting the frequency the rest of the game had, and then once I started getting lathered with things I was caught off guard again and never tended to use them because I had grown used to utilising other options for combat. Bosses… aren’t exactly winners, and while it’s a little less of an issue here since this isn’t a game that relies on action setpieces it is sad to see the little complexities of regular combat get taken away in exchange for spamming your ammo/health and damage racing the boss.
But those are just varying degrees of issue for what’s mostly otherwise a pretty fun time! This was one of the standout games in the golden age of survival horror for a reason: it managed to turn around the technical limitations of the time to its benefit and, as a whole, still remains a very fun game today just by virtue of the little things that define and characterise the entire experience, compared to its contemporaries at the time and all the other games it inspired down the line. 8/10.
You play as Harry Mason, who, after a car crash, wakes up in the strange town of Silent Hill without his daughter (seven years old, short black hair, her name is Cheryl, she’s his daughter) by his side. He soon finds that the town is filled with mist and monsters, and, even worse, as he traverses through locations in an attempt to find his daughter, he finds the presence of the Otherworld — the ground below his feet changing at what seems like a whim to expose the true evil underneath the place. Armed with a map, a gun, and a revolving cast of residents and fellow outsiders, Harry must figure out what exactly lies at the centre of the Otherworld, save his daughter, and escape the town of Silent Hill alive.
I’ve heard that a lot of games in the golden era of survival horror often worked to mask their technical issues, or turn them around so that these limitations instead work in the game’s favour, and the original Silent Hill exemplifies this ethos to great effect. The fog that permeates the overworld — allegedly placed to hide issues with the rendering distance — works both to provide an eerie, unearthly aesthetic to the town, and also allows the player to enter Harry's shoes a little bit and feel how he feels. Because the fog covers up nearly everything beyond a couple metres of you — and given just how large and long the roads are — you never quite know where you are even if you know where you’re going, forcing the player to constantly check the map in order to figure out your position compared to everything else, which super simulates the feeling of desperately trying to navigate but just being lost in all the fog and unfamiliar landscape around you.
Speaking of maps: I really like how important navigation is! The various maps you pick up over the course of the game are required tools to traverse Silent Hill, and Harry is often forced to get out his red pen to point at potentially important places or cross out places he can’t traverse, be it because of a locked door or a fallen apart bridge, updating the map and making both the player and Harry have to figure out where it is they’re capable of going. I also kinda like the way realism blends in with this mechanic — you get maps for, say, the hospital and the tourist area fairly quickly given that these areas would have maps laying around (I love how you also just take the hospital’s map from off the wall, too, that’s a fun little detail) but for a place like the sewers, or the final area, where the map isn’t quickly or easily available, figuring out how exactly to navigate the place becomes as much of an objective as what you’re actually meant to be working towards. Once you’re in the Otherworld, too, using the map becomes more tricky and unreliable due to how similar yet different the Otherworld is compared to the place you actually have the map for, often causing the player to go for stretches without knowing where they are or forcing them to mentally rearrange the map to fit where they actually are. I also happen to be a fan of how the Otherworld is… mostly just a straight shot to where you need to go, as compared to the normal world’s puzzles and locked doors — it’s a nice contrast that means you’re never doing the same sort of thing for too long. As a continual game mechanic and thing the player has to work around, I really do like the way Silent Hill places emphasis on using the map and figuring out your path through the town.
Gameplay wise, it’s… surprisingly solid? Nothing I’d truly write home about, but there are some neat touches that do a good job of standing out and characterising the experience. The presence of the fog complicates combat in the overworld in a nice way: enemies tend to be high-mobility and jump in and out of your vision, often cutting off your visual on them and forcing you to listen out to figure out where exactly they’re going to come back in so you can preempt them with a gunshot or a well-timed melee hit. The radio — which automatically starts crackling whenever you’re in the presence of a monster — does a good job at amping up the tension in the gameplay, as it gives you just enough info to know something’s coming up, but fails to tell you exactly where or what it is, leaving the player wondering when the foe they know is there is going to appear, or even if it’s going to appear at all (and I love the beat when you’re in the sewers and the radio doesn’t work — it’s a fun bit of realism and it really helps to make enemies catch you off guard and put you on your back foot). I’m also into the way the music characterises the whole experience. While sometimes it can be distracting hearing somebody lay down a beat when you’re traversing through an area, I love the sharp contrast between industrial and melancholy that the soundtrack as a whole evokes, with hard sounds defining the combat and navigation through the Otherworld while the story is scored by soft, lush pieces that help to underlie the low-key tragedy of it all. My impression is that it's the soundtracks to the two Silent Hill games following this one that have the soundtracks everybody raves about, but even then I liked what I heard from this — enough to maybe give a listen outside the context of the game.
While I do like how some of the technical limitations help to characterise and improve the overall experience, there are other things, however, that… maybe don’t work as well. I’m not particularly a fan of the tank controls — it’s kind of finicky to try to get Harry through/into certain spaces and interact with certain things, and it often means you never have any true control over the exact direction Harry runs, which… both feel like things the player has to deal with throughout each area as opposed to things that naturally compliment the game’s strengths. There’s a weird tempo to the usual survival horror routine of resource management: while the beginning and end of the game are very happy to just dump ammo and health onto you, this cannot be said about the middle section, creating an awkward period where I was surprised to run low because I was expecting the frequency the rest of the game had, and then once I started getting lathered with things I was caught off guard again and never tended to use them because I had grown used to utilising other options for combat. Bosses… aren’t exactly winners, and while it’s a little less of an issue here since this isn’t a game that relies on action setpieces it is sad to see the little complexities of regular combat get taken away in exchange for spamming your ammo/health and damage racing the boss.
But those are just varying degrees of issue for what’s mostly otherwise a pretty fun time! This was one of the standout games in the golden age of survival horror for a reason: it managed to turn around the technical limitations of the time to its benefit and, as a whole, still remains a very fun game today just by virtue of the little things that define and characterise the entire experience, compared to its contemporaries at the time and all the other games it inspired down the line. 8/10.
1997
Honestly, after all the varied and actually-kinda-fun-in-a-bad-way games I've played I've come to realize even more that the absolute worst thing you can be is boring.
Because, like, even if you're a complete and total failure in basically every way it's still at the very least for me a worthwhile experience just to see where exactly things go wrong. It's personally fun for me — even if the actual game isn't fun to play — to look at the aspects of bad things as I go along to try and figure out why specifically, it doesn't work, and how it could be improved or whether it could've been good in another game or circumstance. There's a lot of ways to learn what to do through seeing how something falls, and something with no 'good' elements can still be educational so long as you're willing to look from a bit of an analytical lens, and also still have fun even if it's more at the game's expense.
It can't, however, if the most you can really say about a game is that it's... really dull, more than anything.
I mean, it's possible to place emphasis on how the game dives headfirst into the worst aspects of 90s adventure games with too many items (especially ones that you don't ever actually use on anything) and mechanics that the player can use at a time, really confusing puzzles that no-one in their right mind would be able to intuit, and game design where it's very easy to softlock and render the game unwinnable if you don't know exactly what's coming, but even then it's not especially egregious in a way other bad adventure games aren't. You could talk about how Jack Orlando is just a really unlikeable protagonist who antagonizes near everyone he meets, but, like, aside from near the beginning he isn't even an asshole in a fun way — he's just dour and randomly rude and actively bigoted at points and it fucking sucks to play as him. The plot theoretically, is absolutely ludicrous and stupid, but because it's a noir it just takes itself so serious and dour the entire time — you just talk to greyscale characters and then talk to greyscale characters sifting through dialogue that's absolutely dull and aside from a couple of moments which are hilarious it's just... dull. It's boring. I played this game with friends and nearly all of them left before the end because absolutely nothing was happening.
And that's the main reason why I consider Jack Orlando to be among the worst games I've played. I've played through boring before, but generally at the very least those games are at least competent enough in some aspect that they're able to just be mediocre and not actively bad. I've played through bad, but at the very least most bad games are bad in a way that makes them worthwhile/educational. Jack Orlando, though, hits the Venn Diagram where none of its aspects really work at all but also aren't really all that fun to see how they fail — this is just a game where you trudge through a dry and monotonous 1930s prohibition-era noir plot trying to exonerate and give this actively awful person his redemption while you basically have to follow a walkthrough because there are so many items that are there and do nothing and so many puzzles that don't have a clear solution at all and so many ways that you can get softlocked into a bad ending because of this design. It's a slog, more than anything else, and given how the game... really doesn't have anything going for it?
Yeah. 1/10. I wouldn't even say, like, watch a video to see what this game has to offer without spending your money — you really do just get nothing out of this.
Because, like, even if you're a complete and total failure in basically every way it's still at the very least for me a worthwhile experience just to see where exactly things go wrong. It's personally fun for me — even if the actual game isn't fun to play — to look at the aspects of bad things as I go along to try and figure out why specifically, it doesn't work, and how it could be improved or whether it could've been good in another game or circumstance. There's a lot of ways to learn what to do through seeing how something falls, and something with no 'good' elements can still be educational so long as you're willing to look from a bit of an analytical lens, and also still have fun even if it's more at the game's expense.
It can't, however, if the most you can really say about a game is that it's... really dull, more than anything.
I mean, it's possible to place emphasis on how the game dives headfirst into the worst aspects of 90s adventure games with too many items (especially ones that you don't ever actually use on anything) and mechanics that the player can use at a time, really confusing puzzles that no-one in their right mind would be able to intuit, and game design where it's very easy to softlock and render the game unwinnable if you don't know exactly what's coming, but even then it's not especially egregious in a way other bad adventure games aren't. You could talk about how Jack Orlando is just a really unlikeable protagonist who antagonizes near everyone he meets, but, like, aside from near the beginning he isn't even an asshole in a fun way — he's just dour and randomly rude and actively bigoted at points and it fucking sucks to play as him. The plot theoretically, is absolutely ludicrous and stupid, but because it's a noir it just takes itself so serious and dour the entire time — you just talk to greyscale characters and then talk to greyscale characters sifting through dialogue that's absolutely dull and aside from a couple of moments which are hilarious it's just... dull. It's boring. I played this game with friends and nearly all of them left before the end because absolutely nothing was happening.
And that's the main reason why I consider Jack Orlando to be among the worst games I've played. I've played through boring before, but generally at the very least those games are at least competent enough in some aspect that they're able to just be mediocre and not actively bad. I've played through bad, but at the very least most bad games are bad in a way that makes them worthwhile/educational. Jack Orlando, though, hits the Venn Diagram where none of its aspects really work at all but also aren't really all that fun to see how they fail — this is just a game where you trudge through a dry and monotonous 1930s prohibition-era noir plot trying to exonerate and give this actively awful person his redemption while you basically have to follow a walkthrough because there are so many items that are there and do nothing and so many puzzles that don't have a clear solution at all and so many ways that you can get softlocked into a bad ending because of this design. It's a slog, more than anything else, and given how the game... really doesn't have anything going for it?
Yeah. 1/10. I wouldn't even say, like, watch a video to see what this game has to offer without spending your money — you really do just get nothing out of this.
2021
This review contains spoilers
So this was far from the worst game I actually played in 2021 but god was it the game that left me the most mad.
Because it starts out so well. You start off with a pretty funny and on-point parody of what Facebook is like nowadays before zooming back into the past and giving the player a snapshot of what it — and the internet in general — was like back in 2008. That, as a whole, is where this game is at its greatest. Leaving the game window to go onto a simulation of early-era YouTube, all the little things like pokes that you can't do on Facebook anymore, the general sound design... this game is the best kind of nostalgia trip, and even as someone who was too young to really be on social media in 2008 I was still really immersed in what the game was trying to recreate — I spent a long while in those YouToob playlists and it turns out I'm a lot more into that era of music than I realized. Roughly half of what goes into this game is interface and atmosphere, and to that effect the effort pays off: the vibe is what makes this game.
So to that effect it didn't really matter to me that the story was mostly just a slice-of-life graduation story — it didn't really need to be anything higher-key than it actually was. The characters that were given to me were fun representatives of certain 08-era cultures (dorky girl who's just a little bit random xd, hard-edge punk rocker) and it made me feel bad that you lose the chance to even just be friends with the one you don't choose to romance at the end of chapter one (which... reads worse knowing the general way this game treats women/relationships, but we'll get to that later). There's a charm to just hanging out with this girl on facebook, planning meetups, getting into poke wars, eventually developing a serious relationship with this girl, and even though there were minor annoyances (I hated having to manually mash my keyboard every time I wanted to say something, really wished there was an option to just have you say the dialogue option instead) by the end of chapter three I was really high on this game, and given how I was promised my choices would matter (and how the previous game in this series actually made good on that promise, unlike the first game) I was excited to keep going and see how it all ended.
And then I found out that you can't get the good ending for someone on your first playthrough no matter what you do.
And that the only way you can actually get said good ending is to get the bad ending, then replay the entire game dating the other girl instead, then do the same steps to get the bad ending you got the first time.
And that the other girl's route is functionally THE EXACT SAME as the first girl's route. you do the same things. you go through the exact same events at the exact same time they happened attempt #1. The only functional difference is that some names are different and the girl you romance is a different 00s subculture.
And what happens on the route to the bad ending you're forced into is so asinine. The short is that (at least, this is what happened in nerdy girl's route because fuck me was I not replaying the entire game again just to arbitrarily get the good ending the second time) your GF gets assigned some study partners for an English class you're not in, friends them all on Facebook and starts chatting with them there. You're okay with this for a couple of months until your BRO messages you like "bro wtf look at what she's posting on his wall" so you log into his account and actually she's been kinda getting really close to him for a while behind your back. You confront them about this, to which they explain to you that she and he are just friends, and that she's been spending time with him because he's going through mental health stuff and really needs people to be there for him, explicitly asking you to drop the topic. You then have the option to back down and apologize, or to keep going and press her harder.
The option that leads her to her breaking up with you/the bad ending is if you choose to back down and apologize to her in the face of that information. i.e what anybody who isn't a controlling asshole would do in that exact situation.
And what happens is also so infuriating. One day after you two graduate she messages you and is all like "I still explicitly love you but suddenly I don't really want to jump your bones anymore I think don't think I can love you anymore. I'm really happy being with you but also I don't want to just be stuck dating my high school sweetheart forever" and no matter how much you try to convince her otherwise whoops your choices don't actually matter, the conversation just goes round in circles until you either decide to take a break or break up entirely. You do so, talk with your bro and the other girl for a bit, and then it turns out... your girlfriend was actually in love with the other guy this whole time and she was lying to you when she said he was just a friend.
And
God
You know what game basically went the exact same way as this? Emily Is Away, the first game in this series. The game lies to you about how your choices matter and has a really sudden turn when your love interest just suddenly becomes a really awful person in order to justify the unavoidable bad ending you get where you don't get the girl and all the people who've been manipulated by this game go on about how it's absolutely heartbreaking and the saddest thing they've played. The second game was an exception — you could end up on good terms with both girls so long as you didn't try to two-time them — but in general this series/this developer just really has a problem with women, huh? They're easily emotional, they'll very quickly dump you then immediately move on to a different guy they've been pining for all this time (and that's not limited to you — there's a storyline where your bro is depressed and deletes his account because his ex abruptly dumped him then immediately started dating someone else), and they'll very quickly try to paint you as The Bad Person if you don't side with them or if you call them out for being shitty. I don't really like making aspersions about someone I only know through their work, but when 2/3 of the works they've made do this exact thing... I'm beginning to see a recurring theme. And it's not a good look.
And honestly? I think I'm done with this series. At least for the time being. There's absolutely a talent for emulating the old days of the internet and using that to create an immaculate atmosphere (seriously, what makes these games is concept and visual and sound design) and I'd still at least bat for the second game in the series for actually diverging from the norm, but until this developer actually starts writing a different story instead of relying on the same old schlock which starts off great then falls apart hard for the sake providing the audience the manipulative ending it'll happily eat up, I'm out. 5/10.
Because it starts out so well. You start off with a pretty funny and on-point parody of what Facebook is like nowadays before zooming back into the past and giving the player a snapshot of what it — and the internet in general — was like back in 2008. That, as a whole, is where this game is at its greatest. Leaving the game window to go onto a simulation of early-era YouTube, all the little things like pokes that you can't do on Facebook anymore, the general sound design... this game is the best kind of nostalgia trip, and even as someone who was too young to really be on social media in 2008 I was still really immersed in what the game was trying to recreate — I spent a long while in those YouToob playlists and it turns out I'm a lot more into that era of music than I realized. Roughly half of what goes into this game is interface and atmosphere, and to that effect the effort pays off: the vibe is what makes this game.
So to that effect it didn't really matter to me that the story was mostly just a slice-of-life graduation story — it didn't really need to be anything higher-key than it actually was. The characters that were given to me were fun representatives of certain 08-era cultures (dorky girl who's just a little bit random xd, hard-edge punk rocker) and it made me feel bad that you lose the chance to even just be friends with the one you don't choose to romance at the end of chapter one (which... reads worse knowing the general way this game treats women/relationships, but we'll get to that later). There's a charm to just hanging out with this girl on facebook, planning meetups, getting into poke wars, eventually developing a serious relationship with this girl, and even though there were minor annoyances (I hated having to manually mash my keyboard every time I wanted to say something, really wished there was an option to just have you say the dialogue option instead) by the end of chapter three I was really high on this game, and given how I was promised my choices would matter (and how the previous game in this series actually made good on that promise, unlike the first game) I was excited to keep going and see how it all ended.
And then I found out that you can't get the good ending for someone on your first playthrough no matter what you do.
And that the only way you can actually get said good ending is to get the bad ending, then replay the entire game dating the other girl instead, then do the same steps to get the bad ending you got the first time.
And that the other girl's route is functionally THE EXACT SAME as the first girl's route. you do the same things. you go through the exact same events at the exact same time they happened attempt #1. The only functional difference is that some names are different and the girl you romance is a different 00s subculture.
And what happens on the route to the bad ending you're forced into is so asinine. The short is that (at least, this is what happened in nerdy girl's route because fuck me was I not replaying the entire game again just to arbitrarily get the good ending the second time) your GF gets assigned some study partners for an English class you're not in, friends them all on Facebook and starts chatting with them there. You're okay with this for a couple of months until your BRO messages you like "bro wtf look at what she's posting on his wall" so you log into his account and actually she's been kinda getting really close to him for a while behind your back. You confront them about this, to which they explain to you that she and he are just friends, and that she's been spending time with him because he's going through mental health stuff and really needs people to be there for him, explicitly asking you to drop the topic. You then have the option to back down and apologize, or to keep going and press her harder.
The option that leads her to her breaking up with you/the bad ending is if you choose to back down and apologize to her in the face of that information. i.e what anybody who isn't a controlling asshole would do in that exact situation.
And what happens is also so infuriating. One day after you two graduate she messages you and is all like "I still explicitly love you but suddenly I don't really want to jump your bones anymore I think don't think I can love you anymore. I'm really happy being with you but also I don't want to just be stuck dating my high school sweetheart forever" and no matter how much you try to convince her otherwise whoops your choices don't actually matter, the conversation just goes round in circles until you either decide to take a break or break up entirely. You do so, talk with your bro and the other girl for a bit, and then it turns out... your girlfriend was actually in love with the other guy this whole time and she was lying to you when she said he was just a friend.
And
God
You know what game basically went the exact same way as this? Emily Is Away, the first game in this series. The game lies to you about how your choices matter and has a really sudden turn when your love interest just suddenly becomes a really awful person in order to justify the unavoidable bad ending you get where you don't get the girl and all the people who've been manipulated by this game go on about how it's absolutely heartbreaking and the saddest thing they've played. The second game was an exception — you could end up on good terms with both girls so long as you didn't try to two-time them — but in general this series/this developer just really has a problem with women, huh? They're easily emotional, they'll very quickly dump you then immediately move on to a different guy they've been pining for all this time (and that's not limited to you — there's a storyline where your bro is depressed and deletes his account because his ex abruptly dumped him then immediately started dating someone else), and they'll very quickly try to paint you as The Bad Person if you don't side with them or if you call them out for being shitty. I don't really like making aspersions about someone I only know through their work, but when 2/3 of the works they've made do this exact thing... I'm beginning to see a recurring theme. And it's not a good look.
And honestly? I think I'm done with this series. At least for the time being. There's absolutely a talent for emulating the old days of the internet and using that to create an immaculate atmosphere (seriously, what makes these games is concept and visual and sound design) and I'd still at least bat for the second game in the series for actually diverging from the norm, but until this developer actually starts writing a different story instead of relying on the same old schlock which starts off great then falls apart hard for the sake providing the audience the manipulative ending it'll happily eat up, I'm out. 5/10.
2004
God I love 90s jank. There’s a tendency for games made in this era to be on the cusp of some genuinely fascinating ideas and go for them with all they’ve got… only for the technology of the time to not quite be enough to fully realize the ambition that went into it. This can result in… rough experiences, yeah, but oftentimes it’s a fun experience looking at them from a game design perspective and figuring out what exactly the developers were going for, even if they don’t quite add up in the end. This… type of experience went away around the mid to late 2000s — as indie games began to take prominence in the marketplace — but from the 90s to before then if you look hard enough you’ll find a full-on trove of games made my smaller studios which did their best to reach for the stars, no matter how limited their tools happened to be. And Bad Mojo — the sole game made by Pulse Entertainment before they moved on to more tech-related ventures — in particular, stands out as a pretty solid example of some of the creativity that came with FMV and adventure games during this time period.
You play as Roger, an entomologist planning on embezzling research money, ditching the city, and running off to Mexico to get bitches. On the night before his escape, however, Roger picks up an amulet which all of a sudden hits him with magic power and transplants his soul into the body of a cockroach. Now trapped in the basement of his apartment building, Roger must navigate his way back to his room, keep away from everything in the house that’s now capable of killing him, and uncovering… a way more complex plot than I was expecting for a game which premise is “you have become Gregor Samsa wdyd?” Like, it’s goofy and maybe a bit overcomplicated (like a lot of games of its ilk), but for a premise that can be a plot all on its own it’s… surprisingly psychological, and surprisingly dedicated to exploring and expositing on its characters. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece of narrative, or something I’d specifically recommend the game for, but it’s certainly an interesting facet, and definitely something that helps contribute to this game’s charm.
What I’m most fond of, I think, is how novel the gameplay feels. You, in your roach form, use the arrow keys to navigate the apartment complex, and it… almost feels more like some kind of top-down platformer than an adventure game. You’re given rather large areas in which you’re encouraged to explore, and oftentimes your biggest challenge, more than anything, is to figure out where exactly you need to go, and in turn how you can get there. Your roach legs can get you anywhere so long as you can reach it, and most puzzles revolve around getting past a barrier or figuring out how to progress through a specific zone. I’m also a fan of how you, as a cockroach, interact with the environment. Liquids, such as oil or water, and slippery surfaces are potential death traps if you’re not careful enough with your movement, but should you stop moving, think about the situation, and refrain from panicking, you can often get back to a safe spot and avoid losing one of your lives. Creatures such as rats, cats, and spiders are enemies you have no meaningful defence against, and it’s either a matter of turning something in the environment against them or carefully maneuvering through an area to avoid them. There are also other details that are really cute: how often you can see other cockroaches scurrying to the place you’re coincidentally meant to go, or how often the 3D objects you climb up always seem to be on some sort of axis, meaning you never tend to go in a straight line, often twisting and turning around the shape as you scuttle up the table leg or bedframe. A lot of the focus of the gameplay is about really making you feel likeSpider-Man a cockroach, and to that extent… it succeeds, and does kind of feel like nothing else I’ve particularly played.
I’m also really into the way the game blends CG and FMV, and how… seamless the overall artstyle feels. While there’s generally a split — gameplay segments being CG while story segments are FMV — it’s generally cool how elements from one can blend into the other, such as ‘real’ objects that do things in game when you interact with them, or greenscreening real actors into CG backgrounds. It’s not exactly something unique to this game — adventure games like Harvester or Darkseed had you play as FMV actors in a CG world — but this feels so much more seamless than the contemporaries I’ve seen: it never feels like the two separate artstyles are in conflict, and a lot of the transition shots between gameplay and story feel super clean. Beyond that, I’m just mostly a fan of the environmental design. The game just really captures the aesthetic of a run-down bar, from how all the clutter constantly lining the floor feels absolutely huge from the perspective of a cockroach, in addition to having some imagery which feels genuinely striking in just how yucky it feels, from all the corpses and the general super sorry state everything just seems to be in. There were points where I was kind of excited to see what exactly was placed on the next screen, whether it be a broken mirror, a... lovingly depicted rat corpse, or the messiest kitchen top I've ever seen. It's a real 'damn bitch, you live like this?' kind of experience, and the game nails that feeling perfectly.
I do think, however, that some of its aspects often come at the expense of each other. While the FMV backgrounds do look great, and aesthetically do a great job at showing off how awful it is, it sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the exact borderlines between surfaces are, often causing movement to feel like you’re getting stuck on nothing, or brute forcing against a surface until the game arbitrarily lets you through. Pushing things around with my head — the only way you can really interact with the world as a cockroach — always felt finicky, sometimes causing me to spend too much time trying to find the arbitrarily correct spot so that I could do what I was meant to do, or often making stuff like the fight with the spider (where you have to rotate a cigarette butt in a specific direction) much trickier than it was intended to be. You have tank controls, which… only exacerbated a lot of the above problems, often making getting a specific angle of direction much harder than it needed to be or often making me mess up when my goal was to rotate something. Even with the cockroaches (and cutscenes) guiding me vaguely in the direction I needed to go, the game… suffers from the same issues a lot of early adventure games do where it’s often not clear what you can or need to do, which can result in moments where without a walkthrough you just feel kind of aimless on where to go.
And those problems… definitely do suck, especially since a lot of these just feel like limitations of the time rather than legitimate oversights, and with something with this much passion and ambition behind it it does feel lame that it ultimately gets let down by itself, but even then, there’s plenty to at least recommend this game for. With a gameplay conceit that feels super unique, even today, and an artstyle that really seamlessly blends together two different graphical style — in addition to providing a striking and fitting aesthetic — Bad Mojo is a game unlike… a lot of others, and uses its abnormalities to stand out for the better. 7/10.
You play as Roger, an entomologist planning on embezzling research money, ditching the city, and running off to Mexico to get bitches. On the night before his escape, however, Roger picks up an amulet which all of a sudden hits him with magic power and transplants his soul into the body of a cockroach. Now trapped in the basement of his apartment building, Roger must navigate his way back to his room, keep away from everything in the house that’s now capable of killing him, and uncovering… a way more complex plot than I was expecting for a game which premise is “you have become Gregor Samsa wdyd?” Like, it’s goofy and maybe a bit overcomplicated (like a lot of games of its ilk), but for a premise that can be a plot all on its own it’s… surprisingly psychological, and surprisingly dedicated to exploring and expositing on its characters. I wouldn’t necessarily call it a masterpiece of narrative, or something I’d specifically recommend the game for, but it’s certainly an interesting facet, and definitely something that helps contribute to this game’s charm.
What I’m most fond of, I think, is how novel the gameplay feels. You, in your roach form, use the arrow keys to navigate the apartment complex, and it… almost feels more like some kind of top-down platformer than an adventure game. You’re given rather large areas in which you’re encouraged to explore, and oftentimes your biggest challenge, more than anything, is to figure out where exactly you need to go, and in turn how you can get there. Your roach legs can get you anywhere so long as you can reach it, and most puzzles revolve around getting past a barrier or figuring out how to progress through a specific zone. I’m also a fan of how you, as a cockroach, interact with the environment. Liquids, such as oil or water, and slippery surfaces are potential death traps if you’re not careful enough with your movement, but should you stop moving, think about the situation, and refrain from panicking, you can often get back to a safe spot and avoid losing one of your lives. Creatures such as rats, cats, and spiders are enemies you have no meaningful defence against, and it’s either a matter of turning something in the environment against them or carefully maneuvering through an area to avoid them. There are also other details that are really cute: how often you can see other cockroaches scurrying to the place you’re coincidentally meant to go, or how often the 3D objects you climb up always seem to be on some sort of axis, meaning you never tend to go in a straight line, often twisting and turning around the shape as you scuttle up the table leg or bedframe. A lot of the focus of the gameplay is about really making you feel like
I’m also really into the way the game blends CG and FMV, and how… seamless the overall artstyle feels. While there’s generally a split — gameplay segments being CG while story segments are FMV — it’s generally cool how elements from one can blend into the other, such as ‘real’ objects that do things in game when you interact with them, or greenscreening real actors into CG backgrounds. It’s not exactly something unique to this game — adventure games like Harvester or Darkseed had you play as FMV actors in a CG world — but this feels so much more seamless than the contemporaries I’ve seen: it never feels like the two separate artstyles are in conflict, and a lot of the transition shots between gameplay and story feel super clean. Beyond that, I’m just mostly a fan of the environmental design. The game just really captures the aesthetic of a run-down bar, from how all the clutter constantly lining the floor feels absolutely huge from the perspective of a cockroach, in addition to having some imagery which feels genuinely striking in just how yucky it feels, from all the corpses and the general super sorry state everything just seems to be in. There were points where I was kind of excited to see what exactly was placed on the next screen, whether it be a broken mirror, a... lovingly depicted rat corpse, or the messiest kitchen top I've ever seen. It's a real 'damn bitch, you live like this?' kind of experience, and the game nails that feeling perfectly.
I do think, however, that some of its aspects often come at the expense of each other. While the FMV backgrounds do look great, and aesthetically do a great job at showing off how awful it is, it sometimes makes it difficult to tell where the exact borderlines between surfaces are, often causing movement to feel like you’re getting stuck on nothing, or brute forcing against a surface until the game arbitrarily lets you through. Pushing things around with my head — the only way you can really interact with the world as a cockroach — always felt finicky, sometimes causing me to spend too much time trying to find the arbitrarily correct spot so that I could do what I was meant to do, or often making stuff like the fight with the spider (where you have to rotate a cigarette butt in a specific direction) much trickier than it was intended to be. You have tank controls, which… only exacerbated a lot of the above problems, often making getting a specific angle of direction much harder than it needed to be or often making me mess up when my goal was to rotate something. Even with the cockroaches (and cutscenes) guiding me vaguely in the direction I needed to go, the game… suffers from the same issues a lot of early adventure games do where it’s often not clear what you can or need to do, which can result in moments where without a walkthrough you just feel kind of aimless on where to go.
And those problems… definitely do suck, especially since a lot of these just feel like limitations of the time rather than legitimate oversights, and with something with this much passion and ambition behind it it does feel lame that it ultimately gets let down by itself, but even then, there’s plenty to at least recommend this game for. With a gameplay conceit that feels super unique, even today, and an artstyle that really seamlessly blends together two different graphical style — in addition to providing a striking and fitting aesthetic — Bad Mojo is a game unlike… a lot of others, and uses its abnormalities to stand out for the better. 7/10.
I don’t like pointing out quote-unquote ‘plot holes.’ It’s a pedantic, lazy way of judging a work and often feels like it’s missing the forest for the trees — not questioning, say, broader issues with the structure or writing or something to instead point and go “but why didn’t they do [thing I, a rational mind, would instead do in this situation]. this is a problem with the work. ding!” What it ignores, in particular, is that literally everything has these inconsistencies or little mistakes if you squint hard enough — and that it’s up to the work as a whole to… work as a whole, in a way that patches these small issues over and makes any inconsistencies not seem as glaring. Some of my favourite books, films, games, etc. usually do have problems… but they’re either minor, or I enjoy the work to such an extent that I don’t feel guilty ignoring whatever those issues might be. To me, it’s always ‘does this thing I’ve noticed actually impact the work, or my enjoyment of it in a meaningful way?’ If it doesn’t, and there aren’t any major issues, then hey, look, nobody’s perfect, and you did a good enough job otherwise, so thumbs up. If there are issues, and they’re a bit more meaningful, then… the work has some problems on its hands.
The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.
The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…
Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.
Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…
…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.
And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.
And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.
The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me is a game I feel has some major issues preventing me from enjoying it. And while I’ve seen comments online, and heard comments made while I was streaming the game that say it’s objectively bad because what the characters did was not what the person commenting would do… I feel comments like those are only surface level, and if I’m really going to try and get into why I felt the game fell flat I think it’s more important to look at the bigger picture, and what these small issues represent on a larger scale.
The game follows the crew of Lonnit Entertainment, a true crime investigative team who specialize in digging up the history of famous old serial killers, as they receive an invitation to a replica of a hotel owned by H.H Holmes, with whom the game seems convinced was “The First American Serial Killer” (the only accurate word in that declaration is “American”). Upon arrival, however, their host disappears on them, and they start to clue in that none of this is quite what it seems. Soon, they find out that the replica hotel (supposedly) possesses just as many deathtraps as the real thing, and that somebody’s hunting them down, one by one. It’s up to the player to explore the hotel, solve puzzles, and make tough decisions, that’ll either mean escape for all five group members, or make sure they don’t make it out of the hotel alive…
Gameplay-wise, I’ll give it credit: it functions well. That might sound rather backhanded, but what I mean by that statement is that regardless of the elements around it, the skeleton of the game itself works. To its core: The Devil in Me is a game where you influence a story in motion and choose what the characters do, with the intent of determining whether they live or die. To this extent, it succeeds fairly well: for its rather small scale, the game does a good job of letting your choices influence the narrative, and the sections where you can potentially get characters killed… mostly feel fair — if you’re observant, and can key into the game’s logic, you can get everybody out okay. If you don’t, you can at least understand what went wrong, and how exactly your choice got that character killed. There are also some really effective individual setpieces, ones where you have to think your way out of a situation, that really work to amp up the stress and make you worry about whether you’re making the correct choice, and these sections… honestly do make it work as a horror game — keeping the stress level up for the rest of the runtime and… never really stopping once it gets started.
Unfortunately, it takes a long while to start. You might think, by my writeup above, that the main plot gets going rather quickly. It doesn't. The first four hours of what’s only a 7-8~ hour game are dedicated to having… basically nothing happen. Instead you’re subjected to endless gameplay segments of exploring the island and the mansion which take up so much time and establish nothing in the meantime. Other games by Supermassive had these sections too, but they were much shorter — and mostly served either to bridge two parts of the story together or represent something, such as you, as the player, trying to dig up info in a specific place. Here they felt so bloated, especially since there seem to be a lot more puzzles gating progress than I feel these games ever had: each character has their own unique talent they can use to interact with things around them (and none of them ever feel like they’re particularly potent or meaningful) there’s a whole system around object physics and using them as a stepping stone to continue your way into the next room you can’t find the exit to because the game is so poorly lit that after nightfall hits it’s almost impossible to see what’s around you. There’s one I particularly liked — one where the feeling like you’re getting lost seems intentional, in a way that diegetically leads you into a later plot point, but as a whole all the puzzles, all the parts where you had to traverse from point A to point B felt like padding. Like, maybe the intention of the first was to start the story slow and build up the characters, but…
…aside from one, maybe two of them I really didn’t feel the cast of five was all that well defined. A good majority of them feel like blank slates of people. While some people get traits or character beats attached to them, they seem rather superficially applied: one character has a whole scene stop to establish that they’re deathly afraid of heights, and then later on when he and another character have to walk across a plank over a sheer drop into the ocean… he just crosses it immediately, without the player’s input, without even so much as a reaction, and it’s the other dude who you have to navigate to the other side. Then, later, when the same guy is up in a lighthouse… suddenly he’s afraid of heights again? Literally the only distinct trait we’re given for him and it’s not even handled consistently. And also… it doesn’t really feel like anybody changes as people during the course of the story, or has some sort of arc. There are token gestures (oh, I’m a hardcore smoker because it helps with my Anxiety that definitely comes up through the game, totally, absolutely, but now that I’ve survived death island….... nah, I think I’m gonna quit…......) but it really feels like, for a game that at points seems as if it’s trying to personalize the death traps to the people going in them, you could have put switched them around and put them in other people’s situations and they all would’ve turned out the exact same. Which would be fine, maybe, if that wasn’t really meant to be a focus… but then at the end of the game, when it recaps who lived and who dies, it specifically states that the survivors lived because they learned and improved as people which, like… no they didn’t. That didn’t happen. Nothing about what you said impacted whether they lived or died or not. Don’t try to pretend you did more with the characters than you actually did.
And, like, going back to my preamble for a second, there are complaints I’ve read and heard about the game’s stories which maybe address the surface level of a problem, but also I feel like these things speak to deeper flaws in the overall construction. Yes, the killer teleporting everywhere and being able to keep up with the main characters is kind of mind-boggling and tiring (like, maybe it’s a reference to how Jason does this in some of the later F13 movies? but also why would you do a throwback to one of the most decried elements of those movies?) but it also speaks to how poorly defined the island is — where is anything on this island in relation to each other? How can the killer go back to chasing one group of characters, then head over to a different building that seems to be nowhere near where he was before and menace a different group of characters there, then just as easily go back to chasing the original group again? What’s the point in that whole segment where we put in the work to get away from him when he can instantly just catch up again? In addition… look, “the plot requires people to act stupid!” is more universal of a critique than the people who use it seem to realize: if whoever writes it can sell it well, then I’m totally willing to buy that maybe a character can be a dumbass and get himself into trouble. It’s much harder of a sell when I, as the player, am being forced to do… things that seem kinda blatantly suicidal in the name of progressing the plot forward. There’s a part of the game where you’re exploring a basement where I came into a room, explored, and found no way forward other than some locked doors a conveyor belt which the game made quite an effort to establish would be insanely dangerous for a human to enter. So I went “okay, so I won’t” and then looked up a walkthrough to see how to get through the locked door… only to find out that the only way out was to go on the conveyor belt. If the game maybe had a cutscene where, say, the character jumps on it because the killer was threatening them at that very moment and the conveyor belt was the only way out, I’d buy it (IIRC there’s a similar thing in Until Dawn during a chase scene) but when I, as the person trying to explore and escape the room, are repeatedly denied other options beside something I wouldn’t want to do… it gets grating. Real quick.
And honestly… the game as a whole felt fairly grating, given how much stuff there was obviously padding and how some of the stuff that isn’t is in service to… ‘develop’ characters who never really felt all that defined in the first place. There’s neat stuff — cool setpieces, and it does mostly work well as far as choice and consequence are concerned, but… I didn’t have a particularly fun time with this game. And when you look past the surface level stuff you see people point out and try and look at the bigger (dark) picture, these issues are painted by deeper problems overall, and given how these rot the frame in which this story is built on… I think this one needed to go back to the drawing board. 4/10.
2022
I liked the first two Simulacra games! They’re… certainly not perfect — in fact, I’d go as far to say they’re quite flawed, in places — but they really do exactly what they set out to. They’re concise, fun little FMV games that take the concept of “go into a missing person’s phone to solve their disappearance” to some fun places, and at the end of the day always link back to their core concept in a way that… really makes it feel like it’s not just a gimmick, that being on a phone is a core part of the experience, and that to change it to something else would result in something else entirely. Sure, the voice acting is… rather inconsistent, and the writing has a tendency to make the cast a lot less likable than intended, but even discounting how… I’d probably give it a pass anyway given that these games are from a Malaysian studio, sometimes that sort of thing can unintentionally work in a game’s favour: sometimes having your asshole ex-boyfriend character be a total dick really manages to sell him as somebody who’s totally at fault in the situation. Sometimes one of the major parts of your narrative (and the road to avoiding the worst ending) involves placating and not alienating a guy who's… oftentimes totally cringe and easy to make fun of. Sometimes you’re talking about the inauthenticity of influencer culture, and having your influencer characters come off as unsympathetic and coarse to be around really helps to sell that message. It’s… definitely a fine line to tell whether it’s intentional or unintentional on the game’s part, but regardless, there’s virtue in being able to turn your weaknesses into a strength, and I think Simulacra and its direct sequel really do a good job at patching up those holes.
So when I found out that a new game in the series had released, I was pretty down to see how the series continued. I found it… odd, that it’d been released as quietly as it had — and for games I discovered through YouTube playthroughs it was definitely weird to see nobody I follow pick up and play this game at all — but I eventually got around to it and found, ultimately… something I don’t feel quite managed to work around its flaws quite as well as the first two games did. And, sad to say, I think I found something that didn’t quite have as strong a core concept as the first two. Or, in fact, that clear of a core concept at all.
You play as an intern at the local paper, tasked with helping out the lead journalist, Ruby Myers, as she investigates a series of disappearances around the town of Stonecreek. One day, the phone of Paul Castillo — the latest missing person — is mysteriously sent to Ruby, and she bequeaths it to you: both to search for any potential clues inside, and to help her as she does most of the legwork. Upon delving into Paul’s phone, it soon becomes clear that these disappearances are something supernatural in nature, and that Paul has rigged up his phone to serve as a breadcrumb trail, where by finding clues more parts of his phone and history are unlocked, leading the player to dig into the history of Stonecreek, interact with Paul’s former contacts, and hope that the end of the trail leads to a solution to the problem: a way to eliminate the supernatural threat before it takes any more victims.
As a base premise, it works, and as a game, the pieces are all there. It’s satisfying to be able to dig deep into somebody’s history and slowly piece together everything, and I like how the reward for finding clues or making progress is oftentimes being able to access more parts of the phone. It provides an interesting method of story progression beyond how the plot moves forward: for every step you take you’re made more privy to background info, which then feeds into you figuring out what to do next. There were some fairly neat puzzles — and one particular section involving accessing Paul’s home security which felt fairly standout, even if in practice I… felt it could’ve stood to be a bit more involved, or a bit more difficult. Most of all, I really do enjoy how much work was put into making Stonecreek feel like a real, lived-in community: from the chatter of incidental townspeople on the town social media app, the focus on local urban legends and ghost stories, the way your direct contacts talk about the place, there’s a real focus on painting this picture of a small town undergoing gentrification, and I think it pays off.
What maybe doesn’t work as well is the story itself: particularly, the people you directly interact with as you try and solve the mystery. This is what I was referring to during my preamble. The story hinges considerably on the player liking the cast of contacts in Paul’s phone, but the writing’s never quite there. Ruby’s potentially the biggest victim of this: you’re meant to be her sidekick, and a lot of the heft for the late stages of the game hinges on you having formed a connection with her, but there wasn’t really a lot of spunk or voice in the words she was saying to me: it felt like she was nagging me around for most of the game, and a lot of her conflict regarding the ethics of journalism/her place in Stonecreek felt more like things the game was trying to establish were her Traits rather than natural topics that popped up during gameplay. Paul, as the person you’re hoping you can maybe find, felt characterized through what we rummaged through, but for someone you mainly see through FMVs the acting was… not there (and, as a sidenote, there were wayyyy too many videos where Paul just parses over his notes or his corkboard where absolutely nothing happens), and I really felt as I was going through Paul’s history that I was doing so for the overall mystery rather than anything for Paul himself. The other characters felt… mostly there, more than anything. They’re defined and likable enough, but they lack story presence — you talk to them for one section of the game and then you don’t talk to them again and then you suddenly actually do have to talk to them again and it felt… abrupt, and a rather weak attempt at bringing it all together.
I also felt like a lot of the overall framing and concept was rather loose in how it came together, to the point where I felt the game never really took full advantage of the ‘found phone’ aspect of it. Specifically, while I was interested in the theming regarding small town gentrification, and the conflict of interests between the town council and the townspeople, this never quite really interfaces with the mechanics, or what you access on the phone: while internet comments and news articles talk about it, at best it’s mostly set dressing more than any sort of proper synthesis, and at worst it’s characters expositing that This Is The Main Theme of The Game. While previous games often had you access apps heavily based off real life ones (such as Twitter, Tinder, Instagram) which even beyond providing a sense of verisimilitude, also added a sense of diversity in what you did — sometimes you’d do a puzzle in one app, then you’d have to move to a different app, then you’d have to text someone, etc. Here, the only app other than texts/emails/the general internet is… this weird combination of Facebook/Twitter centered around local Stonecreek businesses that Paul has apparently jury rigged to hide (presumably) public pages from whoever accesses his phone unless they solve his riddles three?
That’s another area where I wasn’t really as into things: a lot of the game mechanics regarding uncovering more parts of the phone felt rather artificial. Rather than digging into a missing person’s phone to try and find them (with tech issues/more supernatural causes preventing you from seeing everything on the phone), you’re on Paul’s ride from the start: he has this grand keikaku he’s trying to guide you through and he apparently foresaw everything you were going to do before the phone ever touched your hands. One that he already has most of the pieces for but also doesn't enact because I guess there wouldn't have been a game otherwise. It never feels like the player is figuring anything out for themselves, nor does it feel like they have any agency, you're just doing what Paul already did for you, with nothing actually getting in the way of his grand plan up until the climax. Roadblocks aren’t “you don’t have the information you need to proceed,” it’s “Paul won’t let you proceed until you know exactly what he wants you to know.” It’s… a unique direction to take, sure, but it felt rather convoluted, and it strained credibility that this guy was able to foresee everything to this extent and also encrypt his… phone, of all things, into some weird horror game puzzle box. It didn’t feel natural. And a lot of the phone stuff in general… didn’t really feel like it really came together.
I also just feel like this game was a bit undercooked. My impression is that COVID played a part in this — actors having to film scenes in isolation, not being able to use exterior sets — but you can see it in other spots as well. There are a lot less FMVs this time around, and other than… I think two, they’re all connected to Paul and Ruby, which comes at the expense of most of the side characters: robbing the player of the chance to see that non-online dimension to them, or for some particular characters not even getting the chance to know what they even look like. The FMVs themselves… are also a bit rough. While there’s some fairly decent CGI across the board, a good portion suffer from having fairly obvious green screens — the climax, in particular, looks like it’s taking place in Minecraft, and even disregarding some of the plot frustrations I had with it it definitely cheapened the effect it was intended to give. I also feel the story suffers from not having a direct confrontation with the villain — and, in particular, from the villain not feeling very well defined at all. I feel like maybe this would’ve helped with my issues regarding themes linking into gameplay: a proper interaction where we understand what the villain, what they represent and their goals I feel could’ve done a lot to bring it all together (and the scenes in Simulacras 1 and 2 where you come face to face with the malevolent entity are fairly easily two of the best scenes in each game), but instead… honestly I’m not sure who the bad guy even was, in the end? They had the same name as the baddie in 1 but given that its MO was totally different it’s probably actually something else? It felt so indistinct. I felt like… a lot of this needed an edit pass. Or maybe a bit more time in the oven.
And in the end… I dunno. I don’t really like judging the worth of something based on its status as a sequel, an adaptation, etc., but I feel like, in comparison, this game is the worst in the trilogy. While there’s a sense of satisfaction in solving puzzles and unfolding the mystery, and while I can see the effort in building the setting and making it feel lived in, the rough character writing and the lack of cohesion between gameplay and theming makes this particular entry feel not quite up to snuff with the rest. 5/10.
So when I found out that a new game in the series had released, I was pretty down to see how the series continued. I found it… odd, that it’d been released as quietly as it had — and for games I discovered through YouTube playthroughs it was definitely weird to see nobody I follow pick up and play this game at all — but I eventually got around to it and found, ultimately… something I don’t feel quite managed to work around its flaws quite as well as the first two games did. And, sad to say, I think I found something that didn’t quite have as strong a core concept as the first two. Or, in fact, that clear of a core concept at all.
You play as an intern at the local paper, tasked with helping out the lead journalist, Ruby Myers, as she investigates a series of disappearances around the town of Stonecreek. One day, the phone of Paul Castillo — the latest missing person — is mysteriously sent to Ruby, and she bequeaths it to you: both to search for any potential clues inside, and to help her as she does most of the legwork. Upon delving into Paul’s phone, it soon becomes clear that these disappearances are something supernatural in nature, and that Paul has rigged up his phone to serve as a breadcrumb trail, where by finding clues more parts of his phone and history are unlocked, leading the player to dig into the history of Stonecreek, interact with Paul’s former contacts, and hope that the end of the trail leads to a solution to the problem: a way to eliminate the supernatural threat before it takes any more victims.
As a base premise, it works, and as a game, the pieces are all there. It’s satisfying to be able to dig deep into somebody’s history and slowly piece together everything, and I like how the reward for finding clues or making progress is oftentimes being able to access more parts of the phone. It provides an interesting method of story progression beyond how the plot moves forward: for every step you take you’re made more privy to background info, which then feeds into you figuring out what to do next. There were some fairly neat puzzles — and one particular section involving accessing Paul’s home security which felt fairly standout, even if in practice I… felt it could’ve stood to be a bit more involved, or a bit more difficult. Most of all, I really do enjoy how much work was put into making Stonecreek feel like a real, lived-in community: from the chatter of incidental townspeople on the town social media app, the focus on local urban legends and ghost stories, the way your direct contacts talk about the place, there’s a real focus on painting this picture of a small town undergoing gentrification, and I think it pays off.
What maybe doesn’t work as well is the story itself: particularly, the people you directly interact with as you try and solve the mystery. This is what I was referring to during my preamble. The story hinges considerably on the player liking the cast of contacts in Paul’s phone, but the writing’s never quite there. Ruby’s potentially the biggest victim of this: you’re meant to be her sidekick, and a lot of the heft for the late stages of the game hinges on you having formed a connection with her, but there wasn’t really a lot of spunk or voice in the words she was saying to me: it felt like she was nagging me around for most of the game, and a lot of her conflict regarding the ethics of journalism/her place in Stonecreek felt more like things the game was trying to establish were her Traits rather than natural topics that popped up during gameplay. Paul, as the person you’re hoping you can maybe find, felt characterized through what we rummaged through, but for someone you mainly see through FMVs the acting was… not there (and, as a sidenote, there were wayyyy too many videos where Paul just parses over his notes or his corkboard where absolutely nothing happens), and I really felt as I was going through Paul’s history that I was doing so for the overall mystery rather than anything for Paul himself. The other characters felt… mostly there, more than anything. They’re defined and likable enough, but they lack story presence — you talk to them for one section of the game and then you don’t talk to them again and then you suddenly actually do have to talk to them again and it felt… abrupt, and a rather weak attempt at bringing it all together.
I also felt like a lot of the overall framing and concept was rather loose in how it came together, to the point where I felt the game never really took full advantage of the ‘found phone’ aspect of it. Specifically, while I was interested in the theming regarding small town gentrification, and the conflict of interests between the town council and the townspeople, this never quite really interfaces with the mechanics, or what you access on the phone: while internet comments and news articles talk about it, at best it’s mostly set dressing more than any sort of proper synthesis, and at worst it’s characters expositing that This Is The Main Theme of The Game. While previous games often had you access apps heavily based off real life ones (such as Twitter, Tinder, Instagram) which even beyond providing a sense of verisimilitude, also added a sense of diversity in what you did — sometimes you’d do a puzzle in one app, then you’d have to move to a different app, then you’d have to text someone, etc. Here, the only app other than texts/emails/the general internet is… this weird combination of Facebook/Twitter centered around local Stonecreek businesses that Paul has apparently jury rigged to hide (presumably) public pages from whoever accesses his phone unless they solve his riddles three?
That’s another area where I wasn’t really as into things: a lot of the game mechanics regarding uncovering more parts of the phone felt rather artificial. Rather than digging into a missing person’s phone to try and find them (with tech issues/more supernatural causes preventing you from seeing everything on the phone), you’re on Paul’s ride from the start: he has this grand keikaku he’s trying to guide you through and he apparently foresaw everything you were going to do before the phone ever touched your hands. One that he already has most of the pieces for but also doesn't enact because I guess there wouldn't have been a game otherwise. It never feels like the player is figuring anything out for themselves, nor does it feel like they have any agency, you're just doing what Paul already did for you, with nothing actually getting in the way of his grand plan up until the climax. Roadblocks aren’t “you don’t have the information you need to proceed,” it’s “Paul won’t let you proceed until you know exactly what he wants you to know.” It’s… a unique direction to take, sure, but it felt rather convoluted, and it strained credibility that this guy was able to foresee everything to this extent and also encrypt his… phone, of all things, into some weird horror game puzzle box. It didn’t feel natural. And a lot of the phone stuff in general… didn’t really feel like it really came together.
I also just feel like this game was a bit undercooked. My impression is that COVID played a part in this — actors having to film scenes in isolation, not being able to use exterior sets — but you can see it in other spots as well. There are a lot less FMVs this time around, and other than… I think two, they’re all connected to Paul and Ruby, which comes at the expense of most of the side characters: robbing the player of the chance to see that non-online dimension to them, or for some particular characters not even getting the chance to know what they even look like. The FMVs themselves… are also a bit rough. While there’s some fairly decent CGI across the board, a good portion suffer from having fairly obvious green screens — the climax, in particular, looks like it’s taking place in Minecraft, and even disregarding some of the plot frustrations I had with it it definitely cheapened the effect it was intended to give. I also feel the story suffers from not having a direct confrontation with the villain — and, in particular, from the villain not feeling very well defined at all. I feel like maybe this would’ve helped with my issues regarding themes linking into gameplay: a proper interaction where we understand what the villain, what they represent and their goals I feel could’ve done a lot to bring it all together (and the scenes in Simulacras 1 and 2 where you come face to face with the malevolent entity are fairly easily two of the best scenes in each game), but instead… honestly I’m not sure who the bad guy even was, in the end? They had the same name as the baddie in 1 but given that its MO was totally different it’s probably actually something else? It felt so indistinct. I felt like… a lot of this needed an edit pass. Or maybe a bit more time in the oven.
And in the end… I dunno. I don’t really like judging the worth of something based on its status as a sequel, an adaptation, etc., but I feel like, in comparison, this game is the worst in the trilogy. While there’s a sense of satisfaction in solving puzzles and unfolding the mystery, and while I can see the effort in building the setting and making it feel lived in, the rough character writing and the lack of cohesion between gameplay and theming makes this particular entry feel not quite up to snuff with the rest. 5/10.
This was cute! Comedic takes on Dracula, I feel, are a bit more common nowadays than works that take him seriously — moreso than any of his gothic horror contemporaries — but the writing here did well to take it in a different direction than most and genuinely caught me off guard during a couple of moments. I also appreciate the small scale of the adventure game design: with only a handful of rooms and only a handful of things you can interact with, it's much less likely you gloss over anything during your search, and worst comes to worst it's not too much of a time investment to brute force anything. The puzzles felt inventive and possessed some fairly clever solutions, though one of them in particular I felt like I could've received more direction on — I thought I had the right answer but I wasn't entirely sure how I was meant to apply it, the obvious routes in particular either not being selectable or resulting in generic dialogue. The voice acting is... hit or miss: while a good portion of it works fairly well, other parts stand out for... not having great sound quality, or otherwise feeling kind of off. Overall, though, I enjoyed this! It's maybe more of a 👍/10 for me than anything that'll really stick, but even then looks neat, it's fairly short, and I like this particular take on a comedic Dracula. Check it out! I wouldn't sleep on this.
TBD
Having played some really inventive and cool RPGMaker games, it’s fascinating to look at the other side of the coin and look at games where the developers… don’t quite know what they're doing. Take I S O L A T I O N, for example, a game where you must solve puzzles to escape your house, where the core conceit of gameplay is… checking the hundreds of closets in your mansion and hoping that Jeff the Killer isn’t hiding in them. There’s no indication or hints towards which closets have items and which closets have instant game overs: you have to check each closet manually, reload after every game over, all in hopes that the room you’re in actually has something useful in the closets. There are also some other incredible bits of game design: the game, for some reason tries to fake that it has a loading screen… but actually the game is just waiting around and doing nothing for about ~15 seconds. Sometimes you’ll be trapped inside a room after you enter it, or unable to progress to an item on the floor: not because of a locked door in your way, or anything, but because your Victorian manor has suddenly spawned boulders which you need to find a way to break. I was having a good time, despite the lack of quality, up until… in a room where you must find one particular painting out of a total of 48 (lest Jeff The Killer somehow be hiding inside the painting), you must also make sure to lock the door behind you before you select the correct painting… something you cannot do, because the developer somehow managed to delete the event that allows you to lock the door, thus making the game unbeatable. A bit of a shame — I’m not a fan of having to leave something uncompleted — but, uh, given the game as a whole beforehand, maybe having this one glitch out and be unbeatable isn’t that much of a bad thing.
2014
My Dear Brother Jeff follows Liu, a very studious and devoted son, who one day is told by his parents that he really has a brother, and that his name is… “Jeffrey Dahmer.” No relation to any persons living or dead, of course: this is a Jeff the Killer RPGMaker fangame, after all. Jeff goes to the hospital to try and meet his brother for the first time, a magical fire, channelled by the Star of David, allows for Jeffrey Dahmer’s escape, and for him to then later come home and try to kill Liu’s family. What follows is a perpetual chase: one where you have to solve poorly communicated item/key puzzles, where the geography of the area will often trap you in a corner or give you no actual way of dodging Jeff, and where sometimes if you save in the wrong place you’ll load to Jeff instantly killing you. Everything is so dark that it’s really hard to know where and what you can do: something that doesn’t stop even when the endless chase does. There’s this one section where you escape your house by going through a network of tunnels that Jeffrey Dahmer apparently dug under your house and it’s impossible to see anything and it's the worst. At least none of that is present for the game’s final act. And, to its… credit, maybe, the game has a decently evocative artstyle (for better or worse) and the writing at least here seems more like a bad translation job. As far as these Jeff the Killer games go, this probably at least has the most going for it. Which is a low bar, but still. I have to take the positives where I can here. 2/10.
Of note: before now, this game in English (and its original French) was lost media for a really good period of time, after the developer uploaded a 2.0 in Spanish, deleted the originals, and then promised versions in other languages that never came. Luckily, I happen to have a friend who’s very gifted at internet sleuthing, and with some luck he managed to bring both versions of the game back from the dead. Here (English) they (French) are, if you’re interested! I’d recommend you play it yourself, or, uh, watch one of the many YouTube playthroughs that went up circa 2014. It’s really the kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes.
Of note: before now, this game in English (and its original French) was lost media for a really good period of time, after the developer uploaded a 2.0 in Spanish, deleted the originals, and then promised versions in other languages that never came. Luckily, I happen to have a friend who’s very gifted at internet sleuthing, and with some luck he managed to bring both versions of the game back from the dead. Here (English) they (French) are, if you’re interested! I’d recommend you play it yourself, or, uh, watch one of the many YouTube playthroughs that went up circa 2014. It’s really the kind of thing you have to see with your own eyes.
2006
At last, a Nitrome game that more or less runs exactly as it used to. It’s a bit slower than what it used to be (and you’re going to have to exit to the menu at the end of every level if you don’t want it to run even slower) but… other than that, this was a mostly smooth experience. You play as a Venus fly trap trying to escape a greenhouse, and with your mouse you can extend your head to wherever you click, moving you if you bite the ground, and eating whatever critters your mouth manages to connect with. It’s a unique mechanic, and it was fun trying to crawl up along surfaces by biting into them. It’s simple, and remains mostly as such: with later levels, if not challenging your mastery, at least test your proficiency with the mechanics. I… wish the hitboxes in this game were a little better — so many times where I was hit by something not even touching me, or whiffed on something when I clearly hit it — and I wish there was more use for the “your maximum neck length increases with everything you eat” mechanic (as most levels are either clearable with the minimum neck length, or immediately throw a bunch of bugs at you for the sake of progression), but, those problems aside, this was solid! I don’t think it’ll necessarily reach the heights of some of the games (and, particularly, the subsequent platformers like this one) yet to come, but of what I've gone through, I’d feel comfortable saying this is the best so far.
2020
The second Dread X Collection, released a little under three months after the first, brought a couple of iterations to the table. In addition to possessing twelve games instead of ten, Dread X II starts the theme of each anthology following a central theme: in this case, ‘LOVECRAFTING.’ It seems, too, that rather than each game being a playable teaser for a theoretical something more, each game was made to be a standalone experience. That’s not to say that some of the games here could become ‘full games’ — as of writing this, two of them already have — but I do believe that this approach was for the best, and might speak a little as to how this collection, as a whole, feels stronger than its predecessor. Perhaps it’s because the Dread X Collection has found its stride (though I will note that the devs coming back from the first collection, save one, seemed to… maybe put in weaker efforts here), perhaps the move to more complete experiences left the collection to feel more standalone than the first, or perhaps most people involved brought their A-game, but either way, this anthology is a step up from the first, and I easily enjoyed playing two-thirds of the games here.
Of course, another major iteration was the launcher for the individual games in the pack. While the first Dread X was simple enough — click on one of the dev logos, launch their game — Dread X II instead has a whole hub world, where you explore a house, solve puzzles, and obtain keys that then unlock each of the individual games in the pack. It’s made by Lovely Hellplace (who made Shatter one of my favourites from the first collection), and it’s generally pretty neat. I loved going through the house, from the colour palette using hues not generally used in PSX aesthetic throwbacks, to the little details: like the red eyes hidden on the statue, or how you can see rooms from outside that you can’t otherwise access. The puzzles feel fun and varied, with some being solvable from the room you find them in and others requiring you to scour the entire house. The story itself wasn’t something I particularly cared for, and there are maybe a couple stinker puzzles in there, but as a whole exploring the overworld was fun, and it’s really neat that they managed to add a wraparound, and that it doesn’t take away from the main exhibits of the anthology.
Which, speaking of:
SOLIPSIS:
A walking simulator where the value is more in the style than the substance. Gameplay-wise, while it tries to be more than ‘walk from objective to objective’ by adding little puzzles to solve along the way, they’re never more than a quick pitstop before you’re walking to the next point. The story’s… acceptable, but it’s mostly just a vehicle for the incredible vibes the game puts on offer. For something primarily painted with pixels, it’s surprising what’s been achieved here: from the way objects spin as they’re propelled in low gravity, the way blood splatters outward, and how the lighting reveals very little other than the immediate area around you, there’s a lot done here to emulate what it’d be like on the dark side of the moon, and it provides a rather desolate, kind of lonely atmosphere as you trudge across the landscape. I especially like how it transitions from pixel art to FMV as you enter a puzzle section — it does well to illustrate the steady decline of the protagonist’s mental state, and I love the use of the visual filter to make the change between artstyles feel seamless. I… probably wouldn’t rank this above, say, my favourites from the first Dread X Collection — because this game mostly is just about its vibes — but as a quick, memorable ten-minute trip into the moon, I’d definitely recommend this.
THE TOY SHOP:
Nooooooooot impressed. I’ll admit I was a little interested in the beginning, where the constant changing of visual filters (and the dissonance between the rotted, industrial interior to the brightly coloured exterior) implied that something was interfering with the main character’s perception — and through that, the reality around them. Once you're done with the tutorial, though all that gets jettisoned in favour of really drab, low saturation environments, with “puzzles” that consist of figuring out what you’re even meant to interact with and enemies that will hunt you down and kill you unless you sneak past them. 'Sneaking,' in this case, meaning the exact same walk animation, just a bit slower. I’ll admit I was entertained when the game very suddenly became a platformer… but then it becomes a shitty Unity shooter where enemies don’t make any noise until they’re right next to you and attacking (which, like, those particular enemy models come pre-built with footstep noises, why did you take them out?) and it’s even harder to see what’s even happening. It doesn’t even do the service of ending after the (very easily cheesed) boss fight — you go through another section where the game spams enemies at you and then somebody just dumps an entire fucking novel of lore telling you about the themes the game had tried to show during the first segment and also try to tie it into the theme of the anthology. Nooooooot good. It’s kinda funny to see the poor animation and the random, whiplashy directions it goes, but actually playing it? I maybe wouldn’t recommend that.
ANOTHER LATE NIGHT:
This, uh, wasn’t much of anything. It’s like a game that… pretends to be an entirely diegetic experience before slamming you full-on with meta elements, but it forgets that it needs to have something else of actual substance for the meta elements to actually effective. It also forgets that the meta elements also have to be good. And also that the story needs to be in any way coherent. I have no clue what even happened in this game. It’s meant to simulate you doing nothing on your computer at 3 AM, then you read a news article about how the game you’re playing [i]right now[/i] is making people randomly disappear, and then this red voice asks you how you feel about climate change? And then it kind of loops and does the same thing over and over until suddenly it ends? I get what it’s trying to do. I don’t think it does it well at all. Perhaps if there was an actual game the meta stuff was layered over then it…’s maybe on the right track to being effective, but as is… honestly if I’d written up this review any later than I did I’d have worried I’d forget about the entire experience. Maybe that’s the effect. Maybe the game’s reprogramming me to forget it ever existed before it comes time for the sleeper agent in me to wake up. Who knowsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss?
TO THE END OF DAYS:
From the premise I was expecting this to be, like, a pre-apocalypse walking sim where you watch society fall apart in the wake of impending doom, and then when I started playing the game it told me to “press TAB to collect your thoughts” and I did it and I pulled a shotgun out. What followed was… a fairly fun shooter! It follows the sensibilities of something like Doom (or the many modern ‘boomer shooter’ throwbacks coming out today): there’s a certain arcadey feel as you travel down… what’s mostly a straight line and explode everything you come across with your gun. I especially like how even with only two enemy types you never quite get bored or overly used to combat, with encounters remaining fun and frenetic through the whole playthrough. I… felt like the melee was a bit useless? Other than the one part of the game where you need to break down a door to progress I always just used the gun instead, mostly because you’re encouraged to end fights as fast as possible and most enemies benefit from being fought at range. Other than that… this was a pretty fun 30-40 minute romp with some pretty fun plot beats. A pretty big improvement on the game this developer put into the last Dread X Collection.
ARCADELECTRA:
what if… we went on a date… inside the pt hallway…
SUCKER FOR LOVE:
I’m not particularly a fan of ‘ironic’ visual novels — as their attempts at ‘parody’ are almost exclusively surface level and help contribute to the mainstream Western misconception of what visual novels are actually like — but I think this one sticks the landing. If, mainly, because it actually goes beyond the premise of ‘haha, this is a dating sim where you date [x]!’ and feels that it was baked with something besides detached cynicism. While it does feel a bit too anime-inspired, and while it starts off trying to evoke the worst elements of its parody VN brethren, what follows is a fairly solid puzzle game that seems… more evocative of an Adobe Flash adventure game than anything, in terms of how you interact with the things around you. There are some sequences that are honestly effective, horror-wise, and I like how the game does discuss certain aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos and doesn’t undercut what’s happening despite the dating sim veneer. There are some issues with UI — anything that involved me dragging my mouse felt far more fiddly than intended — but aside from that I felt this was pretty decent, if not as strong as some of the others in this pack. Curious to see how the since-released full game expands on this.
SQUIRREL STAPLER:
Too long for what’s there, which is a shame, because I love this game’s general vibes. From the way things build up over the five in-game days, the charmingly scuffed pngs and models, and the random squirrel “facts” scattered across the wilderness, the game does a good job of emulating the feel of a hunting simulator while also greatly simplifying the mechanics, while also (like other games) made by this developer) possessing an immaculate ability to build this bizarre premise around the player and make it feel like the most normal thing in the world. Unfortunately, as is… I do think this should’ve been three or four days/levels, rather than five? Each day is a considerable time sink, as you scour the huge map for hints of a squirrel, then slllllllowly sneak up on them enough that you can get a clear shot, before you then through the process 4-5 more times until you’re done for that given day. Each of these days feels like it could take 20-30 minutes to complete — more, if you die and have to restart from the beginning — and while the story feels like it takes full advantage of each day to build up a climax, gameplay-wise it doesn’t feel like enough is iterated on for the length to feel justified, with days 3-5 in particular feeling like the same gameplay loop repeated three times in a row — the only difference being the number of dudes that try and chase you down. I still think this game’s fairly solid, just maybe one that wore me down a little bit, and I’m happy that the since-created full release seems to potentially address this, a glance of the steam store page indicating that the new content seems focused on deepening the existing game, rather than making it even longer. Hopefully when I play that I might actually see God.
UNDISCOVERED:
I like the way this game uses its ‘found footage’ angle in a way I haven’t seen before — how there’s both a cameraman and a reporter, and how you effectively play as both at the same time: the reporter in third person, and the cameraman in first person. It’s… done in a way that’s rather motion-sickness-inducing, admittedly, but it’s a fascinating way of controlling the game, and I like how the puzzles and the layout of the temple take advantage of it. Aside from that, I like the dynamic between the two characters, I like… the rather unexpected direction it goes, and I really love how you’re constantly moving forward as you move through the temple: both in terms of how that plays with the control scheme and how it shows you going deeper and deeper in. I really wanna play more of Torple Dook’s games. Hand of Doom was one of my unexpected favourites from the first collection, and while this pack is strong enough that Undiscovered isn’t that high, comparatively, that’s two for two. And a better record than… I think any of the other repeat devs so far.
CHARLOTTE’S EXILE:
I think the effect is a bit lost if you’re not the one playing it — I was streaming this with friends and one of these friends got bored and dropped out almost immediately — but man, if you’re the one in the driver’s seat, this is tense. The short of this is that you have to decode a cypher, and find out which symbols correspond to which letters. You have a book that’ll help you decipher each letter (and you can also use Wordle strats on unfinished words to process-of-elimination what certain letters can be), but there’s something actively converging in on you as you work on your desk, and the only way to get it to back off is take your attention off your objective and stare it down until it decides to leave, like red light green light. It’s genuinely tense: you have to be constantly on guard and can’t be distracted for too long, and it becomes a matter where you know what letter corresponds to a certain sigil, but you can’t see where that symbol even is on the list and you have to look up every couple seconds because you’re genuinely kinda scared about the thing coming in on you. It… loses quite a bit of impact when you find out that it doesn’t kill you if it reaches you, but even then that’s not the main draw: figuring out the code and solving the puzzle at the end still singlehandedly sells the game on its own. Overall really liked this. One of my favourites from the pack.
THE DIVING BELL:
At first I thought this was going to be, like, an Emily is Away-style horror game where you have to manually enter stuff into the keyboard while hiding from anything that comes into the room (almost like another Charlotte’s Exile), but then the game let me walk around the marine base and I realized it was a different — and, admittedly, less unique — beast indeed. I still liked it a good bit, though! This is mostly a mood piece: less about what’s in the base with you, more about how it feels to be all alone inside it. Sound design, the way most of the game is you figuring out how to navigate from one room to another, the short bursts of story that come through the typing segments, how you have to look at the walls to try and avoid whatever thing is looking through the windows... it really nails all the little things it wants to do, and at points genuinely manifests a little bit of fear about what you're going to find in the next room. Maybe not as ambitious in concept as some of the other games here, but it does itself with enough flair and execution that it stands out for the better, regardless.
TOUCHED BY AN OUTER GOD:
My favourite of the pack. So much here for what’s ostensibly only a twenty-minute game. It hits the old-school first-person shooter vibes perfectly: it feels arcadey in the way you chew through the waves of enemies, a bit of a power fantasy in how you can stand out, in the open, against the horde, and be able to go toe to toe against them, and yet still deliver frenetic moments where you’re being overwhelmed and have nowhere to hide. I love the EXP and upgrades system, here: the way the randomization means you’ll never have the same skillset twice — I should know, I managed to die, got sent back to the beginning, and came back with a way different build than I had initially — and how in that lens it almost seems roguelite inspired, with its focus on getting stronger along the way against increasingly more oppressive foes. Also it’s just frankly a little insane that you can just not take any upgrades and completely flip the way you play the game on its head. Also also I like how the game takes into account how many upgrades you’ve taken along the way. There’s just so much here. And even if it were just the base gameplay it’d still be super fun. Says a lot that even with a stronger cohort this is easily the highlight of the pack. Definitely wanna check out what else this dev has done.
THE THING IN THE LAKE:
…Sadly, despite four of the last five games in the pack being four of the top five games in the pack, I did not manage to end the second Dread X Collection strong. This game mostly just seems to be a victim of the short development turnaround. Which is a shame, because I like a lot of what this game’s doing. I enjoy the graphical style: even beyond how this is the same dev as World of Horror, I enjoy the way the top-down, grid exploration game looks, and how it visually harkens back to the Apple II era. I also really like how the same areas you go through as one character get repurposed when you go through them as another character, and the way it all kind of interconnects and comes together in the final chapter. Unfortunately… this is just super broken and unpolished, and not in a particularly funny way. Getting sent back to the beginning of the chapter/having to go through all the cutscenes again is way too brutal a punishment for death, especially given how cheap death generally is, with the hidden traps and unclear objectives in a game where one hit or mistake kills you. It’s glitchy, as well: there’s a point where you have to die to continue the game and I managed to softlock myself because the game told me “mash the keys” and the little movements I did while doing that were enough to move me… out of the way of the guy who was meant to come in and kill me. The monkey that provides the main threat is way too centralising: hearing his roar initially makes the process of getting out alive a total crapshoot, but once you start to get familiar with the game (or turn on easy mode) hearing his roar literally just means you have to stop what you’re doing, wait for ten seconds for him to actually appear, then leave and re-enter when he appears. It got tiring, even beyond how quickly this game kind of tested my patience. Would love to see a fixed and maybe expanded version of this game but as of now… it avoided the bottom three mostly for having promise but man, what a limp way to end off the pack.
FINAL RANKING
Touched By An Outer God > Charlotte's Exile > To The End of Days > The Diving Bell > Undiscovered > Solipsis > Sucker For Love > Squirrel Stapler > The Thing In The Lake > Another Late Night > Arcadelectra > The Toy Shop
Of course, another major iteration was the launcher for the individual games in the pack. While the first Dread X was simple enough — click on one of the dev logos, launch their game — Dread X II instead has a whole hub world, where you explore a house, solve puzzles, and obtain keys that then unlock each of the individual games in the pack. It’s made by Lovely Hellplace (who made Shatter one of my favourites from the first collection), and it’s generally pretty neat. I loved going through the house, from the colour palette using hues not generally used in PSX aesthetic throwbacks, to the little details: like the red eyes hidden on the statue, or how you can see rooms from outside that you can’t otherwise access. The puzzles feel fun and varied, with some being solvable from the room you find them in and others requiring you to scour the entire house. The story itself wasn’t something I particularly cared for, and there are maybe a couple stinker puzzles in there, but as a whole exploring the overworld was fun, and it’s really neat that they managed to add a wraparound, and that it doesn’t take away from the main exhibits of the anthology.
Which, speaking of:
SOLIPSIS:
A walking simulator where the value is more in the style than the substance. Gameplay-wise, while it tries to be more than ‘walk from objective to objective’ by adding little puzzles to solve along the way, they’re never more than a quick pitstop before you’re walking to the next point. The story’s… acceptable, but it’s mostly just a vehicle for the incredible vibes the game puts on offer. For something primarily painted with pixels, it’s surprising what’s been achieved here: from the way objects spin as they’re propelled in low gravity, the way blood splatters outward, and how the lighting reveals very little other than the immediate area around you, there’s a lot done here to emulate what it’d be like on the dark side of the moon, and it provides a rather desolate, kind of lonely atmosphere as you trudge across the landscape. I especially like how it transitions from pixel art to FMV as you enter a puzzle section — it does well to illustrate the steady decline of the protagonist’s mental state, and I love the use of the visual filter to make the change between artstyles feel seamless. I… probably wouldn’t rank this above, say, my favourites from the first Dread X Collection — because this game mostly is just about its vibes — but as a quick, memorable ten-minute trip into the moon, I’d definitely recommend this.
THE TOY SHOP:
Nooooooooot impressed. I’ll admit I was a little interested in the beginning, where the constant changing of visual filters (and the dissonance between the rotted, industrial interior to the brightly coloured exterior) implied that something was interfering with the main character’s perception — and through that, the reality around them. Once you're done with the tutorial, though all that gets jettisoned in favour of really drab, low saturation environments, with “puzzles” that consist of figuring out what you’re even meant to interact with and enemies that will hunt you down and kill you unless you sneak past them. 'Sneaking,' in this case, meaning the exact same walk animation, just a bit slower. I’ll admit I was entertained when the game very suddenly became a platformer… but then it becomes a shitty Unity shooter where enemies don’t make any noise until they’re right next to you and attacking (which, like, those particular enemy models come pre-built with footstep noises, why did you take them out?) and it’s even harder to see what’s even happening. It doesn’t even do the service of ending after the (very easily cheesed) boss fight — you go through another section where the game spams enemies at you and then somebody just dumps an entire fucking novel of lore telling you about the themes the game had tried to show during the first segment and also try to tie it into the theme of the anthology. Nooooooot good. It’s kinda funny to see the poor animation and the random, whiplashy directions it goes, but actually playing it? I maybe wouldn’t recommend that.
ANOTHER LATE NIGHT:
This, uh, wasn’t much of anything. It’s like a game that… pretends to be an entirely diegetic experience before slamming you full-on with meta elements, but it forgets that it needs to have something else of actual substance for the meta elements to actually effective. It also forgets that the meta elements also have to be good. And also that the story needs to be in any way coherent. I have no clue what even happened in this game. It’s meant to simulate you doing nothing on your computer at 3 AM, then you read a news article about how the game you’re playing [i]right now[/i] is making people randomly disappear, and then this red voice asks you how you feel about climate change? And then it kind of loops and does the same thing over and over until suddenly it ends? I get what it’s trying to do. I don’t think it does it well at all. Perhaps if there was an actual game the meta stuff was layered over then it…’s maybe on the right track to being effective, but as is… honestly if I’d written up this review any later than I did I’d have worried I’d forget about the entire experience. Maybe that’s the effect. Maybe the game’s reprogramming me to forget it ever existed before it comes time for the sleeper agent in me to wake up. Who knowsssssssssssssssssssssssssssssss?
TO THE END OF DAYS:
From the premise I was expecting this to be, like, a pre-apocalypse walking sim where you watch society fall apart in the wake of impending doom, and then when I started playing the game it told me to “press TAB to collect your thoughts” and I did it and I pulled a shotgun out. What followed was… a fairly fun shooter! It follows the sensibilities of something like Doom (or the many modern ‘boomer shooter’ throwbacks coming out today): there’s a certain arcadey feel as you travel down… what’s mostly a straight line and explode everything you come across with your gun. I especially like how even with only two enemy types you never quite get bored or overly used to combat, with encounters remaining fun and frenetic through the whole playthrough. I… felt like the melee was a bit useless? Other than the one part of the game where you need to break down a door to progress I always just used the gun instead, mostly because you’re encouraged to end fights as fast as possible and most enemies benefit from being fought at range. Other than that… this was a pretty fun 30-40 minute romp with some pretty fun plot beats. A pretty big improvement on the game this developer put into the last Dread X Collection.
ARCADELECTRA:
what if… we went on a date… inside the pt hallway…
SUCKER FOR LOVE:
I’m not particularly a fan of ‘ironic’ visual novels — as their attempts at ‘parody’ are almost exclusively surface level and help contribute to the mainstream Western misconception of what visual novels are actually like — but I think this one sticks the landing. If, mainly, because it actually goes beyond the premise of ‘haha, this is a dating sim where you date [x]!’ and feels that it was baked with something besides detached cynicism. While it does feel a bit too anime-inspired, and while it starts off trying to evoke the worst elements of its parody VN brethren, what follows is a fairly solid puzzle game that seems… more evocative of an Adobe Flash adventure game than anything, in terms of how you interact with the things around you. There are some sequences that are honestly effective, horror-wise, and I like how the game does discuss certain aspects of the Cthulhu Mythos and doesn’t undercut what’s happening despite the dating sim veneer. There are some issues with UI — anything that involved me dragging my mouse felt far more fiddly than intended — but aside from that I felt this was pretty decent, if not as strong as some of the others in this pack. Curious to see how the since-released full game expands on this.
SQUIRREL STAPLER:
Too long for what’s there, which is a shame, because I love this game’s general vibes. From the way things build up over the five in-game days, the charmingly scuffed pngs and models, and the random squirrel “facts” scattered across the wilderness, the game does a good job of emulating the feel of a hunting simulator while also greatly simplifying the mechanics, while also (like other games) made by this developer) possessing an immaculate ability to build this bizarre premise around the player and make it feel like the most normal thing in the world. Unfortunately, as is… I do think this should’ve been three or four days/levels, rather than five? Each day is a considerable time sink, as you scour the huge map for hints of a squirrel, then slllllllowly sneak up on them enough that you can get a clear shot, before you then through the process 4-5 more times until you’re done for that given day. Each of these days feels like it could take 20-30 minutes to complete — more, if you die and have to restart from the beginning — and while the story feels like it takes full advantage of each day to build up a climax, gameplay-wise it doesn’t feel like enough is iterated on for the length to feel justified, with days 3-5 in particular feeling like the same gameplay loop repeated three times in a row — the only difference being the number of dudes that try and chase you down. I still think this game’s fairly solid, just maybe one that wore me down a little bit, and I’m happy that the since-created full release seems to potentially address this, a glance of the steam store page indicating that the new content seems focused on deepening the existing game, rather than making it even longer. Hopefully when I play that I might actually see God.
UNDISCOVERED:
I like the way this game uses its ‘found footage’ angle in a way I haven’t seen before — how there’s both a cameraman and a reporter, and how you effectively play as both at the same time: the reporter in third person, and the cameraman in first person. It’s… done in a way that’s rather motion-sickness-inducing, admittedly, but it’s a fascinating way of controlling the game, and I like how the puzzles and the layout of the temple take advantage of it. Aside from that, I like the dynamic between the two characters, I like… the rather unexpected direction it goes, and I really love how you’re constantly moving forward as you move through the temple: both in terms of how that plays with the control scheme and how it shows you going deeper and deeper in. I really wanna play more of Torple Dook’s games. Hand of Doom was one of my unexpected favourites from the first collection, and while this pack is strong enough that Undiscovered isn’t that high, comparatively, that’s two for two. And a better record than… I think any of the other repeat devs so far.
CHARLOTTE’S EXILE:
I think the effect is a bit lost if you’re not the one playing it — I was streaming this with friends and one of these friends got bored and dropped out almost immediately — but man, if you’re the one in the driver’s seat, this is tense. The short of this is that you have to decode a cypher, and find out which symbols correspond to which letters. You have a book that’ll help you decipher each letter (and you can also use Wordle strats on unfinished words to process-of-elimination what certain letters can be), but there’s something actively converging in on you as you work on your desk, and the only way to get it to back off is take your attention off your objective and stare it down until it decides to leave, like red light green light. It’s genuinely tense: you have to be constantly on guard and can’t be distracted for too long, and it becomes a matter where you know what letter corresponds to a certain sigil, but you can’t see where that symbol even is on the list and you have to look up every couple seconds because you’re genuinely kinda scared about the thing coming in on you. It… loses quite a bit of impact when you find out that it doesn’t kill you if it reaches you, but even then that’s not the main draw: figuring out the code and solving the puzzle at the end still singlehandedly sells the game on its own. Overall really liked this. One of my favourites from the pack.
THE DIVING BELL:
At first I thought this was going to be, like, an Emily is Away-style horror game where you have to manually enter stuff into the keyboard while hiding from anything that comes into the room (almost like another Charlotte’s Exile), but then the game let me walk around the marine base and I realized it was a different — and, admittedly, less unique — beast indeed. I still liked it a good bit, though! This is mostly a mood piece: less about what’s in the base with you, more about how it feels to be all alone inside it. Sound design, the way most of the game is you figuring out how to navigate from one room to another, the short bursts of story that come through the typing segments, how you have to look at the walls to try and avoid whatever thing is looking through the windows... it really nails all the little things it wants to do, and at points genuinely manifests a little bit of fear about what you're going to find in the next room. Maybe not as ambitious in concept as some of the other games here, but it does itself with enough flair and execution that it stands out for the better, regardless.
TOUCHED BY AN OUTER GOD:
My favourite of the pack. So much here for what’s ostensibly only a twenty-minute game. It hits the old-school first-person shooter vibes perfectly: it feels arcadey in the way you chew through the waves of enemies, a bit of a power fantasy in how you can stand out, in the open, against the horde, and be able to go toe to toe against them, and yet still deliver frenetic moments where you’re being overwhelmed and have nowhere to hide. I love the EXP and upgrades system, here: the way the randomization means you’ll never have the same skillset twice — I should know, I managed to die, got sent back to the beginning, and came back with a way different build than I had initially — and how in that lens it almost seems roguelite inspired, with its focus on getting stronger along the way against increasingly more oppressive foes. Also it’s just frankly a little insane that you can just not take any upgrades and completely flip the way you play the game on its head. Also also I like how the game takes into account how many upgrades you’ve taken along the way. There’s just so much here. And even if it were just the base gameplay it’d still be super fun. Says a lot that even with a stronger cohort this is easily the highlight of the pack. Definitely wanna check out what else this dev has done.
THE THING IN THE LAKE:
…Sadly, despite four of the last five games in the pack being four of the top five games in the pack, I did not manage to end the second Dread X Collection strong. This game mostly just seems to be a victim of the short development turnaround. Which is a shame, because I like a lot of what this game’s doing. I enjoy the graphical style: even beyond how this is the same dev as World of Horror, I enjoy the way the top-down, grid exploration game looks, and how it visually harkens back to the Apple II era. I also really like how the same areas you go through as one character get repurposed when you go through them as another character, and the way it all kind of interconnects and comes together in the final chapter. Unfortunately… this is just super broken and unpolished, and not in a particularly funny way. Getting sent back to the beginning of the chapter/having to go through all the cutscenes again is way too brutal a punishment for death, especially given how cheap death generally is, with the hidden traps and unclear objectives in a game where one hit or mistake kills you. It’s glitchy, as well: there’s a point where you have to die to continue the game and I managed to softlock myself because the game told me “mash the keys” and the little movements I did while doing that were enough to move me… out of the way of the guy who was meant to come in and kill me. The monkey that provides the main threat is way too centralising: hearing his roar initially makes the process of getting out alive a total crapshoot, but once you start to get familiar with the game (or turn on easy mode) hearing his roar literally just means you have to stop what you’re doing, wait for ten seconds for him to actually appear, then leave and re-enter when he appears. It got tiring, even beyond how quickly this game kind of tested my patience. Would love to see a fixed and maybe expanded version of this game but as of now… it avoided the bottom three mostly for having promise but man, what a limp way to end off the pack.
FINAL RANKING
Touched By An Outer God > Charlotte's Exile > To The End of Days > The Diving Bell > Undiscovered > Solipsis > Sucker For Love > Squirrel Stapler > The Thing In The Lake > Another Late Night > Arcadelectra > The Toy Shop
2020
The Dread X Collection is… a hybrid anthology/game jam which asked one thing of ten different indie horror devs: distill the horror game of their dreams into a short playable teaser. To that end, the prompt was executed in a variety of ways: some of the games in the pack beg the question of how they could even be extended further, given how complete they feel as standalone experiences, while others… definitely feel more like a proof of concept than something that stands on its own. It’s a smorgasbord of different ideas and executions, the quality varying wildly between each game in the pack, which… as someone who loves horror, and new ideas, and analyzing what works and what doesn’t, this is my shit.
So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested, but without any further ado:
THE PAY IS NICE:
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.
DON’T GO OUT:
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.
HAND OF DOOM:
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.
SUMMER NIGHT:
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.
OUTSIDERS:
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour an empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.
MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO:
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.
ROTGUT:
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending- wait what do you mean my chair just fell apart irl and I have to get a new one before class starts-
THE PONY FACTORY:
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty is tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.
SHATTER:
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.
CARTHANC:
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.
Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut
So here are my thoughts on each game, organized by the order in which I played them. There’s a little ranking at the end in case you’re interested, but without any further ado:
THE PAY IS NICE:
I like some of the stuff going on here — I’m into the theming around what we’ll excuse or stomach if it’s part of our job, and I love the diegetic representation of the fixed camera angles as security cameras automating your every move — but the writing is… not quite there, and sadly there’s a glitch where there’s no animation for walking backwards so I ended up just zooming everywhere through the facility which kind of undercut a lot of what the game was trying to build up. I could definitely see this working a bit more if it was longer (diegetically represent the daily grind by making you do the same thing over and over again, maybe), but as is… it’s a bit hamfisted and abrupt to really work, IMO.
DON’T GO OUT:
This honestly has a ton of potential as a (theoretically) full game. I love the idea of a horror/slasher-themed deckbuilder/roguelike/RPG thing, and I’m into a lot of the mechanics here — how you need slowly-fading torchlight to see through the fog of war, how the arena becomes smaller with each turn, the focus on using the cards you get to just try and survive rather than clear an objective or win… I’d be super down for this to be expanded on. Right now though… there isn’t particularly much here — it’s precisely one level, where the only difference between easy victory and near unavoidable defeat is… whether the player is able to find a specific door while in complete darkness, which… doesn’t provide a particularly engaging experience. I absolutely see the potential in this and really hope this gets made into something full, but the playable teaser in itself does… not have a lot to it.
HAND OF DOOM:
This was pretty cool. This is a throwback to some of the old early dungeon crawler games (honestly reminiscent of Virtual Hydlide, at least in terms of how it looks), complete with a menu that takes up two-thirds of the screen and a… rather fun magic system where you have to press buttons to physically chant out each spell. Getting new spells — and using them to progress forward — is one of the coolest things about this game, and even if it is a bit simplistic and more of a demo/proof-of-concept than a game of its own I still had a ton of fun with it. Super happy that this one in particular got expanded into a full experience. The 20-30 minutes of it I played really delivered in selling me on the concept.
SUMMER NIGHT:
Frankly, I’m… not particularly sure how this could even be seen as the start of something larger, given how complete of an experience it feels on its own. The game does build up fairly well, starting off as a really accurate game-and-watch throwback which is fairly fun in its own right, and as the game progresses, so too do things stop being quite what they seem, in a way that interfaces rather well with how the game adds new mechanics to up the ante. I’d knock it down a bit mostly due to how there are… so many periods where you’re just waiting for the game to continue — I guess it’s meant to make the player more unsettled, but it felt more like dead air than anything — but aside from that this was a super solid standalone experience. Easily the highlight of the pack.
OUTSIDERS:
This one… I might have been a bit too fatigued to really appreciate it while I was playing it. It’s… almost like a survival horror roguelike, in a way. You have to scour an empty, unfamiliar house to find items (primarily keys) that let you solve puzzles, which all coalesce to perhaps let you out… except, secretly, there’s a time limit, and when your stumbling around the house not quite knowing what to do leads you to run out of time, you’re forced to start over again… but with all the items in different spots. I won’t reveal anything after this point, but… as a whole it’s a really interesting take to make a time-attack survival horror, and I like the way the mechanics are justified thematically. I doooo however think that maybe the puzzling itself is a little weak: it’s mostly just “find item unlock way with item” puzzles, where most of the ultimate challenge ending up being having to find the keys you need in the hundreds of drawers within the house, something not helped by how the time limit slowly makes it impossible to actually see anything as all the lights around you get snuffed out. Still, I’m definitely intrigued by the main idea here, and definitely would be interested in seeing it expanded on, even if I maybe wasn’t the biggest fan of this particular demo. Also I SAW THOSE HQ_RESIDENTIAL_HOUSE ASSETS, YOU CAN’T HIDE FROM ME.
MR. BUCKET TOLD ME TO:
This one is a survival sim — one of the ones where you have to scavenge to keep your food and water and piss and shit meters up to keep yourself alive — and while it’s a bit simplistic by virtue of being a game jam game the core mechanic where each day you have to choose which of your tools to give up forever adds an interesting edge to it. I say ‘interesting’ because in practise it’s kind of like Don’t Go Out where you kind of have to know the specific answer or else you’re doomed to fail, but as a preview for a potential something larger I’m into what it’s going for: taking the way resource management works in these sorts of survival sims, and then through forcing you to get rid of your tools and scour the island for far less useful ways of feeding/hydrating/cleaning yourself slowly make it clear that this is more survival horror. Definitely think that if this goes in a little deeper on its mechanics and also gives the player a bit more of a setup/indication of how things work (I played this game twice in total and had no idea some things were in there until near the end of my second) I could definitely vibe with this as a full experience.
ROTGUT:
oh boy I do love walking down an empty tunnel for 15 minutes while absolutely nothing happens- wait what do you mean I have to walk the exact same distance back to the start- wait what do you mean the game glitched out and didn’t give me any ending- wait what do you mean my chair just fell apart irl and I have to get a new one before class starts-
THE PONY FACTORY:
This was a fun little boomer shooter. The short of the game is that you’re travelling through this abandoned factory for something that lies at the center of it, fighting creatures called “ponies” along the way, and… for the most part it works in how simple it is. I like the fact that you can’t carry your gun and your flashlight at the same time, forcing you into a situation where either you can see enemies but can’t fight back or you can fight back but can’t see them. I’m also into the level design — how conductive it is to surprise encounters, and how it changes up once you collect the something and you start going through the levels backwards to get out. I think the difficulty is tuned up a bit high — and I’m pretty sure switching down to an easier mode did nothing — but aside from that it was a neat way to spend ~30 minutes. Dunno how this would expand into a more “full” experience but I’d be down to see it.
SHATTER:
I love the vibes in this one, both in how it wears the PSX throwback graphical style (I love this one’s use of colours in particular, I feel like you never get to see lush greens and pinks in a game like this) and how much it evokes the post-apocalyptic cyberpunk dystopia it’s trying to be. In terms of being a teaser, it feels more like one to set up a world rather than to set up a game, and to that end it worked — I liked walking around and seeing and learning about where exactly I was. I… wasn’t particularly a fan of how restrictive and annoying the stamina bar is — for something that’s ostensibly a walking simulator most of the runtime, forcing you to walk super slow unless you get a secret upgrade just made going around everywhere much more of a chore than it had to be — but… yeah, I’m sold. Really wanna see what a bigger version of this is like.
CARTHANC:
This one’s sad because for as much production value is here and for how good the vibe is this felt more annoying to play than anything. I love the artstyle of, like, this alien temple that takes the aesthetic of ancient Egypt but adds a futuristic spin on it but the core of this is like, a first-person platformer — and not one that plays particularly well. The use of first-person makes your perspective rather limited in a way that makes platforming frustrating, since it’s hard to really gauge how good your jump is or where you are on a platform — I failed so many times because I’d accidentally walked off a platform before I jumped or because I was standing on something dangerous and didn’t know it. Combined with enemies who… basically scream in your ears constantly while they spawncamp you, and a lack of an idea on what the player is supposed to do at any point and… yeah. Like the idea, like how it looks, but god did this one feel so frustrating to play.
Summer Night > Hand of Doom > Shatter > The Pony Factory > Mr. Bucket Told Me To > Outsiders > Don’t Go Out > Carthanc > The Pay Is Nice > Rotgut
2023
Having loved the playable teaser of this in the first Dread X Collection, and having then immediately learned that this managed to get a full release, I was super excited to play this during the months it took for me to get around to it. And it didn’t disappoint! Virtually all the strengths in the 20-30 minute demo translate perfectly to the full release, and the game… almost manages to weather the longer playtime without feeling long in the tooth. The game captures the appearance of a 90s FMV game perfectly, meshing real actors in with pixelated graphics not unlike, say, Harvester or Phantasmagoria, and combat where you must swing your weapon in real-time, like… the first thing I think of is Virtual Hydlide but thankfully everything feels so much smoother here: possessing some fun quirks of movement befitting the time it’s emulating, such as having to use your keyboard to look up and down, while never falling into direct clunkiness. I love the spell system: how you have to click through menus to physically chant each spell, how each spell opens new paths both in front of you and littered throughout previous parts of the game almost like a Metroidvania, and how with brute force and some experimentation you can come across spells before the game officially teaches them to you. The game’s brand of comedy works to keep the line teetering between parody/reference and yet still being able to take itself seriously, and never feels like it gets old even as the game goes on. A big strength of this developer — having gone through all his Dread X offerings — is his ability to just create a vibe that's so unserious yet so unique in how they feel, and this game has that in spades.
There are a couple of things I wish were different, though: I think the final area pushes the game into “too long” territory, and the second area in particular I think is wayyyyyyyyy too large for its own good — too much space between landmarks means there’s a lottttttt of time spent walking around, especially when you’re backtracking/looking for specific things on the map. I also wish the “walk faster” spell was given to you earlier/didn’t cost health to perform: by the time I was capable of using it it was past the point where it would’ve been most appreciated, and it’s not particularly useful for the thin walkways/compressed rooms that the game throws at you after. Also wish spells were more useful in combat: they’re usable, but never quite viable, and it always felt like I could do more just swinging my sword as opposed to standing still and watching my character chant out a spell while the enemy is free to slice me up. Aside from those quibbles, though, I think this did a good job at expanding on yet still capturing what made the Dread X Hand of Doom work so well: it’s a rather engaging puzzle game with a fun, irreverent set dressing, weaponizing its influences in such a way that it looks and plays unlike anything else I’ve really seen. If there’s perhaps an edit pass that works a bit on the pacing, maybe adds some stuff, maybe gives you a couple of things earlier than it does (as well as fixing the bugs that… a lot of people who aren’t me seemed to get) I think there really can be something special here. 8/10.
There are a couple of things I wish were different, though: I think the final area pushes the game into “too long” territory, and the second area in particular I think is wayyyyyyyyy too large for its own good — too much space between landmarks means there’s a lottttttt of time spent walking around, especially when you’re backtracking/looking for specific things on the map. I also wish the “walk faster” spell was given to you earlier/didn’t cost health to perform: by the time I was capable of using it it was past the point where it would’ve been most appreciated, and it’s not particularly useful for the thin walkways/compressed rooms that the game throws at you after. Also wish spells were more useful in combat: they’re usable, but never quite viable, and it always felt like I could do more just swinging my sword as opposed to standing still and watching my character chant out a spell while the enemy is free to slice me up. Aside from those quibbles, though, I think this did a good job at expanding on yet still capturing what made the Dread X Hand of Doom work so well: it’s a rather engaging puzzle game with a fun, irreverent set dressing, weaponizing its influences in such a way that it looks and plays unlike anything else I’ve really seen. If there’s perhaps an edit pass that works a bit on the pacing, maybe adds some stuff, maybe gives you a couple of things earlier than it does (as well as fixing the bugs that… a lot of people who aren’t me seemed to get) I think there really can be something special here. 8/10.