2nd November 2019, 6:42 AM
I'd have to say this game is as solid as its predecessor. It brings back the same terror, tension, and helplessness, dropping the player into a hostile environment in which the only way to survive is by running and hiding. I hadn't realized it until playing Resident Evil VII, but not having weapons makes the game 100x more terrifying in a way I don't think I appreciated before.
At first, the environment didn't seem as frightening as the asylum in the first game, but I'd say it finally hit me when I was crawling through a cornfield, avoiding the waving flashlight beams of two murderous hillbillies. The lights would shine right on the stalk next to me and making me freak out and run, even though they probably hadn't even seen me, and I just gave myself away.
The game adds a couple new mechanics as well. In the last game, there was no actual health meter, so to stay alive, all you had to do was flee an enemy, find a place to hide, and if you bode your time, your invisible health gauge would fill back up. Not so, this time around. You have to seek out bandages strewn about the environment, and they aren't always in great supply. This time around, you do still need to continue finding batteries to keep the night vision on your camcorder working, and luckily, the game is pretty generous with them. Let's be honest, if you were left without them, and had to wander around in the dark, the game would be nigh impossible. But, I'm sure on higher difficulty settings, the game has no problem with that whatsoever.
So that adds a new difficulty to the gameplay, but the game also equips you with a microphone on your camcorder, which allows you to track enemies that aren't in your sight. When you activate it, it amplifies the sounds of nearby enemies, chiefly their voices as they mumble creepy little prayers to themselves. You use it as kind of a radar to detect where they're coming from. This is both convenient and anxiety-inducing, because you can be in an environment with low visibility, but still know an enemy is getting closer. Not actually seeing them makes it scarier!
God DAMN, the game gave me a long, protracted chase scene that kept me squirming. Typically, stealth and chasing is small in scope (both in this game and the last), but every time I thought I found a hiding spot or the path to a safe space, they just. kept. coming. "He's in the house!" "He's underneath the floorboards!" "He's here, get him!" I thought it was a function of difficulty at first, but really, it's by design. There's a certain path/order you need to follow in order to get away. Much of both games are like this; you basically follow an invisible track to progress through the game, and if you can find that, you feel a little more at ease.
As to the negatives, the game's character design suffers, as the studio that made this (afaik) is lower budget than other productions. It shows, as the faces of characters aren't quite so realistic as other AAA games. A superficial complaint, to be sure, but still a bit of distraction. Luckily, the game is both darkly lit and frenetic, so you don't see the actual faces of enemies very often. The game is effective at making things scarier by hiding them, and relying on implication. Certainly you can hide from enemies in tall grass, inside barrels, underneath beds, etc, but this also obscures your view of the creepy things, leaving just enough in sight to let your imagination fill in the gaps.
The story is pretty decent: you play a cameraman, the other half of a duo with a news anchor/journalist that also happens to be your wife. Like the last game, the characters come into danger by their own ambition. It opens with the two characters in a helicopter, trying to get close footage of a remote town where a murder recently took place. The engine fails, leaving the helicopter to crash. As you awaken, you find that your wife is missing, and that not only did the pilot not survive, but has been skinned and crucified. Somehow, you escaped this fate? Maybe the baddies discovered his body, but not yours? Whatever, we need a game, and I'll suspend disbelief just long enough for that creepy bit of foreboding.
One thing I DON'T like is that the game puts the main character through psychological flashes of dream-like states, where he's dropped into a school, presumably the one he attended as a kid, and implies that it's a memory associated with a great deal of guilt. Meh. I kind of like how the first game skipped over this kind of psychological thrill, this Silent Hill dynamic that honestly feels tired at this point. The first game is raw, putting you in danger that's entirely constructed from the evil of human beings, grounded into reality. It feels almost novel to give a straightforward narrative of that kind.
So yeah. If you enjoyed the first game, certainly pick this up, as it's more of the same, i.e. excellent and thrilling. I like to be scared, and years of a steady diet of horror movies has desensitized me. The last game, I felt like I could only play for so long before I felt like I'd have a heart attack. The best way to play them is with all the lights off, at night, alone. Red Barrels is very talented at creating creepy and hostile environments, where the player feels at danger at pretty much every turn.
At first, the environment didn't seem as frightening as the asylum in the first game, but I'd say it finally hit me when I was crawling through a cornfield, avoiding the waving flashlight beams of two murderous hillbillies. The lights would shine right on the stalk next to me and making me freak out and run, even though they probably hadn't even seen me, and I just gave myself away.
The game adds a couple new mechanics as well. In the last game, there was no actual health meter, so to stay alive, all you had to do was flee an enemy, find a place to hide, and if you bode your time, your invisible health gauge would fill back up. Not so, this time around. You have to seek out bandages strewn about the environment, and they aren't always in great supply. This time around, you do still need to continue finding batteries to keep the night vision on your camcorder working, and luckily, the game is pretty generous with them. Let's be honest, if you were left without them, and had to wander around in the dark, the game would be nigh impossible. But, I'm sure on higher difficulty settings, the game has no problem with that whatsoever.
So that adds a new difficulty to the gameplay, but the game also equips you with a microphone on your camcorder, which allows you to track enemies that aren't in your sight. When you activate it, it amplifies the sounds of nearby enemies, chiefly their voices as they mumble creepy little prayers to themselves. You use it as kind of a radar to detect where they're coming from. This is both convenient and anxiety-inducing, because you can be in an environment with low visibility, but still know an enemy is getting closer. Not actually seeing them makes it scarier!
God DAMN, the game gave me a long, protracted chase scene that kept me squirming. Typically, stealth and chasing is small in scope (both in this game and the last), but every time I thought I found a hiding spot or the path to a safe space, they just. kept. coming. "He's in the house!" "He's underneath the floorboards!" "He's here, get him!" I thought it was a function of difficulty at first, but really, it's by design. There's a certain path/order you need to follow in order to get away. Much of both games are like this; you basically follow an invisible track to progress through the game, and if you can find that, you feel a little more at ease.
As to the negatives, the game's character design suffers, as the studio that made this (afaik) is lower budget than other productions. It shows, as the faces of characters aren't quite so realistic as other AAA games. A superficial complaint, to be sure, but still a bit of distraction. Luckily, the game is both darkly lit and frenetic, so you don't see the actual faces of enemies very often. The game is effective at making things scarier by hiding them, and relying on implication. Certainly you can hide from enemies in tall grass, inside barrels, underneath beds, etc, but this also obscures your view of the creepy things, leaving just enough in sight to let your imagination fill in the gaps.
The story is pretty decent: you play a cameraman, the other half of a duo with a news anchor/journalist that also happens to be your wife. Like the last game, the characters come into danger by their own ambition. It opens with the two characters in a helicopter, trying to get close footage of a remote town where a murder recently took place. The engine fails, leaving the helicopter to crash. As you awaken, you find that your wife is missing, and that not only did the pilot not survive, but has been skinned and crucified. Somehow, you escaped this fate? Maybe the baddies discovered his body, but not yours? Whatever, we need a game, and I'll suspend disbelief just long enough for that creepy bit of foreboding.
One thing I DON'T like is that the game puts the main character through psychological flashes of dream-like states, where he's dropped into a school, presumably the one he attended as a kid, and implies that it's a memory associated with a great deal of guilt. Meh. I kind of like how the first game skipped over this kind of psychological thrill, this Silent Hill dynamic that honestly feels tired at this point. The first game is raw, putting you in danger that's entirely constructed from the evil of human beings, grounded into reality. It feels almost novel to give a straightforward narrative of that kind.
So yeah. If you enjoyed the first game, certainly pick this up, as it's more of the same, i.e. excellent and thrilling. I like to be scared, and years of a steady diet of horror movies has desensitized me. The last game, I felt like I could only play for so long before I felt like I'd have a heart attack. The best way to play them is with all the lights off, at night, alone. Red Barrels is very talented at creating creepy and hostile environments, where the player feels at danger at pretty much every turn.