Fatal Frame (2001):
Developed by: Tecmo
Original Position: look I have so many games here I’m just gonna count them all later
Played Before? No.
One rather noticeable thing about the first
Fatal Frame is that its localization... has issues, at least from my perspective. It’s immediately evident, whether it’s how every single voice actor sounds like they’ve overdosed on cold medicine and really could be doing more important things right now, or the subtle grammar errors — tense, plural conflicts, that thing thing in optical illusions where the last word of one line is repeated as the first word of the next line except that here, here, apparently, it's done completely unknowingly. A friend informed me before I started playing that I’d absolutely
need a walkthrough, and while at first I chalked that up to general survival horror esotericness, soon upon starting the game I happened to stumble across a puzzle that was… completely untranslated. I was meant to press four out of ten buttons, on a circular structure, with an epitaph telling me to look at a note I’d collected which had a bunch of numbers highlighted in red. Presuming, maybe, that this was some sort of clock (albeit, one which used specific kanji for the numbers I’d never seen before) I tried to input the numbers roughly where they’d be on a Western clock, only for that to be incorrect. I decided that maybe this was why I was meant to have a walkthrough, looked the answer up, only to find that… I was correct. It
was a clock. The buttons on the interface
did represent numbers. I just happened to lack the cultural context to know that this specific clock… ran anticlockwise. Something that might have been much easier to figure out had any of the elements of the puzzle itself been translated.
If I were to hazard a guess as to why the localization effort turned out the way it did, I’d say… it’s because
Fatal Frame leans far more into Japanese culture and folklore than any of its contemporaries. While most survival horror games up to this point —
Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and
Parasite Eve, among others — primarily took inspiration from Western horror movies, and to evoke this were usually set in some facsimile of the USA,
Fatal Frame goes for… something loosely opposite. Rather than taking from the West,
Fatal Frame draws from within, and as opposed to looking at at-the-time contemporary media — though the late 90s/early 2000s boom in J-Horror could’ve played a part — the game draws from local myth and folklore: specifically, the idea of the
yūrei, figures analogous but not quite the same as the western idea of ghosts. Given all that, it can be seen that
Fatal Frame is not quite equivalent to its brethren, and to approach it with the same treatment as something more naturally Western is a recipe for losing something in translation. And with glaring issues like the untranslated puzzles, and with stuff like, say, the kagome dolls which require cultural context to understand their implementation in-game, it makes other issues — such as the tense conflicts, or the voice acting — not quite as able to blend in as they might’ve for, say, the first
Resident Evil. I’d like to note, for the record, that this doesn’t necessarily impact my feelings on the game itself (perhaps, if I really wanted the true
Fatal Frame experience I should’ve not dropped out of doing Japanese at school while I was in the middle of a downward spiral), it’s just a case where unless you happen to know the language or have the cultural context you
are going to need a walkthrough to understand this game, even beyond some of the usual survival horror trappings.
You play, primarily, as a young girl named Miku Hinasaki, whose brother disappears while searching for his teacher inside the supposedly haunted Himuro Mansion. As her search to find him takes her inside the mansion, she finds that all the ghost stories she’s heard are real: the mansion is littered with yūrei of varying levels of hostility, and only through the use of the Camera Obscura — an antique polaroid camera passed down through Miku’s family — does she have a chance at fighting back against those with more hostile intentions. As she delves deeper, upgrading her camera, accessing new parts of the mansion, collecting recordings and writings of those left behind, it soon becomes clear that your role here extends far past finding your brother and his teacher. A curse has infected the Himuro Mansion for generations, haunting, killing, and assimilating all who enter it, and as you delve further and further into the past, it soon starts to become clear that all this circles around a failed ritual, and the spirit of the woman who was meant to perform it: a spirit who, soon enough, proceeds to place their eyes on you.
I think what I’d particularly like to praise is just how incredible this game is at atmosphere. There are just so many little things that come together and really make it shine as a horror experience. I love the way the plot unfolds: how it initially begins with the plot thread of finding your brother and meeting the people he was trying to look for, before each subsequent chapter unfurls back, generation by generation, coming up against everybody laid victim by the curse until you eventually manage to reach its source. I like a lot of the artstyle, both in terms of helping the game feel smooth to play — how it handles you needing to light up dark areas without it feeling like a low-saturation hellscape, how subtle the fog is at walling off/impeding visibility past a certain point, how (for being translucent) immediately noticeable the ghosts are against the background — and also stylistically: the monochrome colour scheme when you’re looking into the past and the curse is about to take somebody feels so distinct, and also feeds into a couple of particular plot details in a way that feels pretty clever. While I did mention the voice acting as a negative during my preamble, it’s really effective coming out of the many enemies you fight: the monotone, slightly distorted delivery does a lot to show the otherworldly, not-quite-human-anymore nature of the spirits you face. I love the way the mansion changes between chapters: how certain doors lock and unlock, how some areas restock or get new items, how encounters shift to different locations: you’ll be going through the same general areas for the whole game, but the context for why you do so, and the purposes of each room can change radically between chapters which makes it feel like a whole new map each time. I’ve mentioned before how oftentimes it’s all the little things working in tandem that can really tie a horror game together, and I think Fatal Frame is a standout example on that front: all these tidbits which are fairly neat on their own really do their job to coalesce and create something special.
What differentiates
Fatal Frame most from its survival horror contemporaries — aside from its set dressing of Japanese folklore — is its combat system. As opposed to being some sort of experienced fighter, using conventional weaponry to take down physical foes, Miku’s foes are much less tangible, and only through perceiving and documenting them with the Camera Obscura can you dispel them: eventually, with the goal of exorcizing them entirely. You do this via controlling the camera in first person (as opposed to the third person fixed camera movement of the rest of the game), and, upon locating your ghost, keeping your focus on them to build up spiritual power until eventually snapping a picture of them, doing increasing damage based on the type of camera roll/ammo you use and how long you were able to charge up for. There are various ‘special’ types of shot that reward special circumstances — such as taking a photo of multiple enemies at once, taking a photo when they're as close as possible to the camera, and, most importantly, taking a photo of an enemy right as they attack you — by multiplying damage and briefly stunning the enemy, heavily encouraging patience and fishing for the perfect shot.
However, enemies also become more complicated over time, and often engage in tactics primarily built to make you lose track of where they are: teleporting, cloning themselves, and phasing into walls and the floor both to try and protect themselves and sneak up on you. There are different types of enemies, who all react differently to your camera, and it characterizes the core conceit of the gameplay fairly well, going up against the spirit of the same person throughout their many haunts until you’re finally able to exorcize them for good. It also helps to create rather frenetic moments as you progress through the game: where you as the player scurry around the room to try and find the enemy that just disappeared, and where positioning is
vitally important, both to get a wide, open range so that enemies don’t get too far out of sight, and to make sure nothing can sneak up where you won’t be able to see them. I love combat systems that manage to become more complex over time without adding extra mechanics to the core system, and for the most part,
Fatal Frame is able to hit a sweet spot where combat feels tense without actively feeling adverse to play.
(I also really liked the incidental non-hostile ghosts: the ones you specifically need to listen to cues to find, or the ones you have to snap a picture of
fast before they disappear forever. While some of them seem especially “you have to know in advance when and where these guys are going to pop up,” in a way that encourages replaying the game or buying a guide, it’s a cute little extra thing that you can do throughout the game and does a
lot to characterize the mansion and the curse infecting it: showing just how
many people have fallen victim and become trapped inside the mansion forever)
I say “for the most part,” because unfortunately, past a certain point, the game really starts feeling adverse to play, particularly in terms of combat. Ghosts
really start leaning on teleporting the moment you so much as move the camera in their direction, which makes combat this frustrating dance of just trying to
find the enemy in hopes that maybe this time you can actually do some damage to them. This’d be maybe fine, in moderation, and if there was at least some variance it’d be more bearable, but from chapter 3 onwards the game is basically nothing but constant encounters with the same annoying enemies and it’s a sloooooooog. It also plays badly with a lot of your resource management: you have to make do with taking low-damage pictures to enemies, which means you have to take a lot of them to actually put an opponent down, all the while one hit from them takes nearly half your health bar. This means you have to scrounge around the mansion, hoping the game will drop you stuff you actually
need instead of fuel for special skills you don’t use… but also if you dare walk off the beaten path you get punished with combat with a special ghost who embodies everything that makes combat really intolerable at this point, and who will almost certainly hit you before you leave the room (because for some reason Miku never really feels that much of a need to, say, get through a door fast when there's something chasing her), necessitating save scumming or even
more scrounging. It’s miserable, especially since this combat happens in lieu of any other mode of progression. No more puzzles, no more trying to find new parts of the mansion: everything after this point is just the same combat encounters over and over again.
At the very least, though, most of what else I found compelling remained as such even when the direct gameplay took a nosedive: the slowly unfolding history of the Himuro Mansion, the immaculate atmosphere and artstyle that made simply traversing the mansion an enjoyable experience when I wasn’t getting nothin’ personnelled by a ghost monk, and my attempts to get snapshots of as many of the incidental ghosts as I could. Even if the at-first unique combat system eventually loses its sense of where on the line it falls between exciting and frustrating, nearly everything else really holds up, and, if not quite picture perfect, isn't washed out at all, even with all the things that work against it.
8/10.
Afterfall: Insanity (2011):
Developed by: Intoxicate Studios
Played Before? Saw bits and pieces of a playthrough, but otherwise no.
Bad games are a whole lot better so long as the gameplay is bearable. That sounds… like a bit of an obvious statement, I know, but there’s a fairly core difference between, say, combat that’s kind of broken and/or mindless and combat that’s just brutal and awful and a slog. Even if they’re otherwise comparable, even if I otherwise wouldn’t call the gameplay
good, I still feel like a lot of what defines my feelings is ‘how fun is this to play?’ It’s not the be-all-end-all, of course — if something is very obviously more of a narrative experience I’m not gonna be like ‘but where’s the part where i shoot the enemy combatants...’ — but even if I like or even love a lot of the other moving parts my overall feelings can be absolutely tanked if the part of the experience I’m directly controlling feels painful to interface with. And sometimes, even when… nothing really works the way it should, having gameplay feel more like you’re going through the motions rather than slogging through whichever unintentional, awful challenge the developers cooked up can be the difference between disliking something and hating it.
What I’m saying is that
Afterfall: InSanity is fairly abjectly not a good game. It’s at least, however, the type of not-good game where it's mostly just… mindless and unable to stand up against the player, as opposed to something where you’re fighting against it every step of the way. Which, after having gone through a good amount of games recently with absolutely
awful combat, is refreshing! Even as entertaining as the other experiences
were, I’m definitely happy to go through something like this. Sometimes it’s nice to not have to earn your victories.
The game takes place in an alternate universe from our own, where after Germany developed nukes, the resulting nuclear apocalypse resulted in… Poland, of all places, holding the last remnants of humanity in an underground bunker. Fast forward 90 years, and you play as Albert Tokaj, a psychologist, who after being sent on a routine mission to help some scientists finds that the shelter has been overrun by confinement syndrome, a contagious mental illness with zombie-like symptoms that also just… mutates you? and turns you into this weird fishman muscle freak thing? not sure of the definition there. Albert soon starts to find that a great conspiracy is afoot in the now-infested shelter, he must now figure out who is friend and foe as he fights through the shelter, up through the tunnels, and onto the ravaged world above, all the while pursuing the one who caused the syndrome to leak: a man of mysterious motives, who seemingly knows everything about Albert and who has big plans for him and if you can guess what the big plot twist is already then great job. It’s not subtle.
And I think the ‘plot’ — or, well, the game’s attempts at making this a deep psychological thriller — is by far the most entertaining thing about this. Not even the fact that this is attempting to be Fight Club but also you’re fighting weird fishman zombie things, but the dissonance of it all: you, as the player, spending five minutes travelling through a low saturation hallway, hacking up every monster that comes for you without hesitation, only for Albert to take out his PDA and insist that these are only people with mental health problems and how it’s so tragic that the mysterious saboteur released the contagious mental illness that also mutates your body. You beat down enemies by the horde and then the moment a cutscene all it takes is a guy waving his arm vaguely in your direction for your body to be splayed on the ground. There’s an early segment where you must flee the complex after being accused of crimes you insist you’re innocent of, and then the very first combat sequence has you grab a fire axe, chop both a guard’s arms off before smashing his head in. The plot doesn’t even need to be all that dissonant with the game to be absolutely wild, it manages to achieve that on its own. From little things, like the goofy animations and a main voice actor who has trouble feeling any more than mild irritation to everything around him, to the big things, like just…
how many twists and turns there, how many times seemingly important characters drop out of the plot while in the same breath trying to give reverence to characters/plot beats that don’t mean anything at all, and how little sense anything makes. There are these action setpieces that the game tries to let you play through and they’re amazing: all the animations look so slow and stilted, its attempts to be cool feel so comical, it’s great. The story’s great.
Real so-bad-it’s-incredible vibes.
And, unlike most other games of that ilk, it’s at least bearable to play. Not good, certainly, but in a way that benefits the player than makes the experience frustrating and unbearable to go through. At the beginning of the game, when you get the combat tutorial, you’re told you can press the left mouse button to attack and the right mouse button to block. You never,
ever actually need to block: you have enough health (and enough health regen) that most encounters can’t really whittle you down even if they land a hit, and it takes you being overwhelmed, without the resources to really fight back to actually die, in which case trying to block doesn’t really help your case. The core combat effectively comes down to walking up to enemies and attacking them hard and fast enough to hitstun them to death, and while most weapons are kinda pathetic and do nothing, the game is generous enough with the actually good weapons that you just constantly receive copies of them, almost as if it's compensating for a weapon durability system that isn’t there. What this basically means is that you have a gun or a fire axe, you can walk up to an enemy and slapfight them to death with rigid, clunky movesets and animations. It’s not
good, by any means, but it’s at least a little fun in how mindless it is to unga bunga people to death.
It gets rouuuuuugh in the last stretch, though. The game decides that it’s going to be combat combat combat, instead of interspersing puzzles in-between, and also, for some reason, to really restrict the weapons and resources you get: melee weapons completely disappearing and ammo for your larger weapons becoming rather scarce. There now exists this new mechanic where Albert cannot step into direct sunlight without ghost bat harpies spawning en masse and swooping on you constantly, wasting your already scarce ammo because they’re hard to hit and completely disabling your health regeneration, as you’re still technically in combat while they do barely any damage to you and you don’t have the means to damage them. This meshes badly with how enemies now badly pack a punch, and dying often sends you
super far back checkpoint-wise, forcing you to do the same sections over and over again just for a chance to make it past the one actually hard section fifteen minutes of gameplay in the future. The game also decides that it wants to do boss fights, and they’re even
more clunky than regular combat is, combining a lot of the above factors with clunky mechanics and rather large health pools to create… not quite the big, memorable climactic setpiece that was intended. Quite the opposite, actually.
At least, though, it’s not quite a sheer drop from ‘bad but funny’ into ‘genuinely kind of awful’ as, say, an Alone in the Dark 2008: while it’s certainly
rougher, and maybe doesn’t quite contain the same stupid charm the combat did initially, it never truly becomes a slog, and the story at least keeps up the entertainment value even if the last stretch of gameplay shows signs of falling apart. Ultimately, would I call Afterfall: InSanity a
good ga- oh almost certainly not. It’s a mess and a half, not even counting how it can’t even be played anymore due to its unlicensed use of Unreal Engine, but as far as bad games go, it’s one of the ones that manages to provide an entertaining experience
because of how silly it feels, and, as far as games like that goes, it’s at least a good deal easier and more… “fun” to play than quite a lot of its ilk.
3/10.
LIMBO (2010):
Developed by: Playdead
Played Before? Played, like, the first five minutes back in 2013, but otherwise no.
LIMBO starts with you playing as a small child wandering through a forest, braving the many horrors within in pursuit of a mysterious something. After playing the dev’s later effort,
INSIDE, going through this game was… interesting, mostly in terms of what seems similar and what the dev team seemed to learn in the years succeeding. For a horror platformer, I wouldn’t really say there’s much of an atmosphere: as opposed to less tangible things sound or music design, most of what you encounter here is rather concrete, from the simple yet evocative enemy designs and the rather brutal death animations that manage to shine even if the monochrome, silhouetted artstyle does a bit more harm than good. Most interesting is how the game seems to draw a bit from masocore performers. You’re expected to die a lot, and generally not for fair reasons. From random traps in the ground, puzzles and mechanics you can only intuit in the heat of the moment, to points where you don’t know what exactly is going to happen, one thing is made clear: this world is cruel, and it’s mostly cruel for cruelty’s sake. It’s certainly… bleak — and there’s never any point of relative respite in the middle of it — but it does provide a… relatively unique thematic throughline, one that characterizes the game even in lack of a more abstract atmosphere. I wouldn’t necessarily say that I liked this as much as
INSIDE, but as one of the first post-Braid-artsy-indie-puzzle-platformers, it’s fairly solid, and an interesting look at what the landscape of the early indie game boom was li- wait what do you
mean there’s still two thirds of the game left to go?
…
…
LIMBO is a game that outstays its welcome. Before I played it, most of what I’d seen of it — most of the gameplay footage in YouTube videos mentioning the game, however brief — was content that was mostly in the first hour. I was under the impression that it mostly took place in the forest, that the giant spider you ran from was a threat that followed you throughout the game, and that finally managing to turn the tables on it represented the climax, the end of the game soon to follow. In one way, I was right: the game as I knew it did end, and the remaining two hours felt like something else entirely.
The ‘horror’ aspect of the game disappears almost completely — perhaps a consequence of how it was only held up by the more concrete aspects mentioned above: when those are gone, there’s nothing really there to keep the mood up, or really make the game feel like anything. While there’s the occasional bit of grotesque design, or a slightly gnarly death animation, it feels like the game drops a lot of whatever thematic material it
had to become a more generic puzzle platformer where you push boxes onto switches to open the door forward. New mechanics are introduced, but it feels like none of them really interact with each other or the general setting: you just suddenly come across machines that change the direction gravity operates and oops that’s the core game mechanic now. The masocore elements still exist within the platforming and some of the puzzles — this is a game where you’re expected to die a lot — but it never feels particularly charming or meaningful. While other 'impossible' platformers of the time, such as
I Wanna Be The Guy or
Cat Mario, were often defined by having a sense of humour in how they chose to pull the rug under the player, intending to bait a reaction or at least let the player laugh with the game,
LIMBO doesn't particularly treat your deaths with any gravitas: you fail, you wait through the wayyy long death animation, then you reload at the checkpoint. No real surprise, no real reaction other than 'okay, well, I'm dead now.' I guess ‘things are dark and bleak and also fuck you you die’ is at least a
loose theme, but on its own, it doesn’t feel like enough. And without anything to really back it up beyond the direct game elements, it doesn’t feel like it coalesces into anything, just a loosely unpleasant undertone that forgot to leave with everything else the game had going for it.
Which is not to the game’s benefit, because rather than just becoming a rather standard puzzle platformer, it instead becomes a rather standard puzzle platformer which is really,
really frustrating to play. This mostly comes down to what feels like a disconnect between these two separate things, where progress is determined by you figuring out all the moving pieces and solving the puzzle to find a way forward, while the masocore elements try to make that as obtuse and annoying as possible. It’s like having a jigsaw in front of you except your cat or your baby brother keeps taking pieces from you and hiding them around the house: you’re often missing
something that’s the key to actually making progress, and the game makes a point at actively hiding that element from you. Say, a puzzle where it turns out you need a
second box, when that second box is in a completely different area, past an enemy, in a place that does not seem like there’s anything there and in a game where you’ve
never before this point had to go left instead of right.
Not to mention how tight and uncompromising a lot of the timings and solutions are. There’s a puzzle where you have to use a minecart to get onto a rail track, which you have to run across before the minecart presses a button that electrifies the ground below you. There is
no wiggle room: you have to find the
exact place on the slope to jump onto the minecart, both high enough on the slope so that you have enough time to run across the rail, but low enough that it doesn’t pick up speed and hit the button prematurely. The track is long enough that anything other than the exact sweet-spot means you don’t get there in time and you die. There’s no rubric to really tell where the exact place to put it is, whether a failure was because you put it too high or too low, you just have to brute force the puzzle, dying over and over again, until you somehow intuit or guess what you actually have to do. And after four or five puzzles beforehand that are
exactly like that, it’s hard not to get sick of it.
Which, like, maybe that’s what the game intends. Maybe it’s
meant to feel bleak and empty in a rather charmless way. Which, like, okay, sure, but that doesn’t then make it all that fun or interesting to interface with. Nor does it make what’s there… feel particularly deep or meaningful. Which is a shame, because the first hour still holds up. Even if it didn’t quite compare to
INSIDE, it was a decently effective little platformer that worked well to blend horror with masocore elements to create something rather evocative. What follows feels much less interesting, much less purposeful, and something that I frankly got tired of playing long before I reached the end.
4/10.
Twelve Minutes (2021):
Developed by: Luis Antonio
Played Before? Oh I knew
all about this but had not, in fact, actually played it before this point.
So something I occasionally like to do is look over query pitches for literary agent submissions, both to prepare myself for the day I eventually yeet myself into the slush pile, but particularly because a lot of the minutiae fascinates me. There are a lot of little does and don’ts that can make the difference between getting a rejection or a full submission: a lot of it, in particular, coming down to whether you know your target market and aren’t just some wannabe who doesn’t understand the field. Nowhere is this more evident in the space where you put your comparative titles — the books your book is most like. Generally, you want to make them something in your genre of choice released during the past five years, and also something not as well known. Conversely, doing things like comparing your work to a big book, something released far outside the last couple of years, or even comparing your title to a big-budget film are
huge no-nos: all they do is show that you’re not quite well-versed in the genre you’re writing in, and potentially indicate to the agent that you think your work is more groundbreaking than it is. A good first impression can sell a work all by itself, and one of the worst first impressions you can
give is that you’re just a genre tourist. You want to know your market, you want to know how your work fits in that market, and you want to
show the agent just how well you know all of that while still fitting within the general bounds and structure of a query. It’s a
tough balancing act, and it’s loosely fascinating to see where people tend to trip up, and just how tricky it can be to get everything right.
Anyway sorry about that preamble, I know sometimes I tend to go overboard with them, it’s something I’m trying to work on, let’s just get on with talking about the game and-
oh
oh
...
Twelve Minutes is a game where you play as a loving and devoted husband, who one day returns from work to have dinner with his equally loving and devoted wife. The evening goes off without a hitch, before a man claiming to be a police officer knocks on the door and demands you open up. Regardless of whether you let him in or he kicks the door down, he swiftly overpowers the both of you, demands of your wife to tell him where she hid ‘the pocket watch,’ then proceeds to shoot you in the head… sending you back to the beginning of the evening. It soon becomes clear that the husband is trapped in a time loop, and that not even staying alive can break you out. With no other options, you decide your only recourse is to find out why this is happening: using your foreknowledge of events to come to try and manipulate what occurs, all to find out why this cop is after the both of you, what the significance is of the pocket watch he’s asking for, and just what can happen within the space of
twelve ten minutes.
I have to admit, it’s a fairly decent hook, and the first act of the game does a decent job of following it up. The apartment the game takes place in is small enough that everything you can interact with is well within reach, and it’s all a matter of experimentation: doing something, seeing the results, figuring out what you can glean from it, and how this information will help you resolve the overall mystery of the loop. I like the voice acting (even if the presence of Hollywood B-listers as opposed to professional voice actors makes me roll my eyes a little bit), and I’m also into how the game handles the consequences of your actions, and showing the disconnect between player and player character. Throughout the game, there’s a knife in the kitchen you are more than capable of using on your wife. Whether you do it for the funsies, or because you want to figure out what you learn by doing
that, you stab your wife to death… all while the husband is freaking out, apologizing, and is absolutely horrified by doing this even beyond that loop. It immediately kind of brings in the reality of what you’re making your character do: taking something the player likely did out of curiosity and using it to make the atmosphere entirely, intentionally uncomfortable. As a whole, the game
starts out well, with the premise immediately hooking you in and the initial stages providing a decent amount of options and things to do…
…only, as the game goes on, for you to find out that most of this game’s interactivity ends with what you already have. At the start of the game, the three things you can do in the apartment are to drug your wife’s drink with sleeping pills, hide in the closet so that the cop doesn’t know you’re there, and, if you do both together, you automatically indispose the cop when he tries to use a lightswitch. By the end of the game, these are still the only things you can do in the apartment. Most of what you
actually do is navigate dialogue trees with your wife. And show your wife items to unlock more dialogue trees with her. And then do dialogue trees with your wife so you can then do dialogue trees with the cop. And this is all dialogue you’ve likely seen before and you are then going to see again all because maybe at the end of one diatribe there’ll be a new option you can pick, or that you didn’t pick before, which
might mean something going forward. You might think ‘oh, can’t you just skip dialogue? that’s a feature that’s in basically every story-based game to sift through the tedium of seeing the same dialogue over and over again,’ but that’s not the case here. In
Twelve Minutes you can skip through
some dialogue… one line at a time, as if you’re going through a
Dark Souls vendor’s dialogue to try and access their wares. And if you’re not actively in a cutscene with them — if you’re allowed to walk around the apartment while they have their dialogue — you can’t skip through it. You have to wait there, minute by minute, line by line, until you have the opportunity to step in and have something new happen. If you’re looking at your phone, or if you accidentally select the wrong option… whoops, loop ruined, go back to start, go through everything, manually,
again.
Which, frankly, if the comp titles being intro-level Film Studies picks (which, like, no shade, I like two of those movies a lot, but also
wow those are some basic bitch answers) wasn’t indication enough, the lack of polish and how… dated it feels, mechanically, really go to show how little it knows the genre it’s in. Even beyond the oodles of dialogue you oftentimes can’t skip through, the game’s so finicky and overcomplicated even when, on paper, it’s straightforward. At the beginning of the game, when I was meant to just mill around the house and have a romantic moment with my wife, I accidentally put my plate of food in my inventory when I tried to eat it, singlehandedly pissing my wife off enough to call the whole evening off. At one point, you’re directed to show the cop a picture on the fridge, but it’s not good enough to show the cop the picture on the fridge, you must engage him in dialogue trees that will tell him about the picture on the fridge, he’ll go and check it… only for the loop to be ruined because the picture on the fridge isn’t there. Because the picture of the fridge is currently in your inventory. Because you needed to show him the picture on the fridge so you then
tried to show him the picture on the fridge. This then forces you to do the whole process again because, for a game partially about messing about in a time loop, and a genre/medium
all about cause-and-effect and the consequences of your actions, this game is so rigid. There’s only one way you’re ever allowed to do things, and it’s usually the way where you
find the item you need… then do nothing with it, instead just bringing it up in a dialogue tree down the line. For an adventure game, one that places a lot of emphasis on walking around and finding things in your apartment, it feels like the adventure gameplay runs contrary to what the game actually wants to be. Like it wants to be a visual novel but the dev is too busy looking up /r/movies ‘what’s your favourite psychological thriller?’ to realize that interactive media is more than just anime dating sims.
Because, like, if all the game wants me to do is go through the same dialogue trees over and over, then… why is this an adventure game? What’s the point of having to interface with your inventory and have to go through the whole twelve-step, two-minute process of drugging my wife over and over again at the start of near-every loop? What’s the point of being able to walk around my apartment during dialogue if I have to wait right where I am to do the next thing I need to do? It’d certainly be more streamlined if the game was
only about navigating the dialogue trees it so wants me to navigate at the cost of anything else. And the game would certainly feel more playable if it had… any of the quality-of-life features that virtually every visual novel has by default. Why sit around, waiting for the game to run through dialogue it ran through before to
maybe reach something new when I could just… skip to the next branching point, or the next bit of dialogue I haven’t already seen? When the last part of the game essentially boils down to “do this complicated and finicky setup to have a heart-to-heart with the cop, have an entire five minutes worth of conversation, then go back to step one, do the entire setup again, do the entire
conversation again just to use something you learned during the first conversation to learn something new the next conversation just to go back and do that entire, unskippable process
two more times…” why do that when you could just quicksave, or use a flowchart to go right to the point where things actually diverge? It’d certainly be much smoother to go through. And it’d definitely feel more of a match in terms of genre than the adventure game it currently is, where every convention it uses (inventory puzzles, the need for the game to be running in real-time) directly works against the experience and makes it feel much worse to play.
…I’m aware that this game’s ending is… rather disliked, and a big sticking point for most people I’ve seen talk about this game, but on my end… it was mostly just kind of whatever — its attempts to feel fucked-up and disturbing feel rather vanilla, honestly. And any chance for it to have an
impact vanished when, instead of focusing on the immediate reactions of the characters, it just zooms into incomprehensible mind-palace shit and also you can fuck the whole segment up and you have to go out of your way to get back in and try again. Quite frankly, it feels like more of a smokescreen for what I felt were the game’s actual problems: how rigid, tedious, and finicky the game was on its way up
to that point. There’s certainly initial promise — the setup works well as a narrative hook, and the initial stages are at least fun to experiment with until the game starts to show its warts — but when you can find ren;py VNs on itch.io and Steam with more polish and quality of life than this publisher-backed project… it becomes loosely clear this game thinks it’s more groundbreaking than it is. Comparative titles aren’t just buzzwords that your work might vaguely be like, they’re works you
drew from, that were important in the process of constructing your own, and show to those with a more discerning eye that you’re not just a faker looking for prestige. And perhaps, if more time was spent researching the field rather than just throwing random psychological thrillers into your elevator pitch, this game could’ve been one of the many entries of the canon of time loop interactive narrative, rather than some brazen attempt at feeling like an innovation that it isn’t.
3/10.
Morphine (2015):
Developed by: Kerim Kumbasar
Played Before? Watched a playthrough before, otherwise no.
There’s not much that can be said about Morphine that can’t be more adequately gathered by seeing it for yourself. It’s one of those bad creepypasta serial killer fan fiction sort of stories, about a high school student named Peter Bundy and how he’s constantly tor society and also Ted, who’s the leader of both the football team
and the Rich Club. Again, you kinda have to play it for yourself to see what I mean, but the stilted, amateurish writing, the overwrought way it handles its content, and the…
incredible way it ends lend it a really good so-bad-it’s-good quality, where you’re propelled through just to see what silly shit the next part brings (shoutout to how everybody calls Peter ‘Peter Bunny’ when it was, in fact, Peter
Rabbit who had a fly up on his nose) (also shoutout to how the game completely misunderstands what morphine does despite the game being named after it). This is… both accentuated and impeded by the gameplay: while the… distinct graphical style and the cheap, ineffective jumpscares lend something to the charm (<3 the cutscene where the dev clearly didn’t want to animate all the people moving so he just turns the camera away to stare out the window), it’s quite rough to actually play, from rather unclear objectives where you have to search for something but you don’t even know what the something even
looks like, this…
awful lock-picking minigame, and how the game can at points crash and send you back up to twenty minutes. So long as you can stomach that (presuming you’re even the one playing it), though, you… have something special on your hands here. Great for a laugh with friends.
I’m not a loser!
Alone in the Dark 2 (1993):
Developed by: Infogrames
Played Before? Nope.
If
Alone in the Dark is the first survival horror game, then
Alone in the Dark 2 is the first survival horror sequel to take a more action-oriented approach. The difference is immediately evident in how each game begins. In
Alone in the Dark, you’re in an attic, there are
things from outside trying to get in, and you have to race to block the windows off before they break through and drag you away. In
Alone in the Dark 2 you’re plonked right next to a zombie with a gun and you have to karate chop him to death before he shoots you. While the intro for
Alone in the Dark eased you into exploring the mansion,
Alone in the Dark 2 gives way to… what almost feels like an action setpiece, rushing down the driveway to the mansion and trying to push a statue out of the way before the guards can shoot you. If
Alone in the Dark’s first major area gave you an indication of the ins and outs of combat and how the game wasn’t afraid of being cheap with traps and ambushes, the hedge maze that begins
Alone in the Dark 2 tells you three key things: every space you go through is going to be rather tight. Enemies are
constant. If you want to get past, and get through, you’re going to have to engage with the game’s combat.
y’know
the combat
the
really good combat
…
In my review for the first
Alone in the Dark, I talked about how the combat system was fairly easily the worst part of the game. You’re beholden to this system where you have to learn your weapon’s moveset and learn the timings and windups all while enemies can just walk up to you and stunlock you to death, and it becomes really clear really quick that unless you want to spend a lot of health and resources for diminishing returns you need to run from and past enemies whenever possible. For
Alone in the Dark 2, it’s back, and even worse. Not because combat is now the only thing you ever really do, but because instead of enemies needing to close the gap (giving you your one opportunity to safely stunlock
them), now they all have guns. All the melee weapons you get are functionally useless (except for the endgame, where they’re still useless but also you can’t use any of your guns) because trying to close the gap and use them will get you shot, which then forces you into using your own guns, which are just as bad. You need to figure out where to point so that you’re pointing at the enemy, which the cinematic fixed camera angles
don’t help with. This is something the AI never has to worry about, so oftentimes you lose health trying to orient your gun so that it’s actually aimed in the correct direction. It says something that the best way to go through things is to cheese the enemies into shooting a wall between you and them, instead.
And it’s
required. Not just necessarily “the door will only open once the enemy is dead” but in more subtle ways, like an item needed for progression only dropping once you kill a specific enemy. Problem is, you don’t know what enemies are the ones that drop the things you need, or, even if they do drop something, whether the thing you get will actually take you in a direction that progresses you through the game or whether it just leads to more lore or a “”””””””better””””””” weapon. This is even worse when you consider resource scarcity. More specifically, ammo scarcity: your constant need for ammo because guns are the only thing worth using far eclipses the ammo the game gives you. You’re perpetually running low, a problem that’s made even worse by how you’re always going to miss at least one or two shots because the perspective is so fucked. Oftentimes it feels like you need to savescum
just to see if you can get through a fight using slightly less ammo, or losing slightly less health, or losing
significantly more health because you were forced to use melee, which… even when you’re
meant to use it it’s still so clunky and rough to deal with. There’s more than one segment where there are tendrils guarding things that’ll damage you if you get close, that can only be hurt by melee attacks… which usually move you forward as you do so, putting you into the damage zone with the oftentimes borked fixed camera perspective making it unclear whether you managed to land a hit on the tendrils or not. The endgame is meant to be a series of swordfights, but it’s more like a series of you using the same move over and over again to lock the opponent in place, spamming it for what feels like minutes until the enemy
finally forgets to block, with absolutely no indication as to whether something was a hit or how much HP your opponent has left. Overall the combat is baaaaaaad. Bad bad bad, and the increased focus on it in this game honestly singlehandedly tanks it.
Which is a bit of a shame, because I like a good deal of what this game is attempting. I
love the setting: the cloudy, early evening sky, the hedge maze, how you get to run around (and
climb) a pirate ship, the fact that this game, of all games, is set during Christmas (and you spend a significant amount of it in a Santa suit)… oftentimes I feel like survival horror games tend to lean onto the same kinds of settings — primarily, those popularized by genre codifiers like
Resident Evil or
Silent Hill — so it’s really neat to see how even just set dressing can make what’s otherwise a fairly archetypical setting (a mansion) feel so fresh and unique compared to other takes. I like the focus on the background lore — the pirates, their curse, how that informs both the gameplay and sets the story in motion — but even regardless I’m kind of into the shift into having a bit of an active plot: characters you meet along the way, a focus on what’s happen
ing over what happened fifty years ago. There’s also a stealth section that I liked well enough, and not necessarily just because it does away with combat for a merciful, brief moment in time and instead focuses on direct helplessness, needing to stay out of the sight of enemies, impede them when they come after you, and take them out with indirect means. It’s fun, and it does a fun job at repurposing the areas you’ve otherwise fought your way through the rest of the game, transplanting them into a different context and showcasing a little bit of versatility in how they’re designed.
None of that really makes up for how rouuuuuugh the rest of the game feels to play, though. Entirely because of how action-focused this game is: you're saddled with awful combat from the moment you start, and aside from one brief, merciful segment where the game doesn’t allow you to fight back, it never gets better. Only worse, once it becomes fully clear just
how clunky the mechanics are. The original
Alone in the Dark, despite suffering from the exact same issue, did well to nearly turn that into a
strength, the sense of fight or flight, that question of whether entering combat is actually
worth it directly inspiring the games that define survival horror today. It’s… certainly not the best game in the world, sure, but it’s still solid, and still worth taking a look at, both on its own merits and as the progenitor of the genre.
Alone in the Dark 2, on the other hand, aside from some quirks, and the novelty of its setting… I feel is best left forgotten.
3/10.
