I love horror. I hate jumpscares. So finding a scary game I can deal with is rare. But I could finish watching a Let's Play of this one, so I knew I could play it.
The game mixes genres. It's a puzzle platformer. It's horror. It's a stealth survival game. But it all comes together. You play as a little girl trying to escape a huge industrial space with various areas inhabited by truly twisted monsters. You're tiny, and while you have almost no way to fight back, your size is often your greatest asset for escape as you hide in and climb across furniture and structures. Each foe has a different strategy in the hide-and-seek dynamic and their deeply horrible designs hide clever communications of how they're going to work, like a monster with covered eyes, short legs, and long arms which say that he's blind, will listen for anything you do, and can only be outran outside close quarters. Some secrets are hidden throughout the game as well to interact with.
The atmosphere is great. There's a general WWII-era fairy tale vibe that makes it feel like Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito set Coraline and Spirited Away in Silent Hill's version of Wonderland. The game feels seamless with few loading screens, and cinematic despite its cutscenes being brief and rendered in the levels and the total lack of dialogue. Story is delivered through striking vignettes, resembling a theme park haunted house ride in method, and the boss characters' animations make them feel alive and tell you how to deal with them. The distorted environments and messed-up monsters evoke a child's fears in an adult world, and again, the character designs are uniquely iconic, grotesque, surreal, and uncanny—it's an achievement in itself, then, that the least freaky enemy is the scariest. The plot is minimal but outlined clearly enough. Overall, the game embraces the disturbing side of horror, which makes it playable for me and I love it.
On Switch, I found loading times to be unreasonably long and punishing, and the DLC chapters were far less enjoyable and even frustrating to play despite the story.
I have great respect for this game's approach to horror and storytelling. Try it out if startles keep you away from other horror games.
VideoGame A bad dream you don't want to wake from.
I love horror. I hate jumpscares. So finding a scary game I can deal with is rare. But I could finish watching a Let's Play of this one, so I knew I could play it.
The game mixes genres. It's a puzzle platformer. It's horror. It's a stealth survival game. But it all comes together. You play as a little girl trying to escape a huge industrial space with various areas inhabited by truly twisted monsters. You're tiny, and while you have almost no way to fight back, your size is often your greatest asset for escape as you hide in and climb across furniture and structures. Each foe has a different strategy in the hide-and-seek dynamic and their deeply horrible designs hide clever communications of how they're going to work, like a monster with covered eyes, short legs, and long arms which say that he's blind, will listen for anything you do, and can only be outran outside close quarters. Some secrets are hidden throughout the game as well to interact with.
The atmosphere is great. There's a general WWII-era fairy tale vibe that makes it feel like Guillermo del Toro and Junji Ito set Coraline and Spirited Away in Silent Hill's version of Wonderland. The game feels seamless with few loading screens, and cinematic despite its cutscenes being brief and rendered in the levels and the total lack of dialogue. Story is delivered through striking vignettes, resembling a theme park haunted house ride in method, and the boss characters' animations make them feel alive and tell you how to deal with them. The distorted environments and messed-up monsters evoke a child's fears in an adult world, and again, the character designs are uniquely iconic, grotesque, surreal, and uncanny—it's an achievement in itself, then, that the least freaky enemy is the scariest. The plot is minimal but outlined clearly enough. Overall, the game embraces the disturbing side of horror, which makes it playable for me and I love it.
On Switch, I found loading times to be unreasonably long and punishing, and the DLC chapters were far less enjoyable and even frustrating to play despite the story.
I have great respect for this game's approach to horror and storytelling. Try it out if startles keep you away from other horror games.