House of Sayuri

 I watch a lot of stuff on Netflix as a result of having kids and needing to commute to work and as a result of this I end up watching a lot of weird shit.  House of Sayuri was advertised to me at the login screen and being a bit of a sucker for Japanese horror I felt like I had to check it out.  I thought I was getting a serious horror movie but instead I got one of the weirdest films I've ever seen and I'm not sure if its supposed to be a comedy or not.  Spoilers for a aggressively 4/10 movie lie ahead. 

The movie starts out with a family having dinner and there's one extremely hikikomi member that the mother tries to coax out to eat with the rest of them.  This pisses off the hiki and causes her to exit her room with a baseball and go to town on them.  It then cuts to another family who have bought the house as they move in.  The family consists of the parents, 2 boys, a daughter and the grandparents, things seem nice at first but things very quickly start to get ghost-fucky.  You can see where this is going right?  The daughter ends up getting possessed and smashing the younger brothers face into a wall as the inciting incident.  After a decent amount of spooky ghost shit, it all culminates in all but the eldest son and the grandmother being dead as the possessed daughter kills a bunch of them and then stabs herself in the neck with a kitchen knife.  I'm obviously being pretty wishy-washy with the details but the point I'm trying to make here is that up to the family getting killed, Sayuri is playing itself as a pretty straight faced horror movie but then the film just does a tonal shift so insane that I actually might have got a case of actual whiplash from it.  

The grandmother in this family up to the mass murder was characterised as a doddery old lady, probably with dementia, not really being able to do anything for herself and spends most of the early scenes getting distracted by the obvious ghost shit that no one else can see.  At the end of the scene where the possessed sister stabs herself, the ghost shit somehow pulls her violently out of her dementia ridden elderly-ness and she becomes a turbo badass and she becomes a sort of weird mentor to the eldest son as they train to resist and maybe even beat the ghost thats haunting their new home.  This manifests in the story as basically working out, eating well and telling the ghost to literally just fuck off whenever it turns up.  Like it feeds on fear and mental anguish or something so if you just tell it to take a hike when it starts being spooky its got no choice but to just leave.  Pennywise from Temu, I guess, since it doesn't shapeshift and can't hurt you otherwise.  This entire mid-movie sequence is presented as a comedy, with the grandma being an extremely over the top, larger than life woman who slaps the elder son around like a sort of loving drill seargent into not being scared of actual ghosts.  

While all this is going on, the grandma is also investigating the cause of the haunting as aside from not wanting to move out of the new house, she also wants revenge for her dead family.  This is where the movie takes yet another tonal shift as the final scene gets weirdly dark out of nowhere after the entire second act being so comical.  It turns out that the hikikomori in the opening scene, the titular Sayuri, was sexually abused by her father and after she died at the hands of her family she became a ghost.  The grandmas plan here is to bring Sayuri's family back to the house and offer them up to the ghost so she can banish it.  The ghost kills the family that caused the haunting, the granda gets to watch them die, win-win.  Although none of this works and what we get is a surreal scene where the grandma turns into a slasher killer, at one point killing a dude by shoving a crowbar up his ass and then the ghost is beaten by the eldest son who does what I can only describe as "mild anime shit".

It's an absolutely insane movie and I can't work out who its for.  There's some decent horror stuff in the first act but the tonal shift at the half-way point spoils it for anyone who was enjoying the movie that way.  I also can't see dark-comedy or comedy-horror fans enjoying it because the comedy isn't very good.  You get a light chuckle out of the grandmas awakening and a little guffaw the first time the ghost gets told to fuck off but after that its just sort of dull.  But then it takes its third big shift where it gets all heavy with its subject matter and the characters your supposed to be rooting for suddenly become just kind of cruel and weird.  Maybe there's something I'm just not getting about it but to me it feels like House of Sayuri was directed by a guy who just had no real idea of what he wanted to make.  Like he was in the middle of making a horror movie but then just woke up one morning like "Oh! actually I want to make a comedy now!" but instead of scrapping the horror film he just kept it and slapped his weird comedy plot on the end of it.  

I don't think I could seriously suggest that anyone go out of their way to watch House of Sayuri but I can maybe see it having a place at a drunk bad-movie night.  If you've got a room full of drunk friends and you all just want to gawp at some insane bullshit then maybe it has some value but otherwise, don't be fooled by the slick poster and just skip this crap.

Silent Hill 2 Remake Isn't Very Good

 

I finally did it, I finally slogged through the Silent Hill 2 Remake and saw the ending.  I got Leave if anyone is curious.  I thought I'd share some of my thoughts on the game but overall I'm pretty negative on it.  There's a couple of things here and there that were done decently but overall it's an annoying and boring version of the original with a bunch of the sublety removed and a final act that seems to just not understand how good storytelling works at all.

First of all, I want to address the gameplay because that part of the game is at least OK.  Silent Hill 2 Remake plays basically the same as every other 3rd person over the shoulder horror game that you've ever played.  Resident Evil 4, 5, 6, remakes, The Evil Within, Silent Hill Downpour, Dead Space, all that shit.  It plays just like those and therefore there isn't really much to say, if you have played any modern horror game since 2005, you've played a game just like Silent Hill 2 Remake.  What is kind of cool about the gameplay of Silent Hill 2 Remake is the exploration and the remixed areas that James has to explore on his quest to find his dead wife.  When I bought the game for 60 quid I was worried that I was going to blast through the game in a couple hours because I'm pretty familiar with the original and can blast through it in an hour or two.  The areas of 2R have been expanded quite a bit though with new puzzles to solve or expansions on old ones.  For example the coin puzzle in Ashfield Apartments has been carried over from the original game only this time the coins have two sides that you have to contend with and solving the puzzle comes in the form of a 3 part poem with different coin arrangements for each part.  There are certain sections of the game where the expansions to these areas feel like padding such as in the prison, labryinth and one absolutely unforgivable puzzle segment in the hotel but overall the changes to the areas and exploration are decent.  Not better, not worse, just different and for a game that I'm extremely familiar with, I welcome the effort.

Another positive thing I want to touch on are the changes to the boss fights.  The bosses in original Silent Hill 2 are kind of wank.  For a town that's trying to punish James with monsters from his own pscyhe, it's not trying very fucking hard.  In the remake though, from a gameplay standpoint, I like the bossfights.  The change I liked the most is the Eddie fight in the meat locker.  In the original the AI would run at you, get stuck in a loop punching a piece of meat and then die in a couple of hits.  In the remake he's running all over the arena, shooting at you, trying to confuse you by fogging the place up.  At one point the hanging meat starts moving around and so if you're trying to gun him down then that's another thing you have to be managing while you shoot at him and avoid his revolver.  It's cool shit.  The fight with the double pyramid heads at the end of the game is also significantly more intense and while it's not difficult in any regard thanks to James having Dark Souls-eqsue i-frames when dodging, the sheer spectacle of fighting these two hulking fuckers with spears is very cool.

There is some stuff that's absolute dogwank though.  The game learned one trick very early on that was to hide its sentient pairs of legs around corners and have them ambush you and instead of just letting that be a one time or a couple-time thing, it's spamming that nonsense for the ENTIRE GAME.  Even when nightmares start intersecting with each other and James is supposed to be seeing Angela's monsters in the hotel, the remake decides to not do that and instead just fill the hotel with MORE FUCKING LEGS.  Legs and Pukey Boiz, that's all you fuckin' get for like 15 hours.  Maybe a nurse if the game is feeling generous but you fight them in the exact same way you fight the legs so what's the fucking point?

But that's all gameplay stuff.  Admittedly, the game part of the video game is alrite, solid, even if it does run like shit and crashed on me once in the hotel.  But the game isn't the real reason we're here is it? or at least it shouldn't be.  The story is what counts in Silent Hill 2, an absolutely masterfully written supernatural tragedy and how did Bloober handle it?  Well they fucked it up in nearly every single cutscene.  It was so bad that I started to dread getting to the end of segments because I knew something was going to piss me off royally as soon as the characters started flapping their gums.

There's too much to go through in a simple blog post, maybe I'll do a video on it one day, but the general gist of why it all annoys me so much is the complete removal of subtlety from the story.  Everything that was hinted at or implied through imagry or line delivery is gone and instead replaced with obvious statements made by Hollywood-ass sounding voice actors.  Angela doesn't sound weird and stilted like she's supposed to, Eddie is overly pathetic, the letter read at the end of the game from Mary sounds like a weird dollar store version of the original.  Granted, for most of the game it's only mildly annoying, stuff that me and my friend were saying "yeah it's OK but they fumbled it a little bit, I guess".  But then you watch the video tape in the hotel and everything, narratively speaking, goes to complete shit to the point where I wanted to take a plane to the Bloober offices and just punch every "writer" they have it that place right in the fucking jaw.  The game was made for them, all they had to do was copy it and yet they made all these weird changes to the sequence that aren't just different and a bit crap, but actively ruin the effect that the original was trying to produce.  

I understand that Bloober is a team of not very talented people and the fact that SH2R is as acceptable as it turned out is an christmas fucking miracle but what they did to the ending segment of the hotel is nothing short of art vandalism and I'm already sort of swerving into spoiler town enough with this post so again, another post for another day or maybe even a 14 hour video about why it sucks if I ever find the time to produce such a thing. 

Overall, Silent Hill 2 Remake is a medicore experience that teeters very close the being just flat out bad more often than not.  A few good decisions here and there but, quite frankly, it would be better if this game had never been made.

Hollowbody

 Spoiler alert, I'm going to say some rather unkind things about this game.  However, apparently, it's a game made by a single guy so before I take a big shit on it I want to at least acknowledge that the fact that this game exists at all is worthy of at least some praise.  I'm slowly trying to get into making games myself and even just learning how to make a knock-off ZX Spectrum lookin' ass game is proving to be quite the undertaking so despite Hollowbody's myriad problems, the effort to put it out is worthy of a pat on the head.

Anyway, nice things over, this game fucking sucks shit.

Hollowbody is a classic style survival horror game about a chick going into an abandoned British city in order to look for some other chick.  At time of writing it's been a little over a month since I finished Hollowbody and the plot is so forgetable that it's pretty much all I can remember of its story.  It's poorly presented and completely uninteresting and while I do remember the ending I don't want to go that far into spoiler territory for this post but it's unsatisfying and not worth it.

So if we ignore the plot, what are we left with? A sub-standard Silent Hill 2 clone with muddy graphics and shit level design.  Really it's copying the broad strokes of big titles from the entire genre but I single out Silent Hill 2 specifically because the first major area you go to is an apartment building that basically amounts to a dollar store version of the Ashfield apartments.  Each area you go to is also rife with some of the most boring and easy puzzles I have ever seen in a game of this type where any challenge that arises comes from poor signposting of key elements rather than devious challenge from the developer.  One example of this is when you need to light a trashcan fire to set off a fire alarm but the trash can asset is strewn all over the building that you're in and the existence of the fire alarm isn't obvious because it's a glowing red cube that clips into a wall.  When it's not being annoyingly obtuse in that regard the puzzles are just flat out obnoxious.  A stand out example of this type of puzzle was where you're tasked with trudging around a large graveyard examining sparsely layed out tombstones for a code.  I took one look at the puzzle, one look at the size of the area and immdiately went to the internet for the solution because Hollowbody is not worthy of me trudging through empty environments for clues.

But puzzles aren't the only thing this game has, there's also (sort of) combat.  Almost no strategy needed and no need to worry about the "survival" aspect of this survival horror game because most of the enemies you encounter can be smacked to death with a big stick and will basically put up zero effort to try and kill you thanks to the stunlocking effect of said stick.  By the time the game does start throwing some bigger baddies at you, you're so ammoed up with no risk of ever running out that you can mindlessly just blast anything blocking your way (which the enemies rarely ever do anyway, just run around em') and proceed to the end of the game unharmed and unbothered.

There is also a disgusting lack of polish that plagues the game at every turn.  Character models look weird with animations that are distractingly bad.  Voice acting is stilted in the inept way rather than the SH2 creepy way and I encountered a handful of bugs when playing.  My personal favorite of these bugs was a "puzzle" where you have to run around a sewer collecting still beating hearts to put on this fucking machine.  When you examine the machine, the character is like "there are creepy hands reaching out for something" or some shit but my game looked like this 

Insane indeed.  Here's a pic I clipped from some dudes lets play so you can see what its supposed to look like 

Hollowbody being apparently developed by one guy makes me want to be charitable towards it, if true, that's cool as fuck.  But on the flip side, you charged me 15 quid for a sub standard, derivitive and forgettable product that looks like jank and runs like shit.  So sorry not sorry, Hollowbody can fuck off forever.  One for the acid pit, don't buy it

Horror Month Roundup

 

Well, horror month is "over" and for the first time in years I failed to finish all 31 games on the list.  Technically, at time of writing I still have one day left but the next game in the list is Murdered: Soul Suspect and there's no way in fuck hell I'm finishing that in one day.

So why did it fail? The first and probably most obvious reason is the fact that I'm a dad now.  Being a dad reduces my stream hours a fair bit even at the weekends so while in previous years I would maybe go from like, 6am to midnight, this year I'd have to do 9am to 6pm and then 6pm to 11pm.  That's a whole bunch of hours, even an entire games worth of hours in some cases to get shit done.  Now while it would be easy to scapegoat my 1 year old if I'm being honest I don't think I could have pulled it off this year anyway because I'm an idiot.  In previous years I have put short indie horror games in the list to account for the fact that Monday-Friday I have to do my 9-6 job but this year I put far too many big boys on there.  Resident Evil 3, Fatal Frame, Bioshock, Fear 2, Manhunt, Disaster Report, what the fuck was I thinking.  Then I also got sort of blindsided by games that I thought would be a bit shorter that ended up taking way more time like Tormented Souls, FOBIA and Hollowbody.  My impression going in was that they were short and they were short in the sort of "6-10" hour definition and not the "1-2 indie experience" that I was thinking.  My fault for not doing the research in enough detail.

But enough about my failure.  More importantly, how were the fucking games?   Well good, mostly.  Stuff like Fatal Frame and Bioshock were in there because I already knew they were good and I wanted an excuse to replay them.  I was actually surprised at how much I enjoyed Resident Evil 3 actually.  Usually when I have played that game in the past its because I've been marathoning 1-3 back to back and by the time I hit 3 I'm burnt out.  Playing it fresh gave me a new perspective on it and while it's still sort of frustrating and feels like an expansion rather than a proper sequel, I liked it a lot more than I usually do.

Then there were the first plays like Disaster Report which I really enjoyed although I have played later games in the series and enjoyed those so I sort of knew I'd like that one.  Crow Country was also a great old school survival horror throwback with a cool visual style.  Tormented Souls I liked less but still thought was pretty solid.  I really enjoyed the fact that someone was doing the modern day "rendered" backgrounds thing because I love pre-rendered backgrounds of old and I wish more people would make really crisp, detailed shit on modern tech.  That technique is seen as "dated" though and isn't used so much so big props to Tormented for doing a take on it.  Of course, I cannot mention the great games from the horror games I finished without mentioning Faith.  Absolute belter of a game despite the fact that it looks like an Atari2600 game.  Interesting plot, actual effective horror, some decent replayability that I'm excited to go back to offline, absolutely a contender for best game of the marathon. 

Finally there were the stinkers.  Moons of Madness was a pathetic and boring foray into Lovecraft.  Hollowbody was a complete snoozefest which is crazy considering how much it was copying the homework of much better games.  Finally there was FOBIA which I won't go into detail on here because that might be one of the contenders for worst games I have ever played in my life and therefore I need to save all my bile for the blog post its going to get soon.

Just because horror month is over, doesn't meat that I'm just giving up on that playlist though.  It's being incorporated into the regular schedule and played to completion.  My weekends will also continue to be long horror streams until it's done so tune in over at Twitch or Youtube to check it out.  The one good thing about failing the marathon is that the last game on the list is Deadly Premonition 2 and while before I was planning to b-line it to the end to make pace, now that I've failed I can kick back and engage with more of it's content, which I think is a much better way to do my first playthrough.  

Good times were had, more to come

www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

Silent Hill 3's Weird Bad Ending

 

Silent Hill 3 is my favorite entry in the series.  Unlike the vast majority of the fanbase that seems to hold 2 as the best one, I actually like the occult stuff from 1, 3 and 4 and I think the third entry in the series has some of the best scares of the entire franchise.  But they are all (all being 4 and before, anything after 4 can fuck off) good, really that just comes down to personal preference but despite having played SH3 a ton and it being in my top spot since my teens I have never gotten it's weird bad ending.

I didn't even know it was a thing.  Silent Hill as a series is known for its multiple endings thing but 3 didn't really have that. 1 had the Good/Bad + or not plus thing, 2 had endings based on actions you took in the game, 4 has a bunch of endings based on how you treat the escort and how good of an exorcist you are but 3, I thought, only had 2.  It's a definitive story about the aftermath of the first game, there's not really a lot of wiggle room for an ending.  Heather has the unawaked demon god inside her, some shit happens and then she kills it, done and dusted.  Of course, there's the UFO ending which basically every game has to have as a tradition but then there's the "Possessed" ending.  I only found out about it when I was drinking with my friend and he mentioned it in an off-hand comment and it took me completely by surprise.

First of all, you can't even get it on a New Game, you have to be in New Game + or else it won't play even if you do the other requirements.  Once you've done that, you have to get your Hotline Hill on and kill over 100 enemies while also letting them smack you around because you yourself have to take over 1000 points of damage.  Forgive the woman in the confessional near the end of the game and then kill the final boss and boom, bad ending.  I won't spoil what it is exactly here, you can either go look it up on YouTube or go do it yourself.

So it's no surprise I never knew about it really.  Silent Hill 3, despite it's quality, is not the kind of game I tend to play more than once at a time.  The game is so exhausting (in a good way) that after I'm done I'll put it down for a handful of months and then come back for another playthrough when I get the itch.  It's like crawling under a nice blanket....made of flesh and it's bleeding, but it's comforting nontheless.  Usually when I come back to this playthrough I don't do NG+ from a completed file, I usually just do a flat new game on normal/normal.  I've done the UFO ending long ago but that's one of the only times I've engaged with the plus stuff but I'm mainly here for the narrative and not to shoot anime beams at flesh beasts.

It was a nice thing to discover though, gave me an excuss to do two more playthroughs of one of my favorite games on the PS2 and I suggest you give it a go too.  If I'm being honest it's not REALLY worth the effort to get but if this post can get even one person to replay SH3 again then that's good enough for me.  Go play it

31 Game Horror Challenge 2024

 It's that time of the year once again to do the 31 game horror challenge!  This year we're doing it in November because my October was busy as all hell but if it was really up to me, it would be spooky month every month but whatever.  Here's the list in the order that I'll be playing them

1. Silent Hill 2 

2. Paranoihell 

3. Resident Evil 3 (PS1) 

4. The Smell of Death -A Tsugunohi Tale- 

5. Bioshock

6. Lucifer Within Us 

7. Fatal Frame

8. Crow Country 

9. F.E.A.R 2 

10. Splatter Master 

11. Moons of Madness

12. Gun Survivor 2: Biohazard Code Veronica 

13. Lost in Vivo

14. Bloodshots

15. DreadOut

16. Fobia: St Dinfna Hotel 

17. Disaster Report 

18. Tormented Souls

19. Manhunt 

20. Faith

21. Hollow Body

22. 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors

23. Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomstick

24. Murdered Soul Suspect 

25. ...iru?! 

26. Hell Yeah! Wrath of the Dead Rabbit 

27. Gregory Horror Show 

28. Shadowgrounds

29. Dementium 2 

30. Michigan: Report From Hell 

31. Deadly Premonition 2 

I've not failed a horror challenge since the very first one I did where I underestimated the length of Days Gone but this year I have a baby to contend with.  Will I get through all of these? or will life be the real survival horror?  Only one way to find out!  www.twitch.tv/taurinensis

The Windows Are Gone

 

On my stream I like to do a little segment that I call "free game dumpster diving" which, I know, is a strange thing to call it considering that a lot of the things I do play end up being quite good but I started with that and I'm not about to change it now.  One of the things I played recently on that segment was a little thing called The Windows Are Gone which I found moderately impressive so I want to do a little post about it and shine some light on it.

The Window Are Gone starts out with a character moving into a new house as a way of getting a fresh start after experiencing some kind of horrible event.  It starts out quite simple with you just having to carry your boxes of stuff into the house but before too long things start to get a little creepy with a next door neighbor coming to say hi and things going bump in the....day.  Things going bump in the day I think is a smidge creepier because the day is when things aren't supposed to go bump.  Bump in the night? no problem, deal with that shit all the time, bump in the day? that's just fuckin wrong.

Anyway the story is extremely short and I want you, the reader, to actually go and play it so without getting into any spoilers things escalate pretty quickly and a decent horror experience ensues.  The story is pretty predictable and you can KIND of guess whats going on as early as the first little text message you get on your phone from another character but what the game lacks in originality it makes up for with absolute SPADES of atmosphere.  Come cool sound design couple with the not-quite PS1 visuals and some funky tricks with timers and triggers was able to actually get a little bit of a spook out of me and when considering that most AAA huge budget large studio bullshit horror games can't get that out of me, that's impressive.  

What Mr or Mrs ScaryCube has managed to show here is restraint, which I feel is a bit of a lost art in the genre in recent memory.  While a lot of horror games want to hit you with dark corridors, lound banging and BOO! CREEPY FUCKIN MONSTER! as quickly as possible The Windows Are Gone knows how to use its short run time to allow itself to build up properly.  Start with something mundane, get comfortable, get a little cozy even and then slowly IV Drip that spooky shit until the climax.  I've always thought that short stories are probably the best delivery method for horror literature and I'm starting to think that short, bite-sized games like this might be a more advantagous method of delivering horror games as well.  A solid 1-4 hour experience is proabably more conducive to making something truly scary rather than an 8 hour gory screamfest that you become desensitized to by hour 3 (Dead Space, you unscary fuck).  

Finally, the game allows you to actually open up the boxes and decorate the house which, in my opinion, was a way more entertaining part of the game than I ever thought something like that could be.  Move over Unpacking, The Windows Are Gone has got your fuckin number.

This post could be longer but I really don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't played it before and didn't see it on my stream.  It costs literally 0 money and is short as fuck so don't make any excuses, go try it now.

The Worst Kind of Horror

 

I am a big fan off the horror genre as you might be able to guess from the fact that I always do giant 31 game challenges of various horror games every October.  It's not just one of my favorite genres for video games but it's also the first genre I go to for books and movies too.  I'm just can't get enough of all that spooky bullshit.

Horror is a pretty broad term as within "Horror" there's all sorts of different types of horror.  Slasher, supernatural, body horror, psychological, sci-fi and found footage are just a few examples of all the different sub-genres within the giant umbrella that is "horror".  But there is one sub-genre within this niche that has consistently just the absolute worst content known to man and that's Mascot Horror.  If you see a game within this sub genre then I suggest you ignore it and not waste your money (or time, if its free to play) because the only thing you are in for with the majority of games within this genre is a bad experience with maybe a couple of jump scares peppered in between.

I feel like the big jumping off point for Mascot Horror was Five Nights and Freddies, the game that really put the genre on the map.  Now I don't actually hate FNaF all that much, it's not mind-blowing or anything and its tension is quickly ruined by its eagerness to kill you with a jump scare but its a neat little idea for a game.  However the majority of its sequels and all the copycats it spawned are probably some of the worst things to happen to the horror genre in its entire history. 

Poppy's Playtime, Garten of Banban, Baldi's Basics, Amanda the Adventurer, countless examples of just low effort trash shat onto various online platforms for idiots to waste their money on.  Desperately hoping that the game, like FNaF, will be picked up by enough children that think it's being really clever to develop a following and in turn, make a boatload of cash.  Really though, juxtaposing childrens entertainment with horror elements is just a really lame way of generating fear and it's the kind of thing that only a person under the age of maybe 12 might think is effective.  Movies do this too where horror films like to take a childrens song and have it play slowly over some scene of violence and I have never once in my life met a person who thinks that that kind of thing is effective in any way.

The two worst offenders I can think of within the genre are Bendy and the Ink Machine and CASE: Animatronics.  Both games are janky, poorly made pieces of actual shit that fail both as horror properties and as games.  CASE is far worse being a buggy, low effort mess clearly trying to muscle in on some of that FNaF money but Bendy is just as offensive to the senses as that has somehow manage to build itself a little bit of a following.

You aren't being clever by taking something that's "for children" and making it spooky or worse, covering it in gore for shock value.  Take your Unreal Engine horror game template and fuck off, stop wasting time and money by putting this shit to market.  Go and work on something actually interesting instead.

The Silent Hill 2 Remake Gets Worse

 

So without me realizing it some new Silent Hill 2 gameplay footage dropped and while I'm not usually one to watch these kinds of promotional material I just HAD to see what was going on with this absolute trainwreck of a remake.  I knew from the start that SH2R is doomed to be awful in every way but, at least from what I can glean from this trailer, it is way worse than I had ever imagined.  

First thing I have to mention is the graphics, the game LOOKS like complete shit.  Now you could argue that it's early footage or whatever but this game has been in development for a good while already and if this is where we are up to then things look pretty grim.  What's weird is that the visual design of their games is literally the only thing Bloober Team is any good at.  Layers of Fear, for example, is a gigantic piece of steaming garbage but if you go on the store page for it and take a look at some screenshots it looks pretty well put together.  Hell, I imagine a lot of their sales for that game came off the back of tricking people with talented 3D artists to get curious shoppers to buy in.  In particular within that trailer james is fighting some Lying Figures and they look AWFUL.  They sort of look like they've been pulled right from the movie but not the actual 3D model used from that film but an amateurs recreation of that model, horrendous.

Then there's the problem of the combat itself.  It's pretty much stock standard over the shoulder gameplay but there's something about it that looks really bad.  The way it looks gives me weird Homecoming vibes and the abundance of QTE gives me flashhbacks to Silent Hill Origins and that is NOT a good combo at all.  People like to piss and moan about tank controls and shit but that style of gameplay was FINE for a game like this and once you get used to them they don't really feel at that bad at all.  I don't subscribe to the "it makes James feel like he sucks at fighting" thing either, that's fucking stupid bullshit spouted by people who just suck at playing the game since Harry, James and Heather, unlike the highly trained members of S.T.A.R.S can at least have some mobility while aiming.  Not having the camera locked to the right side of James's shoulder though allows the developers to do some things with enviroment design that would probably get missed with a camera so zoomed in.  There's a lot to say for tank over the more modern system but that's another post for another day.

The final thing about the trailer, the thing that stuck out the absolute most out of all the others was some writing on a wall that read "Reap what you sow"

Silent Hill 2 was never this kind of game, never this brand of horror.  It was slow burn, atmospheric, oppressive before lurching into some really scary stuff for a short time and then pulling you back into weird spooky serenity.  Think the part in the hospital, its a great example.  Calm and creepy up till the the bit where Laura locks you in a room with those weird things from the ceiling, then opressive as all fuck and THEN holy shit triangle man is chasing you down a hall and it all ends with James in the hospital defeated, sad and alone while some calm music plays.  I get that this trailer is just supposed to be a short compilation of "the scary bits" but look at Bloobers other games and tell me that you think that they are going to be able to pull off what original Silent Hill 2 was doing.  Of course they fucking aren't, the whole game is going to be always like that all of the time.  Silent Hill 2 via Dead Space and "Reap what you sow" written on a wall in bright text is a perfect signpost as to just how little anyone working on this remake understand what the original was about or trying to do.

Remakes can, in general, suck my ass as in most cases they are a shitty way for some execs to use nostalgia as a method of getting a bigger bonus for the year. But this remake, which is doing that but made by people who clearly lack a lot of talent and probably don't even care about the source material can extra suck my ass through a straw after I have consumed a large amount of spicy food

Fuck SH2R

2022 Horror Challenge Roundup

 

On October 1st 2022 I started a challenge that involved playing though 31 horror games within a month (outlined in this post http://identitygaming.blogspot.com/2022/09/31-game-horror-challenge-2022.html) and on October 30th 2022 I completed that challenge!  It was a stressful month, for sure, but it was an immensely fun challenge and I'm totally planning to do it all again next October.  For now I wanted to just go over a few of the games from the challenge that I thought stood out, so think of this post as a sort of "Halloween spooky game award post" 

Best Game

I did a horror game challenge about 2 years ago and failed it miserably because I'm an idiot that put some IMMENSELY long (and shitty, Days Gone) games and Yuppie Psycho was one of the ones I didn't get to back then, so better late than never I guess.  It's a game that's truly best experienced by knowing as little as possible about it but, let's be honest, is there anything more frightening that office work?  Pepper in a unique setting and some occult-type beats and you have a rather unique experience that is as charming as it is scary. 

That's all you're getting for this one, go play it

Worst Game

Dread X Collection is a collection of short horror games made by various developers that I played off stream and was deeply disappointed by.  Dread X Collection 2 I played on stream and it was probably one of the most miserable experiences I've had with a horror title in a very long time.  The ideas behind the games are bad, the games themselves are bad and there's this sort of air of smugness about the whole thing that makes it pretty unbearable to play.  It's a level of incompetancy that is rarely found anywhere within game development and I feel that most of the people involved should probably fuck off to some other medium.  Most of the games in this collection are barely playing, boring, try-hard messes that despite having an extremely short length feel like they drag on and on just because of how vile they are.

There are 2 exceptions to this though.  One game was called Squirrel Stapler which was really daft but sort of fun to play.  The other was called Sucker for Love which is a sort of joke dating-sim where you have to try and woo an Eldritch God which was pretty funny and also came with some decently creepy concepts and imagery.  However play Sucker for Love with the voices OFF because the voice acting was extremely cringe worthy.  

I own 3 or 4 more Dread X games since I got a bunch of them as a set and after playing these two I have 0 motivation to continue the Action52 of horror games.  

Biggest Surprise

After seeing the AVGN review and being told about it by various people I was expecting something truly awful, something akin to the level of quality of Dread X Collection 2.  However Countdown Vampires is a game that's actually pretty fun to play, at least on stream with a group of people to banter with and revel in its insanity.  It's just a shoddy clone of Resident Evil that has basically no vampires and like, 4 countdowns in it but there's something sort of endering about the whole thing.  The 3D FMV sequences are non-sensical but weirdly well produced and a decent amount of effort went into the pre-rendered backgrounds even if the actual render quality is sort of shoddy.  Also the game is really, REALLY funny between absolute batshit character design and voice acting that makes Resident Evil 1 sound like Shakespear; the whole thing, while not good, was highly entertaining and I'd happily play it again 

Scariest Game

I know that saying Silent Hill 2 is scary is like saying that the sky is blue, just obvious bullshit thus making this pick seem like a complete cop-out but the one "mistake" I made this year was that most of the games I picked almost completely failed on their horror fronts.  F.E.A.R gets a close second for, while not being scary in the slightest, at least TRYING to get an ambience down and Alien Isolation gets props for making me make silly noises when I messed up but I wasn't actually scared by any of the games this year except for maybe this one. Even then its more fear of a concept of my wife getting sick and dying before my eyes than it is of the actual game but it scared me pretty badly in my teenage years so it gets the scariest game spot for being creepy on multiple levels at least. 

Least Scary Game

I didn't know anything about Geist when I put it on the list.  I mean, it's called "Ghost" but in German so I was expecting something at least a little spooky but what I got was a sort of ghost-themed action game/puzzle game?  Not that I'm going to bash it too hard, it was fun to play and the ghost-based puzzles were equal parts interesting and funny but there was a bit too much just shooting dudes with guns in first person for me to really consider it a proper horror game.  Still, I feel like a lot of people haven't tried this one so if you get a chance, give it a go. 

---

So that's it for this year!  There will be other horror games peppered into the stream here and there throughout the year, of course, but we wont be going full spooky again until next October.  Keep me informed of any cool horror games you find via Discord or twitch chat and maybe they'll get put on the list! 

 

It Follows? It Sucks! (Kinda)

 

Between streaming horror games on my Twitch channel I've been trying to squeeze in a few horror movies as well, with it currently being the season for it and all.  One film that I've had my eye on since it came out and never got around to watching was It Follows from 2015 a film that has had quite a lot of positive press surrounding it for a long time and now I finally got to see it.  

Despite the title of this blog post I'm not about to attempt to tear it a new one, it wasn't THAT bad.  The acting is fine, the cinematography is really nice and there's a handful of pretty effective scenes and touches that stop it from being a stinker but overall the whole thing is just kind of silly

The premise to the film is that there is a person who is being followed by some kind of thing in human form that is invisible to everyone except the person who is the current target and previous targets.  If you are the target, the only way to get the creature off you is to have sex with another person, where the curse is then sexually transmitted to the person that you had sex with and then they must pass it on to someone else.  However, if the person you had sex with is killed, then the thing starts going back up the line so, for example, if I was the creatures current target and then I have sex with you, the reader, and then the monster kills you it will then come right after me again.  This isn't a Ring style situation where you can just have someone watch the tape and then be rid of it, you'll always be sort of concerned that your turn is coming. 

The idea of a slow yet tireless thing that will follow you for all of time is a decent premise despite the whole "sexually transmitted" part being a bit daft and the scene at the very start of the film is extremely good in giving you an idea of whats going on while still leaving a bit of mystery.  It's after that scene though where the whole thing starts to fall apart a little.

See, the thing in It Follows is a real thing that exists in the world its inhabiting.  It's not a ghost than can walk through walls, its got maybe some slightly higher than average strength but for the most part its similar to a human and while its invisible to everyone except the victim, other people can interact with it and you can even make it partially visible by throwing a sheet on it.  Also you seemingly can't kill it but you can stun it for a small amount of time but shooting it in the head or using some other means.

Now that I've explained all that, the reason I think this movie is quite silly is that despite all of this being figured out by a group of about 5 people, they spend the entire movie making absolutely braindead decisions and putting themselves in danger for pretty much no reason.  Anyone watching the movie could figure out that the trick to stopping it would be to simply trap it in something.  The main character in a scene about half way through the film stuns it by blasting it in the head and on multiple occasions she also sees it being blocked by doors and walls and yet, despite this, the idea to lock it inside a place NEVER CROSSES HER MIND.  Instead she goes for some absolutely batshit insane plan where they try and electrocute it inside a swimming pool which completely fails and then their plan after that is to just....have sex with hookers?  

A long time ago I watched an anime that I quite enjoyed called Ajin, a series about immortal people getting up to some shenanigans.  There's a scene in that show where the army is trying to aprehend an Ajin who's up to no good and they know that while they can't kill him they can stun him, like the thing from It Follows, for a small amount of time by hitting him in the head.  So they get the first hit on him and then their plan is nearly successful because they surround the body and have a guy with a rifle putting another bullet between his eyes every couple of seconds as they try to carry him into containment.  

The characters in It Follows have a gun, have a means to blast it in the head over and over and could probably quite easily get their hands on some kind of container that they could lob into the ocean and yet it's never done, it's never tried and its never even talked about.  They are more than willing to barricade themselves IN to rooms at multiple points but the very basic idea of just trapping the thing is left completely off the table.

The situation in It Follows reminds me of why I had such a problem with other horror movies such as A Quiet Place, where very obvious solutions to an issue seem to be all around around them but because they are "horror movie characters" they go with the most stupid, nonsensical actions possible so that the film actually has something to work with which in my opinion is just shitty writing.  My first thought actually was to just flee to a different country but the film actually establishes that the thing can swim so that obviously goes right out the window but it puts so many solutions so blatently there on the table that the characters not rubbing their brain cells together just takes me out of the film completely.

Like I said, it's not an awful film by any stretch and if you're looking for a competently shot, competently acted movie with some decent scares here and there to maybe have on in the background or watch with friends, It Follows is a good pick for that.  Just don't buy into all that hype about it being "striking" or those weirdo critics claiming that its "deep" because the demon is sexually transmitted.  

One of the most 6/10 movies I've ever seen

31 Game Horror Challenge 2022

 A couple of years ago I attempted a 31 game horror challenge for October and failed due to the fact I mistakenly picked some very long games.  I will be trying again this year and hopefully I have picked some more reasonable games.  Here's this list of games and the order they will be played in 

1. Silent Hill 2

2. INMOST 

3. House of the Dead Remake

4. Bloodwash 

5. Castlevania: Dracula X Chronicles

6. F.E.A.R

7. Splatterhouse 2 

8. Deathsmiles Mega Black Label 

9. Among the Sleep 

10. Lucius

11. Resident Evil 3 Remake

12. Maid of Sker

13. No Delivery 

14. Dead Space 2 

15. Dementium: The Ward

16. Yuppie Psycho

17. CASE: Animatronics

18. The Witches House

19. Project H

20. Onimusha Warlords 

21. Geist

22. Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare

23. Mr Bones

24. Nosferatu

25. Rule of Rose

26. Penubra Overture

27. Countdown Vampires 

28. Deep Fear

29. Dino Crisis 2 

30. Dread X Collection 2 

31. Alien Isolation

For every game on this list I do not finish I will be donating 10 GPB and adding prizes to the prize list.  

Lets get spooky!

Amnesia Rebirth: A Good Idea Left Unimplemented

 

At time of writing I have just finished Amnesia Rebirth, provided to me for free by the Epic Game Store.  I am also maybe the most frustrated I have ever been with a horror game in my life.

I'm not really here to write a review or anything but I'll quickly cover my thoughts on my playthrough.  Amnesia Rebirth is a game I was expecting very little out of based on the previous entry in the series called A Machine For Pigs.  The first game, The Dark Descent was greatly entertaining but Machine For Pigs was no more than a walking simulator spook-house made by a group of devs so devoid of talent that you could have probably made a better game by giving a new born baby a 1970s IBM and a big stick to hit it with.  Luckily Amnesia Rebirth is a bit more of an actual game and tells the story of a woman called Tasi as she gets stranded in the desert in a plane crash as she goes through caves and some alternate dimension in an attempt to escape and save not just her life, but the life of her unborn child as well.

Gameplay involves exploring areas, solving puzzles and occasionally hiding/running away from a monster.  The sanity management thing from Dark Descent is back where spending too much time in the dark or looking directly at the creature will cause you to freak out and die so managing things like your supply of matches and latern oil is something the game tries to convince you is important.  However Rebirth is also incredibly easy with pathetically easy puzzles and no punishment for failing encounters with the creatures, but I'll talk about that later.  That said though, it was just entertaining enough to keep me playing to the end without getting too angry with it so as far as "run and hide" horror games go you could in fact do a lot worse.  

So why am I so frustrated with it?  Well one of the main things in the game is the main character "controlling her fear" and "not succumbing to anger" and all that bullshit.  It's pretty clear, pretty early on unless you have some kind of brain problem that the events of the game are somehow her fault and she's actually retracing her steps finding out what happned to her and the crew of the plane that went down at the start.  As you play you encounter a monster that will, in certain areas, attempt to chase you down and get you, only if and when it does get you, you don't actually die or game over.  The game throws you a mini cutscene of the main character running through a couple of previous explored areas and then waking up either just before or sometimes just after the area you were just in.  

What I thought was going on was that every time the creature caught you, that was her "succumbing to her fear" and so each failed creature encounter would somehow affect the ending in some way.  What compounded my impression of that happening was the fact that after you are caught and get back to the monster area, the monster is gone from that zone.  Like you are now free to progress the game monster free at the cost of the ending.  Not failing any monster encounters would mean that she managed to stay mentally strong during the whole ordeal and you would get the best ending and failing all or nearly all of them would give you the worst one, maybe with some other factors thrown in as well.  

However none of this actually happened.  As soon as I hit the final cutscene and was given a "do X or Y" choice the rug was pulled from underneath me and I realized that all of that hiding and running away that I did barely mattered at all.  The only monster encounters that actually matter are the spoopy ghosts with the lanterns near the end because they dont actually despawn when you fail but, and I'd have to test thing, they lose the ability to "kill" you after the first time.  

The other reason I thought this was the case is because when you start the game you are given a choice between "normal mode" and "adventure mode".  Adventure mode basically just turns off the monsters and the sanity mechanic and lets you just explore and puzzle solve and is described by the game as "for people that don't want to deal with horror".  

There are two things wrong with this

One is that, like I said before, getting caught by the monster just deletes it from the area anyway so even if you're the worst hide and seek player of ALL TIME you still only need to suffer one minor failiure before you are allowed to progress.  Two is what the fuck do you mean by "dont want to deal with horror"?!  Why in the name of bloody fuck would you buy the THIRD GAME IN A SERIES OF HORROR GAMES if you didn't like horror?  That would be like me going to see a movie called "Love Actually 3" and then getting pissed off at the fact its a romance movie and not a supernatural thiller, what a stupid fucking mode to have in your game.

So what could have been a cool mechanic that encourages repeat playthroughs just wasn't used at all and now if I want to see the other endings all I have to do is load my save and pick the other other thing.  "Push a button on the Ending-tron 3000" is the shittiest, laziest most bullshit way a developer can implement multiple endings and anyone who's used that method deserves to have an entire day spent in wet socks, you're a disgrace.

Despite my griping though, Rebirth is still SIGNIFICANTLY better than A Machine for Pigs which granted, is not a very high bar to pass, but at least there is an attempt at an actual game here.  The most 5/10 horror game you'll ever play in your life

Detention Quick Review

 

Detention is a game I've had my eye on for a long time and now I have finally got around to playing and finishing the game so I want to spend just a little time sharing some of my thoughts on it. 

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

Bendy and the Ink Machine

 

With horror being easily one of my favorite genres of game, I'm always on the lookout for good horror games to sink my teeth into and with all the rave reviews I saw about Bendy and the Ink Machine, I expected this to be pretty good.  To my dismay, however, it's a collosal piece of garbage.

The game follows some dude whos name I can't remember as he goes back to an old animation studio he used to work for only to find the place in complete disrepair.  He throws a switch, turns on an ink machine and everything goes to shit as he gets stalked and chased by all manner of horrors from the studios past.

The game is your standard modern horror fare where you walk around solving some basic puzzles, finding notes and audio logs and hiding from the enemies.  The big problem with the game play in Bendy is that there is no depth to ANY of it and after about the 2 hour mark the whole thing becomes extremely dull.  The puzzles are extremely simple and usually just involve wandering around an area in order to find an item or push a button.  When it does try something more complex than that it's laughably easy, like one section where you have to fill pressure valves or something but you just hold the E key until the little water level touches the line, the kind of puzzle your children might enjoy when waiting in the dentists office.  The combat is super simple where you just walk up to things and left click until the cease to be.  There are some boss fights that try to give some variety to the combat but they are just a case of slowly strafe around enemy until they become hittable.  The stealth also only comes in two flavors of run away or throw a can for a distraction and the sections are always very short and very easy.  The complete lack of challenge or creativity found in this game means that playing it through to the end feels like an absolute chore.

But boring, cliche and unscary horror games are dime-a-dozen on Steam.  If I was to get mad about every game like that I'd be raging longer than the expected life of the universe, but what really sets Bendy apart is that it also just doesn't fucking work.  The game is EXTREMELY buggy with things constantly not working right.  The one that really sticks out in my mind is where the game completely halted my progression because it wanted me to take an elevator.  What is supposed to happen is there's a cutscene where some woman talks to you, the elevator comes down and then you get it to go to the next bit of the game.  In my game, the elevator was already there and if I pushed the elevator button nothing happened.  I even went to every floor in the level and pushed the call button there too to see if that would fix it but nope, I was just stuck.  I had to quit the game, reload, listen to the cutscene again and THEN it worked.

But that's a minor annoyance compared to the fact that the games save system just doesn't fucking work.  If you aren't planning on finishing Bendy in a single session then don't bother.  I had an issue where I was losing a couple of hours of progress at a time because something would screw up with the auto saving system and then when I loaded my game it would just set me back a whole bunch.  I noticed it was possible to tell when the bug kicked in because the save icon would stay perpetually in the corner but it happened A LOT and I was constantly quitting and reloading in order to not potentially lose an hour or two of progress to a shoddily put together game.

Bendy and the Ink Machine is an embarassing example of game design, an embarassing example of horror and an embarassing example of coding ability.  A bad game is one thing, a bad game that doesn't work and wastes the players time is another.  Do not buy it, you can have the same experience with any free to play Unity build student project for free somewhere else

Until Dawn

 

Until Dawn is a game that I ignored for the longest time because I saw it was a similar sort of title to things like Beyond: Two Souls and Heavy Rain and David Cage had very much destroyed any hope I had of the "interactive movie" genre being any good.  Well, thanks to the viewer request system on my stream I was eventually forced to play it and I would like to formally apologise to Supermassive Games for ignoring their first game for so long because Until Dawn was probably one of the most fun experiences I've ever had on my PS4

The game follows a group of young adults (teenagers maybe? they might be high schoolers I forget and they look older than the game is telling me they are) having a weekend getaway in a snowy log cabin on top of a mountain.  The group pranks one of the girls who then gets upset and runs half naked into sub zero weather where she is then set upon by something or someone and ends up falling off a cliff with her sister to her death.  One year after the prank gone wrong, the group re-unite to try and have another party but this time with a bit less death and shenanigans ensue.

You, the player, are effectively watching this teen horror flick and every so often you get to make decisions for the characters or attempt to clear QTEs to see if they live or die.  There isn't quite as much weight to each choice or action as the game might have you believe in a lot of cases but some decisions are quite severe and do effect the plot in major ways and even a few of the QTE's will result in a character just outright biting the dust when failed which is a lot more than I can say for other games that I've played in this genre.  On your first go through you learn pretty quickly that this is the case but you aren't sure which decision will lead someone to their doom and which you can fail for the funnies so there is a decent sense of tension on that first run 

I'm going to get into spoiler territory  so if you haven't played it and you give a shit, stop reading here and go play it.

For example there's a part sort of early on where a boy and a girl are tied to a couple of chairs and one of you must die so the other may live.  The boy has a free hand and a gun on the table and you must decide if you are going to shoot her or yourself.  No matter what decision you make, no one dies because this is where the first of the games major twists takes place, where the whole thing is an elaborate prank being carried out by another character.  The two characters who were tied to the chair don't really talk about the effect of this decision after this scene so you may be led to believe that it's just one self contained scene for a long time, the boy and the girl even carry on their adventures and everything seems fine.

That is until the games second twist, where the game changes from a slasher movie to a supernatural monster flick and the group is being chased by the Wendigo, a lanky fucker that will rip your head off.  You get to a scene near the end of the game where the boy from the previous scene is being chased down a snowy path by the monster and when he reaches the cabin he needs the girl to open the door and let him in to safety.  If you shot yourself in the buzzsaw scene, she opens the door and you survive.  If you shot her she keeps the door tightly locked and watches you get your head ripped off by the Wendigo and sort of pretends to be sad about it.  There's even a combination of events you can do that I'm unsure of where she doesn't open the door for some reason and is distraught when she watches you get torn to shreds.  

There are plenty of scenes that play out in this way and are affected by stuff from WAY earlier in the game and it sort of invokes the same feeling that I had playing Kamaitachi no Yoru (also set in a snowy log cabin, funnily enough) on the SNES where we were working out every decision comination possible to get every possible ending scene, it was good fun there and it's good fun here.

I do have some minor complaints about the game though and while they don't ruin the experience they are worth noting.  There are some characters in the cast, two in particular spring to mind, that don't get nearly enough screen time.  They appear at the start and then either die SUPER fast or are ignored for most of the game and then get a little scene near the end.  Some of the decisions the cast decide to make on their own, outside of your choices, sometimes feel a bit stupid but I suppose you are playing a teen horror movie where this kind of thing is to be expected but it's still annoying.  Also parts of the game that involve walking from one area to another are PAINFULLY slow, with no proper run button and nothing to really do or figure out until the next set piece starts in 99% of cases.

There is one other HUGE complaint I have with the game but I'm separating it out because this is a problem that is no fault of the developer or the game itself.  Since I live in Japan, I was playing the Japanese version of the game and this version is HEAVILY censored.  Most of the deaths that the characters experience in this game involve either decapitation or amputation and in Japan, this is a big no no for games.  That means that when a character is killed the game will usually fade to black or certain parts of the kill animation will be modified.  This however goes as far to effect the story near the end.  There is a scene where you open a door and find a hall that is filled with the hanging, mangled corpses of every character who has died up to that point.  You go through the hall to rescue another member of the group and on the way out he has a sort of break down at all the death he's surrounded by.  In the Japanese version of this game not only is there a fade to black during some of it but the 3D MODELS OF THE BODIES ARE COMPLETELY REMOVED.  I had NO fucking clue what the cast was getting so upset about and I would have never have had an idea if it wasn't for someone in my stream chat explaining what was supposed to be happening.  Japanese censorship of this game really fucked some of it's best moments so if you're going to play it, don't play that version, import a UK or US version or something.

Overall though, Until Dawn was an extremely fun game that has quite a surprising amount of replay value considering the kind of genre it's in.  If you played a Quantic Dream game and found it lacking, give this game (or it's sequels Man of Medan and Little Hope) a try.  If you're a fan of the old school SNES sound novel like Kamaitachi no Yoru and Otogirisou you might also like it since it's sort of a modern version of that kind of experience.  Or if you just like trashy teen horror slasher flicks you'll probably like it as well because it plays VERY heavily into it's influences.  

Bottom line, give it a go.  Pop it in your PS4 in the evening and you'll probably be playing.....Until Dawn

Dohohoho

Little Nightmares

 

Little Nightmares is one of those games I just don't get.  I was told by multiple people that I know that it was awesome, that it was an excellent game that is going to terrify me and leave me awestruck by the end.  Well I didn't get that, not even a little bit.  I don't think Little Nightmares is a shitty game at all but it has to go on the ever growing pile of mediocre games with large followings that I just can't comprehend.

There isn't much of a story to speak of.  You play as Six, a little girl (I think) trapped in a giant ship called The Maw.  The Maw seems to host some kind of event where these disfigured "people" come on board and just gorge themselves on food and you are the main course so you have to get out.  The game itself however, doesn't tell you this.  This information is given to you on the Steam store page of all things, I had no idea until AFTER I was finished with the game that my character was called Six and the big ship was called The Maw.  There's no cutscenes or notes to read or anything, which is fine since they are clearly going for a more environmental storytelling approach, but the story isn't interesting enough so it all just comes off as a bit pretentious.

Game play wise it's just a platformer.  You run, you jump, you pull blocks, push buttons and turn valves and shit to progress.  Every so often the game will throw a big monster at you which you have to hide from as you go from room to room.  There is no combat, you can't fend off the big bad unless you are scripted to do so which means if you are caught, most often you are going to get killed.  Getting killed though doesn't matter because check points are extremely frequent which means that not only is Little Nightmares pathetically easy to finish but it also sucks all the tension out of the horror.  I'm not scared of the blind creature with massive spider arms if I know that I'm only going to lose 30 seconds of progress if he gets me.  

I'm trying to keep this post spoiler free but there's one game play section I just HAVE to talk about because it pissed me off so hard.  There's a bit where you have to run along a table, food is haphazardly strewn everywhere and the weirdos that inhabit the ship and just guzzling it up Hungry Hungry Hippo style.  You have to weave between the people as to not get grabbed but it's extremely tight and the hitboxes for what counts as a grab and what counts as a near miss just don't make any sense.  The checkpoint for this section however, is right near the table, so all you get is a feeling of rage welling within you as you have to creep your way down the table for the 17th fucking time because the slow, fat, lumbering monsters suddenly have reflexes like the flash.

I will say though, visually the game is quite interesting.  I remember watching the Rohl Dahl movie James and the Giant Peach as a kid and I haven't seen it since then and I'm not going to look it up before publishing this post but it was giving me those vibes.  The art style is quite striking and everything looks nice and spooky.  It's got this weird dollhouse vibe to it all that gives it a nice creepy vibe making me think that Little Nightmares would have served better as an animated short film rather than a game.

Little Nightmare isn't a bad game, a lot of effort went into it and it shows, it's a perfectly serviceable little platformer, I just don't understand all the hype that surrounds it.  So if a short, simple little horror adventure is what you want then I'd still recommend picking it up just don't expect anything more than that.  There's also a Little Nightmares 2 and I didn't hate this first one enough to not give that a try at some point so maybe some of my gripes are fixed with the sequel, we shall see

The Misguided "Horror" of Dead Space

 

Dead Space is one of those games that reminds me just how old I'm getting.  I still remember buying this, in 2008 when it first came out as a first year at university.  Going to the local GAME (UK Chain of game retailers), picking it up and rushing back to my dorms to slam it in my 360 and play it through almost start to finish in a single go.  Despite the fact that I remember having a good time with it and despite the fact that I still had a fun time with it on stream recently, it still BAFFLES me to this day that various people I know personally and a number of media outlets will praise this game for being scary.

Before I start talking about ineffective the horror is I do have to at least admit that the idea of making limbs the primary target for weapons rather than standard headshots is a least somewhat interesting.  In most games, carefully placing shots to the noggin is part of the core skill set required for success but in Dead Space it asks you to instead aim for the flailing limbs of the monsters instead.  Luckily, with the protagonist Isaac being an engineer, a lot of his weapons come in the form of tools for cutting stuff with, so in this regard it's a nice melding of story and gameplay.  

But that's about the only nice thing I have to say about Dead Space.  While it is a competently made third person over the shoulder horror shooter which every bloody action-horror game has been since RE4, it is probably one of the least frightening horror titles in recent memory.  

The most striking problem with the horror in Dead Space is the enemies.  The first time you see a Necromorph wildly running for you it can be a little intense while you try and line up your shots to its shoulders and thighs to blast its appendages off but throughout the entire game there's maybe like, 6 flavors of Necromorph and they are ENDLESSLY repeated through the entire game.  So the first encounter with each type might get you but by the end of the game they become an annoyance more than anything else.  Another stupid "thing" you have to clean up before you can carry on following your little blue line.

This then leads into the second issue of the horribly designed areas that you must wade through as you embark on your adventure through the Ishimura.  Sure it all looks very nice and it's trying very hard to be atmospheric and oppressive but the overall design of the place is so obvious that it sucks any potential impact out of a potential scare.  A long corridor with a vent or a dead body at the end? Yep, that's an ambush.  A large room with a big door leading to your objective on the other side? Ambush or boss encounter for sure.  It's trying very hard to surprise you but the level design is so uninspired and lacking that there may as well be big neon signs flashing bright red with "THIS WAY TO NEXT COMBAT ENCOUNTER".  There's one point where a big tentacle grabs you and tries to pull you in a hole and the first time, unless your paying extra special attention, which you probably aren't, this is actually fairly effective.  But they do it again later on and it's so obviously signposted that you end up rolling your eyes as you get your Plasma Cutter out and prepare to wrestle with the shitty aiming.

But the worst thing, the thing that sucks all tension out of the game entirely is ammo and health management.  Resident Evil 1 for example is another game that I don't find particularly scary either because who the fuck in 2021 find slow shambly zombies scary after the complete over saturation of THAT genre?  But the game still holds a good place in the survival horror genre because while artistically it's not particularly scary, mechanically (at least your first time in) Resident Evil is intense as fuck.  Sure, you're playing as a highly trained S.T.A.R.S member and sure there's plenty of weapons lying around but ammo for those weapons is scarce.  It's all well and good having a grenade launcher that shoots acid but it's not much use to you against a hunter if you don't have any acid rounds for it.  Even the simple act of saving in that game could generate some intense emotions because "oh fuck what if I don't find any more ink ribbon soon" and this is an effective form of horror that's basically exclusive to this medium.  Dead Space however fucks all this up by tailoring drops and containers to whatever you are holding or whatever state you are in.  The game will only give you ammo for whatever guns you are currently holding with very little exception so if you are only carrying the plasma cutter, you can guarantee you'll be swimming in plasma cutter ammo for basically the entire game.  When the game does give you random ammo on the rare occasion? just go to the store, sell it for credits and buy MORE plasma cutter ammo. In fact, despite Dead Space having like 6 guns to choose from, you may as well never use anything BUT the plasma cutter.  It's strong, fast, has cheap ammo and is effective against all flavors of necromorph.  The game also does this with health so as long as you don't get one shot by a big machine you basically cannot die from normal combat.  

Yet despite all these massive glaring failures in both artistry and game design, the game still got 9/10s from critics across the board and millions of people signing it's praises about how they were shitting their pants real hard.  Maybe you should see a doctor about those weak bowels hm? 

But that's not to say it's a bad game, it's a fun game and nothing quite beats Isaac's legendarily strong stompin' legs but to this day I have no idea how anyone find this franchise scary.  Granted I haven't played much of the sequels but it seemed to lean more into the action focus than the horror focus and to be honest, that's fine, it was way better at being an action game anyway.