Halloween 2024: Gregory Horror Show

What up, paisanos? I hope you're all doing well. Spooky times are upon us, and thus we took it upon ourselves to pick a sufficiently spooky game off the shelf and immerse ourselves in the season. This year we settled on "Gregory Horror Show: Soul Collector", a Capcom game on the PlayStation 2. It's based on a TV show neither of us had seen, nor ever heard of before. I had very little expectations going on, and I'm glad I didn't, because they'd probably have been extremely wrong.

Is it for kids? Is it…"scary" scary? Is this an Animal Crossing creepy pasta? We start this game and it immediately seems based because it has photos of cats on the walls. 

Wait... if you were a mouse then this would be kind of creepy

Also spoiler warning for ***OPEN SPOILERS*** about this obscure PS2 game, we'll try to leave something to the imagination but eh, we will cover the whole experience.

Looking at the art style, I suspect it's for kids …or people with a Tumblr that posts a lot of Undertale and Helluva Boss content. The hotel is nice and moody with dramatic lighting and creepy creaky noises, but then the characters look papercraft.

Mouse with a house, in this economy? It's a rat with a flat at best

So to summarise the set up, uh… Gregory is a tired looking mouse guy who runs some sort of mysterious hotel, where the other guests are spooky animals or furniture or whatever and they carry around little souls in jars which you have to steal off them and give to a grim reaper who's in your dreams when you sleep. And you’re not allowed to leave the hotel until you get all the souls.

Is he taking us to Hades or Ikea?

The guests are a good place to start. The game starts simple. Your next-door neighbour is a cat who is a zombie whose eyes and mouth are sewn shut. It sounds grim, but they're weirdly cute, and a belly shirt. They teach you the ropes on how to be a creep. You have to be sneaky silent, peek through keyholes and eavesdrop on residents. This way you'll learn what their schedule is, get gossip from the hotel, and what they're all about.

Stop trying to make "ketch" happen.

You’ve hit the ground running, we’ve managed to scam the souls out of a couple residents already by making them slip up and then racing towards their belongings like a handbag snatcher. I get the feeling this game is going to get significantly harder and more stressful as the maligned guests persist and new ones get added into the mix, slowly filling the hotel with dozens of patrolling guests who will chase you down on sight and uh… um… they’ll uh… it says here they’ll “horror show” you???

"Horror Shows" are essentially when an angry person runs up to you, and you imagine something horrible they could do to you, which causes you to take psychic damage. For instance the sultry nurse lizard might stab you in the brain with her comically large syringe and drain you of all your blood. Someone with a giant cleaver might cut you into minced meat. A cactus could try to woo you. Pretty standard fears from folks with anxiety, based on judging books by their cover.

Speaking of which… this new guest, I don’t know what he is. He’s called Judgement Boy and he's like.. A robot coat hanger?? And when you go near him he sings “JUDGEMENT BOY!!” at you? I think I love him?

Note: he doesn't mean his son, he means My Son.

It took us a while to realise, but Judgement Boy is meant to be a living scale, hanging from the ceilings. He'll ask you some questions about the game, and he'll give you a soul if you get them right. I don't quite get why, but he tries to reframe the questions as a choice between love or fortune, but it didn't fit his questions in the slightest. Whatever! Since Judgement Boy was one of the very few wandering characters in the hotel that didn't hold a grudge after you robbed them, he's alright in my book. Plus I had his dumb little "Do you know my naaaaame~? Judgemeeeeeeeeeeeent!" song in my head for weeks. 

So guests seem to come into the house in waves of 2-4 new characters, unlocking another floor of the house for each wave. Also Gregory has a child(???) who's a little menace, if he spots you he tries to “hang out” and follow you around everywhere just to cramp your style. Seems to be you spend most of the time exploring and collecting items, and a lot of books that seem vaguely themed around the characters, not sure why. Oh and this one raunchy looking book…

Gregory's nephew Lil James basically exists to ruin your stealthiness. The game is about gathering information on the down low, and he's there making sure you'll be as noticeable as possible. If he sees you, he loudly asks "What are you doing?" and stomps his feet coming towards you. Anyone you're trying to spy on will be looking your way. It's so annoying. And yeah, Gregory himself isn't much better. He's running Gregory House (no relation), and somehow has a dedicated goon room, which is used for multiple puzzles.

I'm gonna need a bigger judgement boy for this.

What we dubbed the “goon room” is where he takes the aforementioned raunchy book if he catches you with it. Anyway what else happened? We were excited when we found the exit to a garbage chute, as alternate routes are critical for this. When we unlocked the first floor we had to reunite a split-personality doll girl and ambush a cowardly cactus in a saloon. You’re really breezing through it, to be honest! Finding hints really quickly and getting mad souls in the bank.

At some point we unlock a basement, which is needlessly massive and labyrinthine. There isn't much room to dodge people down there, so you have to make sure you don't come across anyone you've taken a soul from, because it's pretty much a guaranteed Horror Show if you bump into them. It also houses three roulette-wheel-based board games, each more difficult than the last. You play against Gregory, who doesn't even want to be there. The game itself is almost fully random, with most of the squares to land on being filled with "events". These events either give you an item to sabotage the other player, harm you directly, or in the worst event, you get sent back to the very start of the board. 

Woe is Gregory.. nobody taught him about cheese strats

You absolutely destroyed Gregory at it though, he stood no chance xD. Speaking of going back to the start, we found these chutes that send you down further and further into basement floors…  B1, B2, B3… how deep does this go? When we found the chute in B3… to our surprise it came out in the garden chute on the ground floor!?? What the hell? Does this place work like pac-man!?

It was really disorienting. At least it also added another shortcut into the main hotel. That gave us another option to access certain hallways from, but even more importantly, it allowed more guests to wander into the basements, making the hallways safer too! Necessary, because some of these later guests were quite tricky. One of them was a father and son duo, called Clock Master and My Son. (Yes, that's his name). Trying to interact with the son makes him shout for his dad, who will chase you and can Za Warudo time for a few seconds like Dio. This makes him pretty scary, but if you take him down, you gain his stopwatch that lets you change time yourself. Unfortunately we did him last. What was a resident that stuck out to you?

See!? My Son! Family events are a nightmare.

At some point there’s this chef guy who's a candle, he literally looks like Gordon Ramsay and he’s called HELL’S CHEF? This was made in Japan in 2003. Anyway as we build up more and more characters we come across a problem: sometimes 3-4 of them just decide to hang out in an area for AGES!!! I don’t think there's anything that can be done, you just gotta wait it out.  Alright we’re getting near the end game now, looks like there's no more floors…

The end-game adds another Judgement Boy into the mix. He's essentially the same, but gold. All you have to do is find him, and he'll subject you to a bunch of trivia about the hotel guests. If you fail, there's no real harm. You just try again. We got it on our second attempt, and obtained the final soul for the Swedish grim reaper. Either way, with the last soul submitted, you can leave the hotel. Except when you try to leave, the real proprietress of the hotel reveals herself… Gregory Mama.

Damn she kinda... no, nevermind, she's a landlord.

There’s a pretty rough boss battle (this game isn't made for action combat) and then in an unhinged cutscene everything is burned to the ground… OR IS IT? Then you learn the truth about the Gregory House, the underlying metaphor. Like.. escapism I guess? And thus concludes our playthrough. We laughed, we learned, we loved. Oh!!! I just remembered it was meant to be spooky. Were we spooked? 

Kind of. It's the type of game where you are disempowered with moody shadows  and loud sound effects. Everything feels off, and unpredictable, and by playing the game, you make the game harder and more tense. I'd say it's pretty effective at what it set out to do. I won't pretend it's some all-time classic that everyone should play, but it served its duty as a Halloween game well.

Damn that's so... Ketch.

Halloween 2023: Resident Evil VII: Biohazard

The days are getting shorter and darker again, so that can mean only one thing… Spoogy month, baby. It's time to play cold, dank, feel-bad games. This year's pick was Resident Evil 7: Biohazard. 

Should have called it... BayouHazard

We've both played a handful of games in the series, so we roughly knew what to expect. We made a little bingo card to bolster our bravery and cockiness, and jumped right in. Unfortunately I had to jump out, as this entry made me queasy almost instantaneously. Resident Evil 7 changed to a first person perspective, which wasn't very compatible with my stomach. After messing with the settings for a while, I gave up and just mooched off Allie's playthrough.

It’s up to the girl with the iron stomach and itchy trigger finger again. Also my toes are cold, better get my blanket. OK first of all, this game's really realistic looking. Damn. I’m already quite ascare and I don’t want to get chased by a stinky guy.

Revenge of the soyjack pointing meme!?

I’m being chased by a stinky guy!!! I knew it, I bloody knew this would happen!

We're playing as "Ethan", a guy coming to look for his wife in some rural looking area in Louisiana. I wish I could tell you more about Ethan, but he doesn't really give you much to work with. He rarely speaks, and when he does, he says stuff like "You don't understand! You're not listening to me!", then continues not explaining things.

"You might be involved" well yes mate... im trapped in the house.

Yeah it’s funny that he’s even made it to the house alive, because he damn near got himself shot by a cop coming to rescue him. At least he’s decently quick on his feet when it comes to snatching up power tools and going 1 v 1 in a frankly pretty tense and brilliant first boss fight.

So the main structure of the game is that you go to a part of this family's land, and each area is being watched over by a member of the Baker family. They're all pretty rustic, in the sense that they use rusty knives to settle family arguments. The first one is the aforementioned smelly guy. I think his whole deal was that he's immortal, because he kept showing off. It mostly seemed to illustrate that Ethan was pretty ineffective at doing anything to him.

Look who's finally out of his room!

I do gotta say, I kinda feel like I'm just kind of swinging my knife at things and going “is this… anything?” The interactions can feel quite vague at first, though once I got a gun in my hands I have to admit I was pretty good at stoppin’ and poppin’.

That you were. Unfortunately for more than half of the game, there wasn't a whole lot of that. It was just sneaking and skulking, avoiding traps and finding items, and a whole lot of looking around. Every time we got used to an area's gimmick though, it was time to move on to the next one, and repeat the cycle all over again… Usually anyway. In typical Resident Evil fashion, they kind of lose steam after a while and put you in an action game where it really is about shootin' dudes.

Trust no bitch.

Yeah I do think the sections themed around each boss character had very strong gimmicks. The second character, featuring wasp nests and centipedes was very NOT HEHE for me. They would also randomly insert these playable bonus flashbacks via VHS tapes. What did you think of the third guy, ACME’s second biggest client after Wile E. Coyote?

I thought it was pretty cool. It starts out as a VHS tape of a Saw-esque Escape Room a previous person who wandered onto the estate was subjected to. There's no combat or nothing. Just a series of small rooms with stuff in it, and your goal is to light some birthday cake's candles. There was a very ominous clockwork clown scribe in the room that you have to return to a few times, which I was very excited about since "creepy clown" was on our Bingo card. Cool section though.

Looks like hes about to sign the declaration of inde-pain-dence

Shortly after this, you’re eased into the rather anticlimactic twist of the game. On top of it having the usual resident evil style secret military science zombie gone wrong type projects in a hidden underground bunker, the reveal of the source kind of… brought it in line with an awful lot of other horror games. And I dunno, I mean, I guess I don’t respect the genre of “redneck cannibals” either, but this is even more cliché to me actually. Speaking of cliches, upon the reveal of a second spunky female character besides the woman you came to rescue, I was dreading the likely opportunity for the game to “make you choose” between which damsel to rescue, leaving the other to a cruddy fate. Wow that’s so poignant. Like a harem dating sim.

Once we enter the lore-dump phase of the game, the game kind of takes a nose-dive in general for me. A lot of mystery and horror stories start crumbling once you start explaining, and it's no different here. Unfortunately combined with the pivot to a shooty game, it felt like they simply didn't really know how to make it all come together and have a dramatic climax. People started shouting more, I guess? Ethan called a child a "bitch" a bunch, which really felt unnecessary.

Drawer full of shoes. This is the most depraved thing i've seen so far.

Man yeah, Ethan kind of gave me these weird vibes I can only describe as “deadbeat frat house boyfriend”. I didn’t hate the pacing of the game, and the final boss was a fun spectacle… but yeah. I came away feeling the game overall was well executed but lacking in that extra spark I look for in a horror game. It had jump scares, and it even had a brilliant sense of dread and suspense. But it wasn’t haunting like Amnesia, it didn’t make me agonize over my lack of agency like Danganronpa. It didn’t have bizarre and unexpected moments like NightCry.

I see it as a haunted house experience in the end, kind of cool, but also a little basic. So yeah, I'm in a similar boat as you it seems. Speaking of which… This will contain some light spoilers, but here's our Bingo card. Unfortunately we didn't hit a single bingo. Things were looking so great for a while, and a fan boat would have been the key to it all. We were so stoked when they were leading up to escaping over the swamp by boat, but unfortunately it was just a stinky lil regular motorboat.

Wait… his wife was called Mia… was she called Mia because she was M.I.A.?? OHHHHH I JUST GOT THAT

brb gotta fax this banger sentiment to the motivational poster dept

Halloween 2021: The Evil Within

Well well well. If it isn’t Covid. Still here I see? Well fuck it then. Halloween month. I put lights up, I got all the spices associated with pumpkin, I got some gummi sweets, and I'm gonna whip something promising out of the old backlog.

Thinking you should consider changing optometrists.

This year's spook-em-up is Tango Gameworks' The Evil Within. A little bit of a spiritual successor of Resident Evil 4, one of the highest acclaimed games in its genre and in general. If you've played a shooty game in the past decade, you've probably got a decent idea of what you're in for. A third person over-the-booty shooty with Not-Zombies™, crafting, and gross toilets. How about you lead us in on the story and characters, Al? What is The Evil Within about?

So it’s about a Bruce Campbell lookin' cop dude who is supposed to be investigating a massacre at a mental hospital(?) with his 2 cop buddies but instead he starts trippin' balls and next thing you know the city explodes. Also you collect jars of piss green goo which are EVERYWHERE. And you inject them??? Directly into your brain with some medieval murder chair looking thing????

No seriously, medial school credentials? second opinion maybe?

Now now, maybe only half of it is in jars. The rest can be slurped off the filthiest, muddiest, blood-caked ground. Regardless of how it's sourced, more brain juice makes you brain harder. Seems pretty simple to me, and Sebastian doesn't hesitate or question it for a moment. There is something to be said though that he needs to inject his skull with stuff to think of impressive upgrades like "I can carry an extra bullet of 1 specific type of gun in my back pocket", or "what if I carry 6 matches instead of 5?"

Didn’t get far before I'm clocking that this whole series of events is taking place in some sort of… subconscious brainscape. Some dreamosphere mind prison. Seb keeps passing out and waking up in the next area, and seeing ghosts and shit. I guess it could be frustrating if you don't roll with it, but I'm kinda fine with them making it convenient to just skip to a bunch of wacky locations without having to contextualise a sense of time and place. Now I just never know what's gonna happen.

OK on some level I kinda knew this was gonna happen.

I thought it worked well too. Transitions tend to be really in your face, and met with audible confusion from the characters. When you see the characters roll with it though, it's pretty effortless to just go on the ride along with them. Speaking of "them", I suppose we should do an official rundown of the major players of the game as well. We kind of hinted at Sebastian Castellanos already. He's pretty much your cookie cutter Sad Cop™. The jovial beloved family man, who at the same time is also a workaholic that is always too busy to actually spend time with his family, and then falls into alcoholism and depression when his family is taken away from him. You're expected to just trust them on the former, because you only see the post-tragedy version of him, who's just a jaded, hard boiled arse with sexist baggage.

You’ve got buddy cop Joseph Oda, I think he’s supposed to be kinda stuck up but I love him he’s just doing his best. Other buddy cop Juli Kidman, who's a very Ada Wong-ish high heel kickin’ running off ahead-ing morally unclear kind of associate. Everyone is obnoxiously sexist towards her, nicknaming her “Kid” and complaining that she gets too cocky. She killed a zombie with her foot, Seb.

Watch out Costa, they're coming for your maple hazel lattes!

Joseph would never disrespect her like that. He wears glasses like a real human boy. It's mostly Sebastian and her boss that talk down to her, because she knows how to do things, and it annoys them I guess. But yeah, I like Kidman and Joseph. They're a little underdeveloped, but you quickly care more about them than you care about the lead. There's also Leslie, who's just a scared little boy who you chase around. Not much to say about him. He just freaks out a lot and is terrified of the monsters. Fair though. Then there's some obviously shady dumb professor guy who's way too chill about the nightmarescape full of death and destruction. Immediately sus, and you kinda wait for him to eat dirt. Can't even say if he does in the end though. 

And then finally there’s “Ruvik”, a mysterious ghost in dorkass Assassins Creed cosplay who likes to appear every now and then just to shit you up. On top of that there’s your token videogame not-zombies and an exciting rogues gallery of pretty terrifying ghosts mutants including WOMAN WITH ALL TOO MANY LIMBS and OBVIOUSLY PYRAMID HEAD INSPIRED GUY WITH A SAFE FOR A HEAD. I sound snarky but their encounters are actually fantastically tense and each new enemy design you encounter fills you with dread. You got a favourite enemy encounter, Tobi?

Damn bitch you live like this?

Oh boy, do I ever. The most terrifying and startling enemy in the game for me were the friggin' bomb traps. They're these proximity sensing devices that will know if you're near, and will blow you up into bits. You can catch them off guard by crouching and sneaking, which lets you safely disable them and recycle them into scrap parts for arts and crafts. They place these bombs all over the place. Often around corners or at the start of new rooms. My most memorable one though is when you enter a room, see some ammo or a jar of tasty tasty brain juice in the distance. As you approach it though, you pass a stack of crates, and immediately behind it is one of these beeping suckers, ready to pop. Not only did it startle me good, it also got me again when I watched Allie play. Absolutely disgusting.

Ok yeah fair point. This game resembles Resident Evil 4 in a lot of ways, but it adds in some new hooks that lend well to what's already there. One is the traps that create a whole new kind of jump scare, and the other is the CROSSBOW weapon. You have a (frankly rather pointless) craft system to make speciality bolts of your choice,  where can zap enemies, flashbang them, blow them up. 2 outta 5 of your options are actually any good, but they do a lot of damage and have decent range, and it's pretty fun to pin a ghoul to the wall and watch their ragdoll do a little jiggly dance. Not so scary now- well ok that's actually horrifying I guess. Any more thoughts in that big juicy brain of yours?

Hello im a local representative from the conservative party can we count on your vo-

Not really. I thought it was good. Not Resident Evil 4 good, but I liked it. Will play the next one at some point. Fun game to play, and a fun game to backseat hassle someone else over. It never does anything terribly original, but I guess that wasn't a huge problem.

I give this game a ZOMB BOMB out of 10. It was flashy, campy, and it didn’t disappoint. I think I enjoyed the hell out of it. I tend to prefer a more actiony game to the stealth horrors like Outlast and Alien Isolation, and this one managed to prove that you don’t need to spend *all* your time hiding in cupboards and fixing generators to be a properly tense, scary game. Though ok, it had a bit of that too.

Ah, to be an advertising agency in a Japanese horror game.

Halloween 2020 Double Feature: Ib and Alan Wake

Since we have literally nothing better to do for all of this year, I decided to basically spend all of October in Halloween mode. So we got the time to play two (wow two!) whole games.

First up, a game called Ib.

Ordinary, non-demonic looking child.

What were your expectations for Ib?

Personally I didn't really know anything about it, but I knew from looking at a screenshot that we were dealing with an RPG Maker situation. That kind of set my expectations of what would be possible, as I had quite a bit of experience with that particular engine. What about you? You were the person that put it on the docket.

W….was I? I don’t even remember hearing of it before seeing it on the list. *eerie noises* But yeah really I thought you put it on there. Looking at it reminded me of that Yume Nikki game though, which I still haven't played. It seemed like a game probably made by a female indie developer and I guess I was hoping for something suspenseful and bizarre.

So let me set Ib up for you fine folks. You're a young child called Ib, and your parents drag you on a trip to an exhibit of a famous, eccentric artist. Like all good Horror parents, they let you wander around by yourself, and before you know it, you've lost track of them and have no idea where they are any more. Not long after, it seems like the art's coming to life. (It did) 

Rude isn't that the Dragon Age: Origins logo?

Yeah so it’s the suspenseful game I hoped for, with an art gallery lending itself to a ton of weird variety and surreal imagery. Loud door clanging and footsteps were one of the major features of the game, as well as mannequins, dolls and things changing in rooms when you’d come and go. I was kinda glad to discover it was one of those no-combat RPGmaker games that are just made up of a lot of neat setpieces, some talking and items. What was your favourite “moment” from the game?

I don't want to give too much away, but I really liked how it played with paintings in particular. Their contents could change as you went along, and you could interact with some, depending on what you were carrying. We even had an instance where we thought two paintings on different floors looked like they could be thematically connected, and they were. It all ended up being pretty intuitive, but satisfying to piece together. What was yours?

Are the straights OK?

Same, there were lots of cool setups, some really simple but brilliant. Like the “guillotine” scene. Loved it. I also enjoyed when we walked into a room full of dolls and you just went “NOPE!” I think that summarised the mood of that game well.

All in all, Ib was dope, and given how short it was, I think it's a pretty easy game to recommend to people who are looking for a quick Halloween night trip. It's free too. Couldn't have asked for more. We had plenty of time in the month left though, so we did end up seeking more. How about you introduce our second game?

Alan: Isolation

It was a dark and stormy night…. Oh wait it kinda was. Anyway we played Alan Wake. It was a cinematic story driven game about a writer who was perhaps TOO GOOD at writing for his own good. So your idyllic trip to all-american spookyforest becomes a zomp-romp as you are pursued by ~dark forces~ who kidnap your lovely wife and send lots of fighty humanoids after you, that can only be defeated after being exposed to beams of light. What were your thoughts on Mary Su-er, Alan Wake?

Gotta be honest. He didn't really make the best impression on me. When you make stories about someone who is just so immensely amazing and talented in their field, you're just inevitably writing cheques you're going to be expected to cash in. Does Alan, writing rockstar, pull that off? Not really. He just comes off as very masturbatory, and this is only made worse by all the non-stop praise he gets from the characters around him. I don't even think the character changes at all throughout the story. He is exactly what your first impressions are of him, and remains that way 'til the very end. Most of the ideas were fairly generic in general, to be honest.

Heeeere's references!!!

Yeah I feel you. It didn’t help that they name dropped authors so often it became cringey, and they had so many references it kinda didn’t have much identity of its own to me. It was stephen-king-hp-lovecraft-twin-peaks-alfred-hitchcock the videogame a bit. I did love one aspect though: Barry. What a lad. Best boi.

Yeah, I did enjoy Barry. He was your publisher friend/comic relief guy. Cowardly, a little whiny, and basically just there to make Alan look good. Unfortunately for Mr Wake, Barry oozed with personality, and was super endearing to me. When I think of the best and most memorable moments in the game, Barry's in both of them. There are some other side-characters, like the cop lady, who I also thought was fun. All the others were just genre-tokens, or "homages".

Alan Fake

I guess we talked a lot about the story (as that did seem to be bigged up as the main feature) but besides that I did at least find the gameplay went down very smoothly for me. It was mostly stop and pop, a bit of dodging killer furniture and middle aged man parkour. You had to make sure to disarm things with your torch, making it your most valuable weapon of all. There’s journal entries and frivolous flasks of coffee scattered around to collect, which I got a bit obsessed with.

The spooky combat sections were unfortunately the part that didn't really do anything for me. The core gimmick of shining light on things was cute at first, and thematically worked fine, but I got pretty tired of it after the first couple of hours. Unfortunately that was the meat of the remainder of the game, which would last a dozen more hours. There were some neat set pieces to break up the monotony, but that monotony loomed over the entire thing like some kind of off-brand horror entity homage with the serial numbers filed off.

At least it had furries

Yeah, I definitely felt like the game peaked in the middle chapters where it introduced some strong locations and setups. Still, it managed to keep me motivated enough through the whole game. I guess one thing that surprised me… I didn’t find it that suspenseful and scary, really? Or like, not eerie. I don’t know. I felt like you could have just told me it was an action shooter game like Half Life 2 or Resident Evil. OK I guess those are technically horror games. It just wasn't going to haunt me afterwards the way games like Amnesia or NightCry did, you know?. Final thoughts on both games?

Ib was spooky and fun. Highly recommended from me. Alan Wake, is a little trickier. Didn't do much for me, but it wasn't really a genre I particularly liked in all fairness. It also didn't really feel super spooky, like you said. It just used the appearance of spookiness like a hat, much like it used ideas from more interesting stories as a sweater. What about you?

Yeah it definitely wasn’t a chore to play either of those games for me. But Ib was a much more excitingly bizarre and memorable journey, whereas Alan Wake was a competently made game of its time that I don’t feel did anything particularly exceptionally when you compare it to anything of similar genres and themes, such as Doom 3, Life is Strange, Deadly Premonition…? Maybe I'd feel differently if I played lots of indie RPGmaker horror games though, dunno. My advice? Check out whichever of the two games looks and sounds like your kinda thing! And decorate yourself like a christmas tree because you’re worth it baybeeee!

LIT UP LIKE A CRYSTAL BALL THATS COOL BABY SO IS U

Halloween: Sweet Home

Merry Weenmas, folks. It was that time of year again. Since I won our annual bet, I got to decide this year's Halloween game. We settled for the old 8-bit classic "Sweet Home". You ready for this?

Sweet Home bro, did I see you on MTV Crypts?

I mean, I *do* like sweet homes. What has it got like a heated blood pool or something? Mausoleum couch? I’m ready. So, what were your expectations for this game?

I knew a little bit about this game. I knew it was a spooky game, and that it was an RPG by Capcom. I also knew it was based on a movie, and that it ended up blossoming into the Resident Evil franchise. It's an NES-era game though, so I did expect a lot of shenanigans like brutal difficulty, and poorly translated cryptic nonsense.

It's not a Sweet Home without tense opening door cutscenes.

Yeah I thought this game was going to be more of a pain to play, somewhere between Parasite Eve and Final Fantasy 1 I guess. All the technical limitations of NES games and the obtuse difficulty and instadeath mechanics of early horror games. I was to be pleasantly surprised.

I guess it definitely did have some of that, but on the whole I thought it was a weirdly reasonable for a game of its era. Anyway, let's introduce us to our crew.

• Allie: A cool dude with a lighter. Doesn't use his lighter to light the way, but does burn ropes.
• Tobi: A nurse looking character. Not much of a fighter, but did have an infinite supply of pills in her first aid kid.
• Isaura: The burly cameraman. Essentially a clue-gather-er.
• Ico: A lass with a key. The mansion has many types of keys, but this generic master key works on a surprising amount of locks.
• Jinks: Someone with a vacuum cleaner, but is oddly a real powerhouse.

Now you might be thinking that these items slowly start getting odd the further you get down the list, but they kinda make sense. We accidentally did a gender swap for everyone, as the game just asked us to name five characters, and we had no clue who was going to be what.

All from different walks of life, all day-drinkers.

So the goal of the game I guess is to explore the mansion and take photos of the frescoes around the house, which all had the same image but revealed secret hints for how to progress further. Sometimes the frescoes would be dusty and you would need to use the vacuum cleaner on them. There were also lots of other hazards around the house such as holes in the floor to be crossed with wood bridges, broken glass areas to be swept, burnable ropes, locked doors, etc. Though there are some hazards that could result in losing your party members, having Tobi reading the manual and briefing me on what to expect made the game far more reasonable than I expected. There are ways to carry on if you only lose a party member or two, but we were able to make it through without losing anyone.
The combat was also fairly reasonable. As a survival horror, you had very limited amounts of heals to use wisely throughout the game but we used them sparingly and found it easy to end up quite over-leveled just by navigating the mansion naturally. There were a decent amount of spooky RPG monster designs to fight, what were your favourites? Mine was the “worms!!” Because they looked like macaroni cheese and made me hungry.

Creepy pasta.

I liked the one where just a regular dude had his back turned on you. And after a turn in combat, he turns around and he reveals he's a terminator skeleton man with half his face missing. He had the very unique moniker of "MAN".

Were there any parts that spooked you? 

The game's pretty full of spectacularly unimpressive jump scares. For some reason whenever something is about to happen, the game pauses, a slow DUN DUN DUN DUN jingle starts building up and BOOM, a thing pops on screen. Since you know it's coming, you pretty much never get caught off guard. I say "pretty much" never, because there's one guy that got me several times. One of the monsters is a ghoul, who's upside down. They look pretty silly, but them being upside down is enough of a twist that it caught me off guard. I love 'em though.

Truly, he turned that frown upside down.

While the game was pretty reasonable, fun even!? We managed to lose a bit of momentum towards the end when we started needing a lot of unique items, including several different kinds of door keys. Due to the limited inventory system, we were constantly swapping out items we didn’t think we’d need again… and being wrong. 

Yeah, basically all the characters can only hold two items each, and the parties are split up more often than not. If you want to pick up a new item, you usually have to drop something else. That sounds simple enough, but the moment you need a unique item back in a large haunted mansion full of monsters, you can probably guess that finding where you left a specific thing can be trouble. Since we decided where we left items behind, it wasn't something we could look up either. We'd have to retrace our steps, and speculate when we might have used a thing last. It's tedious, but the confusion and chaos did work into the game's atmosphere's favour.

They're always in the last grave you dig up, am i right?

Besides losing our keys, the pacing of the ending was pretty good and it kind of wrapped up the way you might expect a NES era game to. A cheerfully bizarre final stretch, a cryptic boss battle and a quick finale.

On the whole, I did have a good time with it. I could recommend it, assuming the prospective player has access to save states. There's a couple of "how was I supposed to know that?" insta-death traps in there that are fine if you can quickly reload, but would otherwise probably be frustrating and unfair. On the whole though, the home was pretty sweet.

Clowns!? This is a haunted house, not my twitter mentions.

I give it a macaroni cheese worms out of 10. It’s modest and not very spicy, but it tastes good and makes for a comforting atmospheric late autumn feast. It can also be enjoyed by cats.

Don't let your kitties snack on macaroni unless you want to be cleaning up a real horror story.

HALLOWEEN 2017: NightCry

Happy Halloween and Bi-yearly blog update!

This year’s token halloween game is a callback to Clock Tower, which we played back in 2011. Nightcry, aka Project Scissor is a ‘spiritual’ successor, as it were… get it??
So Tobi, anything to say about this before we start? A successor to Clock Tower is all I know about this. I know there's a couple games in between I missed, and that the reviews are ‘VERY MIXED’ on Steam. Anything else?

I guess one thing to keep in mind is that this is a Kickstarter game, so it makes sense that while the main creator is the same, the branding had to be changed. I’d say that I generally expect slightly lower budget affairs from crowdsourced games, but I suppose it’s not going to be that much of a difference for this series. It was always a little janky and weird, but had its heart in the right place. I genuinely know next to nothing about this game, but I suppose the level of mystique is going to be a boon for our Halloween pick.

.......An eyeball??? Hopefully you've used one since.

One session in and so far this game’s a lot of walking and some light adventuring. I kind of like how it’s really more of a P&C adventure with jump scares and chase bits than one of those modern ‘stealth action’ games. It kind of sucks that you either go the exact right way or you run out of stamina and slowly die, but I guess I’m enjoying that it’s more of a casual storytelling game and i don't have to headshot anything or sit in a cupboard for like 8 hours swearing at a stupid flipping Xenomorph- yes I’m still salty.

Yeah, my first impressions are pretty positive. The animations are hilarious, but the gameplay seems solid. The Point and Click Adventure elements work well for horror games, and while I’m not a fan of chase sequences in any capacity, they are always short here. Most of the time you’re left to explore and soak in the atmosphere. The setting of a cruise ship also works well for this type of game, but it does feel a little familiar.

I won't ask what for.

Okay, there’s some pretty funny ways to die. Don’t wanna spoil too much but here’s a few examples of things that have killed me: A tumble dryer, a possessed naked baby doll, and a radio distress call. I should also note, the game takes place from 3 different points of view. What do you think of the 3 playable characters? Monica is ya preppy but spunky gold-digger (who NEEDS to take off those HEELS, girl! Imagine how fast you could run!) Leonard is my dogg, he’s a scholarly father figure who's getting stuff done. Rooney is ya typical 90s horror movie protag - the shy virginal outsider girl with a tragic past. So I mean basically, it’s Buffy, Giles and Willow right?

Hm yeah, that’s basically what they are. I kind of enjoy the characters in this to be honest. They’re simple horror-movie clichés, but they get the job done. One thing I’m really not liking are the camera angles. They’re set to be cinematic, and they work OK in that respect, but they remain that way, even in chase sequences. You’re expected to walk towards the camera by clicking on the single centimetre of floor you can actually see ahead of you, while a monster is right behind you. Then sometimes the camera swings wildly around corners or after opening doors, making the whole process just a pain in the butt.

Finally, a social scene that's right for me.

Ugh yeah! I’m always just mashing the left click until until my hand hurts. So not only does the boat setting give it a Zero Escape vibe, but the game’s structure does too! Turns out there’s alternate endings and the game gives you some handy prompts on what you might be missing. So we both got our first ‘ending’ (and the same one!) within minutes of each other. It’s kinda still hard to have much of an opinion from one of those bad endings that doesn't explain squat. Time to soldier through! I’m gonna try and get as many alternate routes as possible before i get the best one.

Not me. After my first bona fide ending, I plotted my course to the good ending. My journey wasn’t very straight-forward, since it’s apparently quite easy to miss certain key scenes if you’re trying to rush through bits you’ve already played, but I made it there eventually. The game’s actually relatively rather short if you want to power through it and know what to do. That’s one of the reasons why the tree of choices was a good idea. Makes replaying a lot smoother, assuming you still want to do that. 

When u the only cat at a human party.

Ok turns out this is a bit underwhelming in its structure after all. Unlike Zero Escape (last mention i promise!) all the routes are narratively identical, only the final cutscene is different and the gameflow map is just a way to really explain all the dead ends you’ll reach and allow you to not have to fully start over. I’ve really got more than enough of the jist of this game now so heck with it let's just shoot for the proper ending.

There’s some other issues I have with it as well. The game’s kind of confusing when it comes to the simple act of saving. If someone didn’t explicitly tell me how to save my game, I don’t think I would have figured it out. The game does checkpoint you sometimes, but it feels chaotic and random. Another weird quirk is that the pause button pauses everything in the game, including menus and the loading screens. Another bizarre thing was that quite a few of scenes were timed as if they should have had voice acting, but they just didn’t. Normally you can skip dialogue ahead in unvoiced scenes, but not in these ones. Just weird.

Unskippable cutscenes got me like:

Huh… that was it? I mean, I kinda enjoyed the ending on some level but uh… ok.

Short and while not “sweet”, not “bitter” either. It certainly scratched that Clock Tower itch for me. I’d argue that the original Clock Tower is still a better and more polished game, but I guess that was to be expected from a crowdfunded project. At the end of the day though, it’s unapologetically old-school, and I enjoyed several of its scenes. The stuff if did present to the player was fairly coherent.

C'mon Rooney, Springtime by Monet is a CLASSIC.

I do kinda love how unpredictable this game is. Like maybe you’ll figure out the core ‘mysteries’ of the game, but whatever happens in the immediate future you probably won’t see it coming. Because WHAT. That’s kinda what I’ve come to look for in a campy Halloween game experience.

Agreed. Verdict?

I give this game a ‘severed head of a loved one/10.’ It’s not pretty, there’s a lot less to it than you’d hope or expect, but it kind of has the more engaging features that endear you to something.

Yeah. PEACE OUT.

HALLOWEEN 2016: Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth

Happy Hallomidnovember, folks. As always, we figured we would pick a spoopy game to start on Halloween, and just bask in the atmosphere of the holiday. 

For this year’s Halloween, Tobi and I had a bet going on circa some time late last year. The bet was ‘Which cult dinosaur-related game series will appear in game news first with rumours of a remake/port/sequel, Turok or Dino Crisis?’ I won the bet, so I picked the game. It was a tough decision, we seem to have acquired quite a lot of good potential crazy scary games to pick from. Having finally read some of HP Lovecraft’s best known works a year or two ago, why not that game people have gushed about to me, that supposedly captures all that Cthulhu stuff perfectly, in the form of an atmospheric FPS?

Heh! Gilman. Get it? That's foreshadowing.

Things immediately started getting an unsettling mood, as the process of borrowing a copy of the game came with a warning. ‘I hope that game runs better in 2016 than it did when I played it’. I went online and saw just a near endless list of common glitches, bugs, patches, and aimless troubleshooting. Since knowing is half the battle, we felt sufficiently prepared for what was about to come.

BUT WE WEREN’T!!!

We sure weren’t!

^ This game, WEYYYYYYY

We both booted the game up, picked the standard difficulty, and went on our way. As soon as the intro movie stopped, my game hard-quit to the desktop. Weird. I try again, tab out to say that it might be better now, and the game crashed once more. I guess tabbing out was not allowed in this one. Since I was playing on a retail copy, and Allie on Steam, we were starting to worry that one version might have been significantly more problematic than the other.

Behold!! Tobi has broken blog formatting to bring you snippets of the authentic chatlogs from us playing the game.

Nope! I was getting the same problems. It turns out I would have to play the game at 640x480 resolution, with the process affinity set to 1 core. That would at least stop some of the unsurmountable tech hangs and crashes. The game would still collapse like a jenga tower if I so much as breathed on it a bit hard too, of course. Staggered saves, ahoy!

Sadly enough, fixing the majority of the crashes was just the tip of the iceberg. At that point, we were dealing with vague objectives, something that I think was supposed to pass for “stealth gameplay”, and multiple chase sequences, all of which still had the potential to crash or glitch out. I really wish I had listened to Allie’s staggered saves suggestion, since when I booted the game back up the second session, my progress was gone. I had to replay the entire thing all over again, just with less patience for all of its bullshit. 

Is this like, a steampunk letsplay?

It was all up to me again. I was going to have to do the investingatin’ for the both of us, and report to Tobi just how deep this Cult of Dagon thing goes, and what unimaginable horrors lie in wait below the surface of Innsmouth Harbour. Oh, and what monsters there were in the game, too.

While monsters were present, throughout most of the game you’re just shooting dudes with distractingly terrible cartoony accents anyway. I’m not proud that I bailed two years in a row, but things are hard enough to stomach when you’re playing first person games with narrow fields of view, shaky cameras, and scripted insta-kill sequences. All the glitches were a step too far. At least you can take on the torch, and I can live vicariously through your Steam Broadcast.

WARNING: ABSOLUTELY THE BIGGEST LIE EVER

Nope! That’s IT! I’m done!!! I can’t do this! After a 20 minute long timed sequence i repeated about 10 times, eventually figuring out how exactly to do everything in the game AND researching a way around a tech hang and I finally did it and surprise! The game crashes right before a save checkpoint. I’m not a quitter, but this game has quit *me* for the last time.

You can’t quit too! You can do it! I believe in you! Power of friendship, love, believing in yourself, hearts and all that other anime stuff. 

We can't just succumb and sleep with the fishes, that's how we got here!

YOU’RE RIGHT! COME HELL OR HIGH WATER, WHICH IS LITERALLY WHAT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW, I CAN BEAT THIS GAME!! TOBI BELIEVES IN ME!!! Redoing that whole segment actually went by quite quickly after having perfected it so many times before. I’m shooting so many fishmen. I’m jumping all the chasms. Am I… am I starting to… have fu-oops there I go, I just flew out of the gameworld and died again. Nevermind. 

Allie's spot on impersonation of the game's protagonist.

This game was a heck of a lot longer than I expected. Every chapter felt like the final chapter, for the last like… 5… chapters?? But here I was, with Tobi assisting me with a few of the insanely impossible bugs.

Armed with the power of the internet, we sought high and low for one problem after another. Sometimes we had to seemingly break collision and jump over clear obstacles that the game used to communicate that you shouldn’t go this way. Sometimes we had to look up vague markers and coordinates to fire a cannon, since the targets and the game world wouldn’t render. Sometimes we’d have to do highly specific obtuse puzzles that are not communicated until you were already doing it correctly. Other times we had to simply redo what we tried 10 times already, in the hope that it would register.

Adventure games: where everyone makes you do their job.

Aaaand oh no. I can’t do this bit. Something’s wrong. I die every single time, I’ve tried it 20 times. Tobi’s looking at letsplays, and I’m doing it right. We tried the patch. It’s not helping. This is it. I’m done. I’m fucking done. I’m beyond done, I’m a charred husk that no longer even resembles beef. We were close, but I’m fucking DONE.

Seriously, T, you leave Metroid Prime out of this!

Come on, Allie. Do it for the poorly acted, weird-faced, stilted children.

FFFFFFFFFFUCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKKK

You can imagine a thrilling 80s montage of Allie trying to power through the most tedious nonsense, while I look up suggestions of how to pass through this utterly broken section. Since everyone was giving different hypotheses and potential solutions (none of which worked, I might add), we started to think this might have been actually it. One last ditch effort was the theory that this timed section was not actually using seconds to count, but frames.

I have a lot of hands.

FUCK IT. FUCK. I HAVE A GOD DAMNED PLAN!!! Let’s reverse everything we’ve done to make this game work. Let’s crank it up to the game’s maximum display settings for this final section. IF THAT DOESN’T WORK IM LIGHTING MY PC ON FIRE AND SACRIFICING A GOAT. LETSSSSSSS FINISHHH THISSSSSSSSSS!!!

Holy shit! This is how the game was meant to look this whole time?

Let me just cut through all the BS right now, Al. Sure, the game one of the most unstable we’ve ever played. Would you think this game is any good if none of the frequent (!!!) crashes and glitches were present though? Because I don’t think so.

Wellllllllll *deep breath* so actually… having somehow soldiered through the whole entire thing… I actually kinda do get why people like it. I mean, it’s got so many problems besides the glitches. The tedious cliche noir dialogue, the voice acting and animation, the ugly dark brown everything, the poorly explained puzzles and mechanics, the plot being just a mess of lovecraftian monster highlights smushed together into a bunch of nonsensical encounters with AI that’s far too rudimentary to even qualify this as a ‘stealth’ game... BUT!! This game has a few things going for it. It’s got momentum. It’s got variety. It’s got atmosphere. It’s got really big tentacle monsters.

GOODBYE, CRUEL GAMEWORLD!

I give this game a VERY AUTHENTIC HELL EXPERIENCE/10