The game starts out with you playing as a high school student called Wei who, during a storm, finds himself trapped in the school with a girl, Rey. They interact for a while and then Wei ends up hung upside down in the school assembly hall dead and the story then focuses on Rey as she explores the school to try and escape. I dont want to go into too much of the story after this point because Detention is very much a one and done kind of game where things are best experienced for yourself. The story isn't anything incredible but its well executed and interesting enough to hold your attention for its fairly short play time
Gameplay is done entirely on a 2D plane using the mouse. If your familiar with old point and click adventure type games then that's the kind of style it has. You walk around the environments finding various odd items for various odd puzzles which you solve for various interpretations of keys for various interpretations of doors. It's actually quite a good job that the story for Detention is interesting because as a game, it's a bit shit. The puzzles are insultingly easy at pretty much every stage of the game with usually the thing you need to solve a puzzle being either in the room of the puzzle itself or just every so slightly down a hall with few exceptions. The only time I got "stuck" in Detention was during a puzzle sequence involving tuning a radio to change rooms and I was only stumped because the shadows of one of the rooms was hiding a door. I fired up a guide, saw the sentence "exit the door on the right" and then closed the guide and did the rest of the game no problem. The only other element to the gameplay is the "enemies" that occasionally stalk you in the corridors. They come in two flavors and both are thwarted by pressing the right mouse button to hold your breath. If for some reason you are killed by one, the game makes you walk up a mountain path for 15 seconds and then drops you off at a checkpoint.
While Detention sort of sucks shit in the gameplay department it does much MUCH better with it's horror. Games that look like they could have been made in FlashMX 2004 usually piss me off but the old Newgrounds-y style art coupled with some decent sound design make for a rather unnerving atmosphere. There was one moment where I had to pause the game and go do something downstairs and the weird noises coming from my room were enough to make me trot back upstairs and close the door to shut them out because they were sort of making me uneasy. Also, one thing I cannot praise this game for enough is the TOTAL lack of jumpscares. Not a single one. A lot of horror games/movies rely heavily one loud noises coupled with an orchestra sting to force a scare out of you but Detention does not do this EVEN ONCE and for that it must be highly commended. A lot of the fear in Detention comes from its strange, nightmareish visuals and it does this nice thing of occasionally flashing something weird at you for just a frame or two and then never bringing it up again.
Minor spoiler here so if you dont wanna hear it skip the next paragraph
One of the puzzles involves finding a box cutter and slitting the throat of the strung up body of Wei in the second chapter. When you do this and get the item or whatever it was you get for the puzzle, as you click out off the screen, Wei opens his eyes for just a moment as the screen fades to black and fades back into the main game. If you click him again, his eyes are closed, it never happens again. It's a fantastic way to unnerve a player and it uses this technique sparingly enough to keep you guessing at every turn.
Spoilers over
It's nice to see a horror game take a more subtle approach to scaring the player than the usual loud noises, monsters made of bacon and chase sequences that we've come to know all to often today. Sure, Detention isn't particuarly great as a game but it's trying to tell you a nice, creepy little tale with some nice creepy imagry and at that it succeeds very well. If you dont want to take my word for it then consider that it was good enough at what it did to have a movie made of it, which I will be checking out myself at the first possible opportunity. It's extremely cheap on Steam so go pick it up and give it ago, you proably won't regret it
No comments:
Post a Comment