Amnesia: The Dark Descent - The Review

Developer: Frictional Games
Publisher: Frictional Games
Platforms: PC, Mac OS X, Linux
Release date: September 8th 2010

Well bugger me, only a week or two after my post about trying the demo to finally silence all the requests for it my birthday came around and some generous mate had gifted me a copy of amnesia on steam.

Whilst the demo left me a bit cold I gave it a go, being a freebie and a gift after all, and in a brisk 6 hours I was done.

What is amnesia? Well if you haven’t played it the game is an indie developed action adventure horror game with light puzzle and stealth elements.
You are Daniel, a man who wakes up in a dark, seemingly very recently abandoned mansion with no memory of how he got there and only a note from his former self to guide him.
Unfortunately for Daniel said note directs him not away to safety but deep into the bowels of the castle to kill a man who put him in this situation. Sort of. It’s difficult to explain without spoilers but basically Daniel was at an archeological dig and discovered some artifact of a lovecraftian style origin and now a sentient ‘darkness’ is after his soul and has killed anyone associated with him. He came to castle brennanburg for help and unfortunately for him the help came in the form of another evil which in its own way is far worse than the darkness chasing him.
Essentially Alexander, the castles Baron. Has made Daniel do terrible, unspeakable things in attempts to ‘cure’ him of the darkness. Things that will literally come back to bite him as he makes the trip from the upper castle to the deep bowels beneath it.

The game itself is a first person physics interaction game.
To begin with you can pull and push open doors and draws, pick up items like chairs and rotate them and throw them and the game eases you into the mechanics of it.
A major mechanic being the lack of weapons and sanity.
As Daniel progresses the game becomes darker, both in tone and literally. Staying in this dark allows Daniel to creep about but at the cost of his sanity which can only be restored by completing the puzzles required to progress.
OR he can use a lantern with a finite amount of fuel or tinderboxes to light candles and torches to create light and keep him calm and sane.
-but also make him easy to spot for the castles residents.
Said residents are the remains of Alexanders experiments. Mutant hulks like a cross between Frankenstein’s monster, a cenobite from hellraiser and the average walking fleshsacks from silent hill.
They stalk the halls of castle brennanburg with purpose. To kill you. They are filled with supernatural strength and fighting back is utterly futile. All you can do is hide, either in the dark or in cupboards or closets and wait for the monsters to pass or dare to brave the pitch black darkness and lose sanity whilst you attempt to sneak away from them.
The castle itself is experienced through a series of connected hubs with a puzzle that you must solve to progress and items key to the puzzles solution hidden in side areas all connected to the hub. The first of which is a fleshy growth covering a tunnel entrance and the lab, wine cellar and storage rooms around the hub allow you to concoct an acid to allow you to melt it away and progress further to Daniels final goal.



As with the demo my experience was marred by its nature. Though not to the point of the demo which is not exactly like the final product mind you, but I found it hard to immerse myself in a game so requiring of your voluntary engagement with the world it tries to paint out.
Again the blurry jelly vision, the spawning of a monster behind you in your way as you go down a one exit room to get a key item or the many times it wrenches control away to show the character getting scared instead of letting the player become scared repeatedly enforced the notion that it isn’t real. The flawed attempts to jerry rig scares in what they felt needed to be expressed as scary rather than shown pulled me out of the game with its irritatingly uniform and obvious choices for placement and points for such things to occur at.
This is a poorly done way of not allowing the scares to come naturally but foisting them up your audience and then dashing your hopes to do so because of the very forced nature in which you attempted and failed to scare them.
Honestly at many points I myself could have been scared If only I wasn’t told I should be.
Case in point.
In one scenario I am in a dark room, my torch is out of fuel and in the murky dark I see a humanoid figure walk through a doorway down the long black hallway.
At this point my jimmies where fairly rustled.
In another scenario as I walk down a hall there is a torch at the end that bursts into flame all on its own- which has nothing to do with the plot or any reasoning and never occurs again or has any relevance- and the camera is wrenched out of my control as Daniel appears to experience severe spasms, or something.
All I could do was roll my eyes at the cheesy attempt and sit, arms folded, as I waited for the game to have the good nature to give me control of the character again.
For all the artificiality of the repeated hub layouts or lack of major story this is amnesias weakest point and makes many tense moments redundant. So surely it is a failure as a horror game, right?

Well not really.
One thing this game does well, for the most part, is ambience. The grimy, dark castle that leads onto rotten prison cells, a flooded sewer and worse is a well paced and well thought out path of an increasingly dark and oppressive location that truly makes you feel as though you do not belong there.
The is an almost effervescent creepiness that permeates every moment of this game that may come and go between little well lit areas that allow the player to catch a breath but the feeling of ‘wrongness’ about the location is constant throughout.
The music in particular is well done. It is a subtle undertone that allows the developers to alter the mood of a location at a moments notice and it’s a shame some of this subtlety did not go into the scripting of events as well.

Gameplay wise its actually pretty good. My only minor gripe is that you may be running from a monster and get ‘stuck’ on a flat surface of terrain, a common problem with many physics heavy games and no different here.
The puzzles are actually pretty easy. You collect a series of items with only one solution and you just cannot progress until you search all the off-rooms of that hub and collect them all. Simple as that.
On the whole the very nature of the gameplay is shallow. Either you are safe in a well lit room and you spend the time pulling open draws or doors to find items or you are crouched in the dark hiding from enemies that- due to a constant auto save and respawns with no progress lost- are not really much of a hindrance anyway.
Shallow is really the term for amnesia. The scares are there, the ambience is there, there is enough story, character and design genius to draw you in and get you going.
For most though its constant hammy attempts to try and force you to evoke emotion rather than naturally draw it out makes it not last longer however.
Perhaps its just a sign of its indie nature but not only are you always aware this is just a game, but the tiny budget and inexperienced design team means you can see when and where things will occur as surely as a teenager in a slasher film saying “I’ll be right back” being singled out as the next to be killed off.
It has the setting, I felt very much alone in the castle, but never truly at risk and only through design choices which hampered the experience. The pacing in particular is excellent. Many games would ram monsters down your throat but only in one instance did i ever encounter more than 1 at once. In fact i do not think i saw a monster- at least more than a shadow in the doorways for the first 2 hours of the game. It eases you in and allows you to build up to the reveals of monsters which makes there limited appearances all the more impacting. It is just a shame that this pacing is completely countered by the artificial scares put in place by the level designer.

On the whole I played through in a single sitting in which I died 3 times and was never more than mildly spooked- mostly when there was no scripted events or monsters and just me alone in the dark, empty rooms of castle brennanburg.
I felt slightly dissatisfied with the time spend during the game. The was no real change in the experience from the first hours play to the last and I never really cared for the faceless blank slate of a character as i progressed.
Don’t mistake me for out and out disappointment with the time spent. Amnesia is a unique experience that I had not played the like of before and it was certainly a memorable one.



I just cant consider it truly scary. Certainly not anywhere close to either my top horror games of all time or just as a notably great videogame because in the end, it’s kind of a dull videogame that has squandered its potential as either a fun game to play or as a terrifying experience.

I finished the game, described it to my friends with a funny wavey hand motion followed by an ‘eeehh..’ escaping my mouth but a funny thing happened the next day.
I sat down to get some work done ay my desk and as I stared at the imacs screen the amnesia icon was luring me in, making me want to revisit the experience again already even though it offered nothing new.
Doe’s that mean against all my criticisms it is a great game? Not really. An enjoyable experience you will sit through more than once however? I think that that’s probably closer to the mark.

I was not left overwhelmed with Amnesia. It has certainly been overhyped by word of mouth. However any aficionado of horror games would do well to experience the game much in the same way i would point to D's dinner table, koudelka or nanashi no geemu. None of which are truly balls to the wall scary or a truly stellar videogame experience but as an experience they are note worthy due to there unique nature and as such i recommend these oddities as something for any horror fan to play through at least once and in this respect amnesia is no different. Hell even if you are looking for cheap thrills the more susceptible players may be thoroughly spooked by it. So by all means do not let me dissuade you from this game. I would very much recommend it.

Just don't expect the be all, end all final boss of horror games most websites make it out to be.

SCORE [6/10]

SCARE FACTOR [6/10]

"Hey guy! you gotta try amnesia!"

Okay, Okay, so i keep getting emails to try games, in particular spammed to no end to try Amnesia: the dark descent. Honestly i've put it off because the trailers just made it look like someone took penumbra and reskinned it with the tile set from oblivion and thats sort of a one trick pony for me.
I realize the irony of saying that after playing a dozen or so resident evil games but what can i say, im a fickle hypocrite like that about my entertainment.

Anyway. I've tried that demo and honestly? its okay. However i feel i have to post because i feel like the developers have shot themselves in the foot with the mechanics. To put one point up to cite as reasoning i would blame the sanity effects from removing me from any immersion the game builds up.

My experience whent something like this:

-walk into dark room.
-see monster.
-get creeped out.
-start to hide.
-suddenly get shakeycam/jellyvision 'insane' effect.
-remember its just a game and death is nothing but a respawn with no time or data lost.
-previous event loses all impact and ambient fear imbibing in the player.


Now this could very well just be me but when my guy could see clearly and i was walking around with nothing creepy actually happening i was more open to scares than when the walls are bloody and the screens spazzing out. It felt almost farcical in nature to me. It utterly ruined every moment in this horror game that should have scared me. Which at best renders it a grimdark adventure game with irritating sanity effects which are not needed in any fashion but an artificial way to attempt to instil fear and a sense of urgency in the player. Which, once you realise this in the first 15 minutes, you are constantly aware of the artificial nature. that it is all fake and nothing can hurt you.

In filmmaking terms this is what we call a huge no-no. Rule number 1 is to create a world that draws your audience in. If you are constantly reminding them- intentionally or not- that this is all make believe they distance themselves from the piece and are far more likely to notice the unpolished bits and pieces as they play and all the more decrease how much they enjoy your product.

Basically through their own attempts to make the game scarier they made the game no longer scary for me and in doing so defeated the point of their own creation.


Sometimes games developers need to remember they are not a board game dungeon master attempting to paint a scene and impress emotions on their player about events they cannot actually see and explore. They are closer today to theatre directors, assembling the parts on the digital stage for the player to take the primary role in a story of their own production. You dont need to set up a system to make them feel. just allow them to feel it on there own as they explore the world.
Amnesia had a scary world, but in an effort to make an already scary world scary they make it no longer scary and in doing so the game i experienced was a failed product.

Not to say i dont recommend it but gameplay and story must go hand in hand but we are for more forgiving of story errors than gameplay ones. Heavy rain has plenty of plot holes, but the gameplay experience keeps you engrossed. This is a case of the opposite where they story keeps trying to engross you, but the gamelpay mechanics rip you right back out of it and its a shame that this happens but its just like the spamming of jump scares as you quickly alter your directional view in F.E.A.R. Fool me once shame on me, fool me twice?...

Well its friday.

So by now you, along with the rest of the world should be aware of the announcement trailer for dead island not being, well, dead.
If you haven't heard of it before it was announced in '05 or '06 and was due in 2008, it had a trailer that has aged terribly. Both in terms of what the game was like and the style of videogame trailers (namely terrible heavy metal music and smash cuts to lots of red text every 9 seconds on a black background) and a couple of videos to advertise its still impressive 'multi layered damage system'.
Then it vanished. Like Duke Nukem Forever and Alan Wake most folks assumed it was dead. A project to ambitious to have seen fruition.

I was pretty surprised to hear an announcement trailer for the product had appeared and was doing the rounds. Even more so that so many people where gushing about it being one of the best trailers ever made for a videogame. So of course, being a horror fan and a filmmaker i had to check this out.

I was not disappointed.



Not only doe's that get me excited for the game but that is, from a technical standpoint, a superb piece of work. In less than 3 minutes with no dialogue we get a narrative about a family vacation that has gone as wrong as it could possibly go and it invokes genuine emotion in its audience.
Sure the choice of music and the focus on the girl is a bit of an obvious, guaranteed heartstring pull but still it remains bloody effective. -pun not intended.

As a videogames enthusiast i am excited for the game without seeing anything to do with how it plays, so it definitely did its desired job with me. As a filmmaker myself i am impressed by it. Personally i feel the edits of it in chronological order have a bit more emotional impact, but still it remains an impressive piece that is easily up there with gears of war's mad world trailer or resistance 3's 'on the rails' trailer as one of the best attempts to sell a videogame as something a little more meaningful than "Bro check it, you will totally be able to kill some dudes in this!". For that alone the creators of such trailers should be applauded.

Proof of being alive topic time!

So first off forgive the lack of any articles, but ive moved house, had to deal with a lot of crap to get the net hooked up and now im in the final month of my film degree.

but ive been playing some horror games on and off, namely semi recent releases like F.E.A.R 2: Project Origin and Resident Evil 5. Though ive finished nothing of late so i dont think i can warrant a good article on any games ive not seen the credits roll on. 

However the last few months have seen the net crawling with threads on forums debating if resident evil 5 IS even a horror game at all. In my personal opinion it is an action shooter with horror overtones, it doesnt intend to scare any more than gears of war does but there are mild jumps and rushes of adrenaline from certain set pieces though the soundtrack has greatly shifted from action and suspense to action movie music. -and i have said often that music is a key ingredient in a successful horror piece. But!, on the flipside of this we have fear 2, which literally has a shock a minute to the point where my controller was almost consistently on rumble and you were turning clone soldiers and the homeless creatures from condemned into clouds of so much red matter. this was so over the top i quickly became desensitized to any and all attempts to shock me or instill fear as i played. Plus if any fast moving or stealthed enemy showed up i simply hit the time freeze button and shot them in the head.

but this is getting into a ramble and those are topics for much longer posts at a later time, what i wanted to comment on was the current parting of ways between to series that have gone hand in hand as the two leading sides of the survival horror coin, and thats resident evil and silent hill.

Or more specifically Resident evil 5, and Silent hill Shattered memories.. For those wondering what im on about dont feel stupid, this games been prettty under the radar thus far. Its a re-imagining of the original silent hill on the wii pc and psp, developed by Climax studios, again taking over for team silent on this wii centric remake with a twist ill get to in a second.

So first off lets look back at the mid 90's resident evil and its "stylish but shameless rip off" as it was dubbed at the time silent hill have just been released. Both archetypal horror stories, you play a person in there 20's looking for missing people they know in an isolated location where unnatrual events have come to fruition pitting the player against a menagerie of monsters, either science or supernaturally based. Each have there charms, great memories for the game enthusiast to hang onto, yet remain distinctly different regardless of there obvious first glance similarities.

Now jump a decade on and we have a great divide between the once all too similar franchises. Resident evil is a new type of creature altogether, finishing the transition to full 3rd person shooter it began in resident evil 4. its still at its heart the same franchise but the essence of the game contains a little more in common with gears of war and other bloody shooters pitting your against humanoids with guns and weapons and large behemoth creatures to take down as you progress. Basically it lost the survival. when you had to survive in the early games thats because there was not enough ammo to take down everything, you had to survive by dodgeing the lurching zombies as you ran through the tight corridors, in 5 you have rocket launchers by level 3 onwards and hardly anything is greater than an equal threat.

Though silent hill appears to be going the other way, the remake is focusing on combat evasion rather than a rambo style "turn everything organic into a red paste" shoot off. tie this into the freezing environment replacing the rusty , fiery hell and i think its the one franchise of the two that is sticking to its roots, albiet in new and interesting ways and i for one am really looking forward to the new silent hill far more than i did for resident evil 5 and i dont think i'll be the only one.

So there my point, ill cut my ramblings off before they get to tangential, but there you have it folks, taking the fight to the majini guns blazing as the special forces chris or hiding in the frozen hell of a new silent hill as disturbed writer harry. i know which one of the two id call survival horror, but whats our view?, discuss.

Valve put up left 4 dead "movie" posters in online store.

So have a gander's, gentle horror loving folken, at the latest addition to the valve store. For those yet to play it each of the 4 stories in left 4 deads campaign mode has a fake movie poster for its loading screen at the start, listing each gamertag in the credits as each respective character they are playing. Now you can grab these from valves online store to go with your companion cube t shirt and lifesize headcrab. at 15 bucks for all 4 im very tempted, but for all i know ordering 4 pieces of paper form the states could cost an additional 10 to 35 bucks in postage costs.

Still, cool thing to frame and put in the studio at least.

-Oh, and rather than get all fanboy...ey and rave about it right after release im holding off on my left 4 dead review till ive played every mode to death.

EDIT- that would have been a good intentional pun to end on wouldn't it?, just a fluke i assure you.

Dead Space: The Review

Developer: EA redwood studios

Publisher: EA

Platforms: Xbox 360, Playstation 3, PC

Released: October 24th 2008

Genre: 3rd person sci-fi shooter/ survival horror

So its 3:24am and ive JUST finished dead space. i was really excited about this, which was confusing because ea hasn't made a good game since oddworld strangers wrath in my opinion. so after  couple-a-hour stints is it the next big thing in survival horror?

Honestly? no.

and for once I'm disappointed to admit it. 

I read the comics, did all the puzzles on the site, read all this lore voraciously, i had to know what the plot and back story was. All of that i loved, and don't get me wrong, i love dead space too. but its just a clone of resident evil 4.

So if you don't know already (and if you don't your mother and i are very disappointed in you young man), you play Issac Clarke. An engineer on a small ship investigating a distress signal coming from a dead, silent, drifting hulk of a mining ship the usg ishimura. unfortunately they get trapped there and they find out that, whilst the crews dead, the atmosphere certainly isn't.

cheesy i know but it works.

anyway i cant say much, but what i can say is the story can be wrapped up in 5 minutes, theres a good minute long interesting scene every few hours but all in all i finished the game wanting to know more, not in a sequel, but in back story. i needed it to be explained to me in a more concise and plain way.

Though this is a successful new ip so you know ea is gonna bleed it dry so i expect ill read a novel about it some time in 2009.

-Plus there is an animated feature film that tells the prequel story, so i guess youve gotta buy that to get the full experience. 

bad e.a.

Game play wise its pretty much resident evil 4. remember playing silent hill or resident evil first and then the other and going "hang on, the controls are exactly the same". this is just like that nostalgic 1998 feeling, whether its good or bad i don't know but there we are.

The merchant is replaced by a machine, but you still get loot and ammo from enemies, which you can then use to buy new guns and upgrade them and stuff. but like resi 4 you cant upgrade it all in one play through. theres logs, over the right shoulder aiming. in fact its pretty much resident evil 4 with a new skin.

though thankfully they've got none of those damn quicktime events. everything, including being dragged by a tentacle across a room and having to shoot its week points to escape is real time relying on you, not pressing a a lot. 

unfortunately i was drawn in with comparisons to bioshock. lets be clear. - THIS IS NOT BIOSHOCK. this is resident evil 4 by a mile between the two games. the problem with that is that the ishimura has no character, if you go in expecting rapture type world that's full of character you in for a disappointment. instead you get something more akin to the mars base from doom 3. 

-anyway I'm going off on a tangent here, but the point is, rapture felt like it had a history, like you'd joined a game halfway through the worlds narrative. but in dead space all you've got is a blue line leading you in form an airlock to set pieces which seem to have been waiting for you.

Which neat leads me to the fact that this is not open ended, its funneling you down a path half life 2 style. only with back tracking for the final 3rd. it lacks character, you go here, do something, get told to go to the next point and follow the path. Which is lame but how its done is neat. issac uses , when clicking the right thumbstick, a hologram that beams along the ground to your next destination. in theory its really disappointing but its cool and different.

Speaking of which. theres no hud, well there is, but it not in your face. issacs spine is his hp bar, he gets a holographic inventory and display above weapons for ammo. its real time and immersive but unlike alone in the dark its not adding to the fear its just a neat factor. 

overall i got used to the hud instantly, you can still pause, but it just feels like an interactive movie at some points.

only trouble is its less aliens and more jason x.

to sum up the controls its responsive and easy to use, but its overcomplicated by combos. left trigger plus x is stasis freeze, x alone is health packs, which is a poor choice when you might need to freeze a fast enemy, and use your last health pack by mistake and then get badly hurt because you didn't freeze it in time and have no health pack.

However, i can ignore most faults because of the dismemberment system, i got used to so much shooting out legs and arms off that i tried another game in the same vein and kept missing headshots because i aimed for the joints.

its fun, but its never implemented any more than you see in the first fight and it had more potential i think.

You can also upgrade weapons with a system reminiscent of the sphere grid from final fantasy x. you gain power cores across grids to upgrade the powers of your suits and weapons. its a nice touch but unlike resi 4 you may have to level up two blank spaces before you can gain any actual power ups.

Graphics wise space is beautiful. an orange ether permeates the sky and rainstorms of meteors flow past like a stream. However inside its, well, like i said, its doom 3 all over again. its not very easy on the eyes, theres jagged edges were there should be smooth surfaces, edges are grainy and cloudy and the colour pallet was uninspired. Again I'm going to compare it to rapture, but also the starting areas of resident evil 4, either Spanish woodlands or the art deco of fort frolic and its just bland in comparison to either. the game lacks character. the hero is iconic, but the levels and creatures leave a lot to be desired. it never detracts from the gameplay though, i had a blast. but in retrospect i think "yeah, at the time i didnt notice it but-", and im getting this a lot as i write this review. i enjoyed myself, but i can pick so many nits with this game. though possibly i am just being biased due to my poor previous experiences with ea?

Sound wise i was really disappointed, its poor and buggy and all in all annoying at times. there can be a creature in the next room but its so close to the door that tension building music is playing. but i would just be browsing the wares in the store and i noticed that after 30 seconds it stops instantly and then restarts. i cant think of that many items but i can say that its barely even ambiance, they couldn't feasibly release a soundtrack to this like obscure or alone in the dark.

i could go on about the factors that bugged me, but these faults, though they number in the good dozen or so, never mess with the experience, because honestly its the scariest game Ive played in a long  long time. which surprised me. though like many games this does lessen as the game goes on but all in all i enjoyed it, it inst very good in the grand scheme of things but for 10 hours of horror gameplay id say its worth a rental but a full purchase buy?..... maybe, for once I'm indecisive, some of you will love it and disagree with me, saying I'm too harsh, others will hate it and say I'm too lenient but id say give it a try.

on one hand you will have a great time, on the other you will not care about it at all 1 year from now.

so i give it a loose-

SCORE: [6/10]

SCARE FACTOR: [8/10]

Remedy wakes up from slumber to release new trailer

Too cheesy?, yeah i thought so too, but im lost for good titles right now , gimme a break!

anyhoo, horror fans prepare to go nuts for the new alan wake trailer!, 'nuff said.

Bioshock 2: Sea of dreams PS3 easter egg trailer

A little late on the uptake i know, but i think ive got it.

So theres a lot of speculation on this, and my first thought was rapture rising from the sea, but i think ive got it now.

The girl is one of the little sisters, now in her teens, that jack saved from rapture in the good ending. only instead of living normal lives like the others she went all "carrie" and has similar plasmid abilities to jack and the splicers. maybe jack made the big daddy doll to give her something familiar to attach to when she was little and now its bringing back these long blacked out memories or rapture and she is unconsciously shaping the sand behind her to the images in her head as she looks out at the sea.

Perhaps it doesn't even take place on rapture, and this is just the catalyst for it, im definitley getting a carrie/ring vibe of the girl, but only time will tell. aside from a terrible endgame boss bioshock was almost perfect, maybe it could have used some more period music but the art deco style just captured my imagination. So needless to say i cant wait for this.

But seriously folks, the trailer, whats your speculation about it?

The Suffering: The Review (or: "How Danny got back in the saddle")

Developer: Surreal Software 

Publisher: Midway games

Platforms: PS2, XBOX, Pc

Release: July 30th 2004

Genre: Third person shooter with psychological horror themes.

So a few posts back i posted a link were midway had, very surprisingly, put this game up for a free download. Being a horror nut (go figure) and the fact ive yet to see an xbox copy in stores i spent a good 6 hours on my poor connection downloading this. So yesterday i finally sat down to play it.

I'll then stood up after that "brief session" to find several hours had passed and i had finished the entire game. 

So i guess i liked it, i think.

The game beings with the eyerollingly named protagonist "torque" (no, really) being admitted into carnate island penitentiary for the murder of his wife and children. Wouldn't you know it however that as soon as the locks bolt shut everything goes all "silent hill" on the islands population.

Now, do you remember the prison level from ghost hunter?, well this is it, albeit in a much more free roaming sense. from the off set your never given any clues theres maps and such but your not even told what button you use to see them. your just given a knife and told "heres the open cell door, escape!". Now this i really liked, i had no idea were i was, what i was looking for. i just fought my way through the demons filling up the prison and explored the blocks and tried to find a narrative in there. somewhere. 

To be honest i dont know if this was intentional or bad design but i couldnt help but think it would make a good level in left 4 dead with 4 players stranded around this island trying to find a way off.

The level design is nice, albiet bland in parts. and sometimes the textures are apt to dissapear for sod all reason. really on the whole it feels so much like an incomplete test level from another game i cant place my finger on. the island has a mental institution, a WWII amy barracks, a beached slave trade ship and a graveyard of witch trial victims to name a few. i know ive played something like this before. its neat to explore but i cant escape this nagging feeling ive played something just like this before.

please leave a comment if you can think of he game im thinking of as this is bugging the crap out of me.

-anyway. music wise it not very good, just cheap screeching noises with flashes of gore to make use of those tired "jump" scares.

Control wise its not bad, but i find myself closing the program instead of opening doors because of poor placement on the keyboard at default (im not a pc gamer), sometimes the character, after a checkpoint starts constantly running to the left or right even when the keyboard is removed from the computer. I could go on but to sum it up its fun , to a point, it has faults.

This isn't really a long or in depth review, i think thats quite an apt analogy of the game itself, This game is like buffy the vampire slayer, or ghosthunter. A third person horror game that never feels like your in a world, like fable or resident evil 2. You are always conscious that this is an enclosed little area, like setting out pieces on a pre set puzzle board. Thats not to say it isn't fun. i had a relatively good experience playing this, going crazy with a shotgun running towards 2 done screeching terrors from beyond.

Is it worth getting?, its free, so of course. would i pay full price on release when this came out?, no. its an interesting gameplay experience, but in no way is it memorable, there are few scares, the story is ranging from inconsistent to none existent and it just needed more rounding off before release. For example, you can have prisoners or guards team up with you, but they can suddenly stop following you for no reason, disappear, or just get locked behind a door thats pre set to forever close after you enter it.

Honestly i can go on but these little faults allow for no mental interaction. its more of a mindless shooter with horrific imagery over a true survival horror. not once did i believe torque, who could turn into a bloody giant monster with a sword for an arm for gods sake!, was not going to make it through this without a scratch. To be blunt you just dont give a crap about him.

I know this review is inconsistent. but thats the game in one, its hard to define. can i recommend you will enjoy it for a gameplay session o two?, yes, its a free game that i can recommend. but is it worth your time as much as ghost hunter or obscure, let alone resident evil or silent hill?, no, honestly its not.

SCORE [7/10]

SCARE FACTOR [2/10]

Play the suffering for free!

Props to Chris of a certain questing site for the skinny on this one. Midways put the Survival in the slammer horror game The Suffering up for free download on our good old t'internet. Its a bit hefty at over a gig, but its free and ive not found an xbox copy of this so im getting this whilst the gettings good, so check it out and enjoy!

http://www.gamershell.com/news_60914.html

There WILL be a left 4 dead demo coming for the xbox and pc.

So make with the clicky-clicky here For the info about it. its been confirmed for co-op play too.

Now this bugs me a little.

Its what?, 4 or 5 different areas? in total?, im not sure how this demo is going to come about myself. You can give the player a level to try, like the city one weve seen a  lot of, and whilst the a.i and director engine will make every demo experience different, by the time the levels over they will have experienced a 5th or a quarter of what the game has to offer.

maybe it will be in one barricaded building and one stand off to survive or just a set 15 minutes of gameplay which pisses me off. but its a good way to give you enough.

honestly i dont know, but im a long time fan of zombie films, novels and games so im sold from the first minute after i heard the premise, but this doesn't seem like a demo-able game to me.

Resident Evil: Twilight - A Halflife 2 Mod

So im looking for images to use in the banner for the update the sites going to be going under in the next few weeks and googling raccoon city, (and coming up with this very site a few times) i stumbled onto this -http://www.evilmod.de/view/base.php?site=home&head=1&changelang=eng its a mod for half life 2 based on the last 24 hours of raccoon city and it looks pretty neat, its 80% done and im actually looking forward to playing this and reviewing it on here. though im not normally one for mods, but this one looks worth checking out, ive been playing resident evil again dn reading the great s.d perry novelizations and im in a raccoon city mood again lately so this is worth checking out in my opinion.

-On that topic

Time for a recap on alan wake.

So there's the two trailers again. Im imagining that if you've not heard of alan wake, but being a horror games fan visiting my humble little site that your excited now?

yeah, i thought as much.

In some ways the graphics are showing there age a little, compared to alone in the dark, but the thing is this is early build footage from YEARS ago.

its really been that long. for those who dont remember or are new to wake. The game is about a struggling writer who is grieving for a lost loved one and heads to the town of bright falls to clear his head and find the peace he needs to right his new novel.

its all very stephen king and i dig that.

The enemies are wakes nightmares made flesh, there only weakness being the light, so they only attack wake at night.

so when alan sleeps he has to set traps, like a trip wire that sets off a lamp flooding a hallway with lamp to ward off the raincoat phantoms.

though they can break the lamp and stuff so youve really gotta think carefully.

the weather ranges from sunny, windswept or rainy to thunder storms or full blown, terrain destroying tornadoes.

i could go on and on but this really is a must own game for any 360 owner, horror fan or not.

Wake up!

So there's been a rumor doing the rounds that Alan Wake, my most anticipated horror game yet to be released, from the creators of the pieces of art that is the max payne series were going to finally show some new information about wake at the 2008 Tokyo game show (http://tgs.cesa.or.jp/english/) and for those not in the know, there hasn't been any major wake news since the bloody jaw dropping weather engine tech demo which was staggering in its grandeur.

... Unfortunately these rumors have been quashed by the site bright falls.net a very reliable fan site for news on alan wake. Apparently this is VERY old news from last years tgs event.

Well im disappointed now, but to be honest the longer remedy works on improving it the happier i will be. so take your time remedy, i know it'll be bloody brilliant regardless.

and include an address unknown easter egg!

Vampire The Masquerade - Bloodlines: The Review

Developers: Troika Games

Publishers: Activision

Released: November 19th, 2004

Platforms: PC

Right off the bat i was... unsure about bloodlines. 

I got it free with S.T.A.L.K.E.R: shadow of chernobyl one day and knew nothing about it, save that it was a video-game rpg made in the half life engine  based on a pen and paper/LARP (like action role play) game akin to dungeons and dragons, albeit set in a vampire controlled L.A.

Nether-the-less i gave in and tried it. since the idea of owning a horror game and not playing it, at least for a review, left me huddled in a corner, rocking back and forewords in a fetal position.

okay, not really, but still i felt like i had to give it a try.

So the game is a somewhat free roaming game, with 5 "hubs" that are a lot like a level from tony hawks underground 2 meets the early street levels of max payne. You play  as a male or female character of your choosing form one of several subclans of vampires. each with different abilities ,some magic based, others brutish savages and everything in between. 

Gameplay wise its a 3rd person horror themed action adventure with rpg elements. you have your typical wasd movement, aim with the mouse as a crosshair and either shoot in fps mode of swing a weapon in 3rd person. everything is simple to control, even though the jumping is akin to a crab performing gymnastics.  the controls are slightly self piloting. you dont pick a lock, you right click on a lock and either do or dont, its not like thief or oblivion were you actually pick it yourself. Its a little gripe, but i like my games, not just horror, but across the board, to have a little room for self expression in it. Here the gameplay, whilst enjoyable, feels like its an unfinished tech demo for a playstation game. I know the whole "self expression" thing sounds uppity and pretentious, but this IS a ROLE PLAYING game, yet it never draws you into the character, you never make it your own, you cant choose appearance, very few dialogue trees come to different final conclusions.

.....i know im going off on a tangent here but it is a fallacy rpg that appears to give to the player the freedom it promises, and in gameplay alone you can see that it would have easily worked on the consoles as a straight up 3rd person action horror game.

-Anyway.

Storywise you can slightly affect your choices but overall its quite a linear experience in comparison to most rpgs, its rpg-lite. you are given the "embrace", become a childe of the night and are part of a clan, you are then cast out to do menial tasks for the night un-life of los angeles. during the beinnings of you getting into all these political shenanigans things start to go very awry. a ship, full of dead seamen and a sarcophagus driftsto shore, a powerful vampire suddenly becomes reclusive, and a serial killer is on the loose.  Say what you want about its shallow designs, it does have a good number of sub-plots ,seperate from the core narrative, and i like that. whilst there isn't much choice, there is a choice WHEN to do most things and these little stories actual take up more game than the core story missions, and not unlike gta you will find yourself doing these way before heading onto the next area to fight another boss.

Graphically speaking its of the time. its made in the half life engine, which means details, but also a kind of ...i dont know, feeling you in a box with buildings painted around the edges. its not sandbox gameplay, its lunchbox gameplay, a close emulation, though it lacks the true freedom of its larger, sandier counterpart.

the characters are well designed, although a lot more time is spent on the women's cleavage than buildings which is A: questionable and B: unsurprising given this is a game about vampires, natures enemy of the corset.

All in all the graphics have character, they do have a tendency to jar, with the likes of warcraft and stalker contained in the same level, but the overall design thematically works soundly.

Overall i, not a pc gamer, but part of the console playing sub race whos primary evolutionary traits are playing first person shooters and being loud, Found bloodlines to be that rare thing. -A pc game i can actually play, its witty, exciting, though never scary. The music and graphics suit the dark, comic-noir feel and most importantly i had fun. if you own a pc that can play it, as a horror fan you should play it.

[8/10]