Five Nights At Freddy's (PC)

Horror games. If you've been paying my totally very often updated blog with anything remotely resembling half an iota of attention (or listening to SpellCast), you probably know that I really enjoy writing and talking about horror. And Star Wars.

In fact, I've probably run my checklist of things that make a horror experience scary into the ground and back out the other side of the planet at this point, so I'll reiterate a condensed version:

• Creepy things in the dark.
• They want to eat you.
• You can't fight them.

In other words: you're powerless. In most true horror games you typically have two options when faced with something that wants you dead: run for your goddamn life, or hide somewhere and hope it goes away. Amnesia and Outlast both make exceptional use of this concept, but what if I told you there was a game out there that further limited your options?

In Five Nights At Freddy's you are the new night security guard at Freddy Fazbear's Pizza, an obvious parody of a certain restaurant known for pizza, arcade games and an arguably unsettling band of animatronic animals. Of course, there's no "arguably" about Freddy Fazbear and his friends, Bonnie the Bunny, Chica the Chicken and Foxy the Pirate.

I am so far from settled. You don't even know.

As night watchman, your job is to...well...watch over the place. At night. The thing is, at night the animatronics get a bit "quirky" as your predecessor puts it in his recorded phone messages that serve as tutorial and background story. In case it wasn't apparent, Freddy and the gang are the creepy things in the dark that want to murder you. 

It seems that your predecessor's definition of "quirky" means they think you're an animatronic skeleton with no costume on, and they want to fix that by forcibly shoving you into one. Unfortunately, said costumes are full of electrical wires and sharp metal bits that would make inhabiting one understandably a bit uncomfortable.  

Remember what I said about having limited options when faced with an enemy?  Open or close the doors to your office. That's what you've got to work with. If someone is coming for you, hit the button and SLAM! Down come some alarmingly thick blast doors to keep them out. "But wait," you're probably saying. "Why would you ever even open the doors at all? If they just stay shut then nobody can get in! Problem solved, right?" 

Well, you're absolutely correct. At the start of each night, you can just hit both buttons and be completely safe for the next 6 in-game hours (about 10 minutes in real time).

Except no, that would be a stupid game mechanic and also completely un-scary.

As it turns out, your employers are cheap bastards who shut off the electricity at night and run the entire security system off of a generator. Guess what uses up that generator's power ridiculously fast? That's right. Absolutely everything you do. Looking at the cameras? Turning on the hallway lights? Closing the blast doors? Doing all of those at the same time will completely drain your power in minutes.

And if that happens, you'd better be goddamned ready for Freddy.

Get it yet? You are literally powerless. You have to develop a strategy for paying attention to the locations of the characters in the building and keeping them out when they show up at your doors, while trying to conserve enough power to last until morning, which involves using the provided protection as little as possible. 

"Well, so what?" You're saying now because I've already characterized you as an argumentative little shit, and there's no point in changing that now. "All you need to do is watch your doors, shut them if you see anyone, and open up when they leave! Problem solved again!"

Actually, you are partially right this time. Technically, you can make it through the first night without even bringing up the camera screen because you only need to watch out for Bonnie and Chica, who will always appear at your doors before actually entering the office to grab you and therefore give you advance warning and hopefully enough time to shut them out.

But that's only accounting for half of the characters out to get you. There is also Foxy, who lives in Pirate Cove, and of course Freddy himself. They become active on Nights 2 and 3 respectively and demand your attention via camera to be sufficiently kept at bay. Foxy is constantly gearing up for a sprint down the hallway, and Freddy likes to Solid Snake his way through the shadows directly toward your office. Catching them on camera slows them down, but also takes your attention away from Bonnie and Chica who may already be watching you.

This game is a master of using the player's own paranoia against them. There is so much atmosphere that you completely forget the only payoff is a simple jump scare because you're putting so much concentration into holding onto your limited control of the situation. Every sound you hear could just as easily be nothing as it could be one of the characters moving into another room. Footsteps? OH SHIT, BETTER CHECK THE DOORS AGAIN. Okay, it was nothing. Wait- Was that Freddy's laugh? Did he move again? Better find out where he went before-

CHRIST ON A BIKE!

This may sound obvious, but the only way to truly experience this game is to actually play it yourself. Yeah, that pretty much goes for every game, but watching a Let's Play of a horror game usually tends to spoil a lot of the fun by revealing the story and all the scares. This is most assuredly not so for Five Nights at Freddy's. I watched 3 YouTubers play this game, was still unprepared when John and I played it on Halloween, and I'm STILL WORKING UP THE NERVE TO PLAY THROUGH IT ON MY OWN TO ACTUALLY FINISH THE DAMN THING.

It's incredibly simple mechanically, but has a fascinating backstory that has spawned equally fascinating fan theories, and it still hits all the marks infinitely more complex games have managed to completely miss. My only real complaints are minor technical issues such as a complete lack of options (not even basic volume controls), and that a game about moving your mouse to the far left and right sides of your monitor doesn't constrain the cursor to the game window, meaning if you have multiple monitors you can easily inadvertently click outside of the game and force it to minimize (which in my case, usually means crashing it as well.)

Five Nights At Freddy's easily gets a  9/10.

Dead Space 2 (PC)

Oh hey, I've got a blog that I haven't posted in about 7 months. Sorry about that. I'll make it up to my nonexistent loyal readers by reviewing Dead Space 2. Obviously the sequel to Dead Space, which I have previously reviewed.

Dead Space 2 picks up some time after the events of the first one. In the opening cutscene Isaac Clarke finds himself being questioned by some scientist guys on a gigantic space station. They go over what happened during the last game for expository purposes, and then Isaac wakes up in a straight jacket while all hell breaks loose aboard the station. That's right! Isaac's old buddies, the Necromorphs are back and wasting no time slaughtering everyone! Your main objective becomes "get the fuck out of here!"

So DS2 almost literally throws you right into the action, which is not really a bad thing. Recall my rant on DS1's lack of scariness because of how you can kill everything? During the opening of DS2, you're stuck in a straight jacket. It's a very chaotic scene, and it actually manages to briefly make the Necromorphs scary for a while. Even once you're out of the jacket, it's still a while before you get an actual weapon and get back into the routine of "SEE MONSTER, SHOOT ARMS OFF, MOVE ON."

Unfortunately, Dead Space 2 does still suffer from that problem once you clear the first chapter. It's a bit saddening, because it is very obvious that it's at least trying to be scarier than its predecessor. The fact that the game is set on a residential space station gives it some some fairly wonderfully disturbing moments (especially considering that you're witnessing a Necromorph outbreak AS it's happening, rather than just seeing the aftermath), but it's still mostly just jump scares.

If anything, the changes Dead Space 2 has undergone have improved on its already good action game qualities, rather than its few good (if any) horror ones. Isaac has much more personality (also a face) this time, and seems to be fairly good at voicing the player's own opinions of the situation at hand. For instance, stomping on an enemy several times in a row will result in Isaac grunting, "Argh! Die! Fucker!" Barely audible in most cases, but I thought it was a nice touch.

Spoiler warning begins.


Sadly, Isaac is the only character to get any kind of development. The crazy guy just gets crazier until you predictably have to kill him, and the badass chick just stays the badass chick.

 Even the main antagonist throughout the game is never seen in person until seconds before the final boss. Seconds during which you kill him in a quicktime event. You never even really find out what his problem was or why he wants to kill Isaac so badly. Unless I'm just really bad at paying attention.

In fact, the entire ending just seems to come out of nowhere. Suddenly there's a giant marker that Isaac and the crazy guy apparently helped build, all the Necromorphs getting near if causes it to start sucking them in, and Isaac's hallucinatory dead girlfriend needs to kill him to complete the process.  Or something. The characters call it a "convergence event" but nobody ever explains what that actually means or why it's bad!

Spoiler warning ends.

There are several new types of Necromorph this time around, in addition to most of the originals. Most interestingly at first are the Stalkers. If you hear their sound, get a good look at them, and your first thought isn't "velociraptors" then something is wrong with you. These bastards are different from the other Necromorphs and are actually some of the scarier ones in the game for the sole reason that they HUNT YOU.

They seem unnervingly smart until you get their pattern down. They will charge at you, then run and hide behind a corner, and peek out at you. "Ha! What a dumb creature! Giving away his position like that!" You might say, as you go around the corner to dispatch the beastie- OH SHIT HE'S CHARGING AGAIN! Before you know it, you're on the ground and he's run off to hide again around a different corner. Unfortunately they're actually not nearly as clever as their first ambush might lead you to believe. Indeed, that first ambush is the only time I was actually afraid of them. Once you figure out their simple pattern, it becomes all to easy to blast their legs off mid-charge and leave them effectively harmless.

Another new enemy is the Puker. You get exactly one guess as to what he does. Time's up. He pukes acid at you. However, the damaging effects of the acid are the least of your worries, since it doesn't seem to really hurt you all that much. The main problem you will face when going against a Puker is that the acid slows you down a lot. This can cause serious trouble when you're facing a group of enemies, and is the reason a Puker should always be your primary target. They also have probably the most gruesome Isacc-killing scene when you lose a grapple with one. (Incidentally, this was the only enemy I ever lost a grapple with despite seriously trying to win.)

Strangely, with all those and more additions to the enemy team, nothing has really been done to make the bosses more interesting. In Dead Space you had a boss fight in zero-g, one you fought using the ship's turrets, and even one that was completely invincible! Dead Space 2's bosses are all just "shoot the big glowing weak spot until it dies," except for one fight which is 95% cutscene until you get a "shoot the explody thing" moment. Definitely a step backwards.

Which is disappointing because one of the bigger steps forward is the new and improved zero-gravity mechanic. Instead of just pointing, clicking and jumping to another part of the room, Isaac can now freely navigate areas with no gravity using little jets on his suit. It's fantastic, to be honest. I loved the zero-g sections of the first game, but the parts of DS2 where you actually fly around in space are just mind blowing, and they could have easily taken advantage of it for a boss fight or two. Instead, you get a couple of admittedly awesome scenes of falling through space at high speeds and carefully maneuvering around broken sections of the space station. They're fairly intense, but still only really serve to push Dead Space 2 further away from the horror genre and into action territory.

It's surprisingly easy to like the Dead Space series if you acknowledge that it sucks at horror and succeeds really well at action. Even if you're very easily scared, you'll come to expect all the jump scares they throw at you, but you'll still have fun desperately fighting off swarms of Necromorphs and running like hell after realizing you just fired your last plasma cutter shot. The story is a bit confusing and most of the characters except for Isaac are dull and forgettable, but Dead Space 2 makes some significant improvements on several aspects of the original, and  manages to be a fairly enjoyable game overall despite its few steps backwards.

8/10

Amnesia: The Dark Descent (PC)

 I suppose you remember my Dead Space review, where I had this to say on the subject of what makes something scary:

"Scary is being all alone with no weapons in a dark room hiding from something that is actively trying to murder you. Scary is hearing that thing moving around and having no idea whether or not it is even near you until you step on its toes."

Well, it turns out there is an entire game based on that EXACT concept, called Amnesia: The Dark Descent. That's right. There's a horror game that's ACTUALLY SCARY. And not just for 10 minutes like Silent Hill 2.

Amnesia is played in a first-person perspective, and involves solving puzzles, finding journal pages to regain your memory, and dealing with horrifying monsters while trying not to go batshit crazy. (Think of it as H.P. Lovecraft's MYST.)

The catch? You can't fight. At all. So if you something sees you and starts chasing you, you're pretty much fucked if you turn around. So you hide in the dark. But if you stay in the dark for too long, your sanity drops and makes the controls and screen go all weird (among other things). If you look at the monsters for too long, sanity drops. If you witness paranormal events, sanity drops. If your sanity drops too low while a monster is looking for you, it becomes more likely to find you.

Prior to playing, I had heard a great deal about how terrifying the game is. Of course, given that I've heard a great deal about how terrifying a lot of things are, only to be met with severe disappointment, I can be forgiven for my initial response consisting solely of the word "psh," followed by an explanation of how just about nothing is capable of inducing a legitimate fearful response in me.

A short time later, I downloaded the demo from Steam to see what it was all about. Sure enough, it was pretty much what I expected. Generic horror cliches and jump scares. The atmosphere is very reminiscent of Silent Hill though, very dark with occasional otherworldly sounds.

You are a man named Daniel, who- for some reason- has given himself amnesia, and awoken in a mysterious castle. Luckily, Daniel's former self had the foresight to leave messages explaining the situation, and ordering you to find and kill a man named Alexander. Pages from Daniel's diary are found throughout the castle, and explain more about how Daniel  came to be in this situation. Entering certain areas also triggers flashbacks as Daniel regains more of his memory.

For the most part, as I mentioned, the castle is extremely dark which takes a toll on Daniel's sanity. You can find tinderboxes here and there that allow you to light candles, torches and other sources of light. This has the advantage of keeping your sanity up, but each tinderbox is single-use and may be needed in the future, and turning on lights makes monsters able to see you easier. Additionally, you have a lantern, which provides a portable source of light for areas that have no candles or the like. The lantern runs on oil, though, so you need to use it sparingly or it will run out at the most inopportune moments.

I slowly made my way through the demo, up until a certain point. At this certain point, the game went much darker than normal, and the hallway inexplicably became flooded with about a foot of water.

"Oh, please." I said. "Water? Really?" No sooner had I whipped out my lantern and begun to step toward the nearest flooded room when I heard splashing that was most certainly NOT coming from me. I turned around and saw large splashes in the water....moving...TOWARD ME!?  Yes. I was being chased by water-dwelling monster that was FUCKING INVISIBLE.

Initial reaction: RUN THE FUCK AWAY! RUN! HOLY SHIT! RUN! RUN! RUN! OH GOD, WHY IS THERE A GATE IN THE WAY WHO PUTS A GATE IN THE MIDDLE OF A GODDAMN HALLWAY OH SHIT I'M BEING EATEN BY SOMETHING I CAN'T EVEN SEE! WHAT THE FUCK!?

And then I died. At which point the game's death screen helpfully pointed out, "STAY OUT OF THE WATER." No shit. So there's boxes and stuff you have you jump to in order to not get eaten alive by the invisible water monster. Easy enough. I'm certainly not going to make the same mistake agai-

*Splash*

WHY CAN'T I JUMP ON THE BOX!? SHIT! SHIT! SHIT! IT'S RIGHT FUCKING BEHIND ME AND I CAN'T GET ON THE BOX!

And that was the most heart-stopping moment in the DEMO. Running like hell up to a box and realizing you can't jump onto it. (You have to jump on the smaller one NEXT to it first.) The demo ends shortly after this area.

Realizing that a game had just effectively given me multiple heart attacks without resorting to jump scares and horror cliches, I hurriedly purchased the full version, eager to continue the experience. (On sale on Steam at the time for about $10.)

I was not disappointed. At all. On several occasions I had to take off my headphones to find out if the terrified, heavy breathing was coming from me or Daniel.

As a game in itself, it's actually fairly decent. There's reasonably challenging puzzles and fetch quests, and I needed to consult a guide a few times near the end to figure out just what to do, but the final encounter was severely disappointing. I know it's unreasonable to expect a massive boss fight in a game that has already firmly established itself as a "run and hide" sort, but something involving more than 3 mouse clicks would have been nice.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent is a surprisingly good game with one or two minor drawbacks. Every bit as terrifying as I had been told, which is certainly a first, and overall very entertaining to play.

9/10

Dead Space (PC)

THIS IS A SPOILER WARNING. I WILL POST THESE IF I INTEND TO GO INTO DETAIL ABOUT KEY PLOT POINTS IN A GAME. IF YOU CARE ABOUT SUCH THINGS, I INVITE YOU TO CEASE READING IMMEDIATELY.

If you've seen any of my past reviews of "horror" games on my DeviantART journal, you would know by now that I've had some issues with managing to fully enjoy certain aspects of them. Namely, the aspects of them that are supposed to be scary (and therefore actually BE horror games). Before I go into this review of Dead Space, I think it important to define what I personally consider to be scary.

Scary is being all alone with no weapons in a dark room hiding from something that is actively trying to murder you. Scary is hearing that thing moving around and having no idea whether or not it is even near you until you step on its toes.

Scary is NOT being armed to the teeth and surrounded by hideous mutated monsters that make more loud obnoxious screaming sounds than the fangirls at an anime convention.

In short, 90% of Dead Space is what I would call "not scary." This is not to say it is a bad game, though.

We begin with a team of people (including the main character, Isaac Clarke) responding to the sudden mysterious loss of contact with a gigantic ship in an abandoned sector of space. Their ship inexplicably crashes, leaving them stranded inside the aforementioned gigantic ship as they investigate the cause of the aforementioned mysterious loss of contact.

If you have to guess where it goes from here, you have no business being involved in any way with any science fiction stories. Ever.

It turns out the entire ship has been overrun by mutant alien zombies known as "Necromorphs,"  which are basically the Flood from Halo, only louder and less vulnerable to shotgun blasts.

The way you have to deal with these abominations is actually fairly clever, though, despite the cliche factor. You see, conventional anti-zombie warfare teaches us that headshots are the way to go. So no big deal, right? You just blast the head off that Necromorph charging at you and he should drop dead-

OH GOD HE'S STILL CHARGING! 

So you unload the rest of your ammo into the body, BUT IT'S STILL COMING OH CRAP!

That's right. Headshots pretty much don't count for shit in Dead Space. You need to remove individual LIMBS from these freaks to take 'em down. Chop off arms, legs, anything sticking out of the main body because anything fired at that main body isn't gonna do jack. And hey! How convenient! You just happen to be surrounded by high-powered mining tools whose SOLE PURPOSE IS TO CUT THINGS.

So yes. We revisit my main issue with every horror game ever: YOU CAN KILL EVERYTHING THAT WANTS TO EAT YOU, SO WHAT'S THE PROBLEM?

No monster can be scary when all you need to do is blow its arms off. They don't even bother sneaking around or making quiet nerve-wracking noises. They just jump out screaming and start running at you. This is not scary, this is startling until it is done so often you expect it every time you open a fucking door! That decidedly non-human "corpse" on the ground? It's gonna attack you when you get close. Those other human corpses? Stomp them apart before an Infector comes along and brings them back. (Which will happen if there's more than 2 in a given area.)

One thing that does make them a bit interesting is that each type of Necromorph has a special "death scene" if they attack you in a certain way. Some of the enemies will start grappling with you, initiating a  button-mash quicktime event to free yourself. If you succeed, you kill it instantly (sometimes) in a short little scene. If you fail, IT kills YOU instantly in a short little scene. I suggest failing each one at least once for the entertainment value. In a particularly disturbing one, a small tentacle monster decapitates you and implants itself in your neck to take control of your body.

Dead Space's main problem is in its predictability. Anyone with a basic knowledge of horror storylines is going to be able to predict with uncanny accuracy what is going to happen next. Oh, one of your teammates is a badass black soldier guy? Guess who's not gonna make it off the ship? What's that? One of the scientists on the ship has survived and he knows how to stop the Necromorphs before they inevitably consume humanity? "Not if I have anything to say about it," says the plot.

In fact, the main character being an ordinary guy with no military training should clue you in that he's gonna be the only survivor of this incident.

Also, expect a major attack any time you complete a main objective. Do NOT pick up that key card unless you have ammo. They can sense when you've done something plot-relevant.

The only predictable plot twist I actually didn't see coming, but in hindsight really should have, was a certain character's betrayal. Scientist guy gets shot and the ship we were gonna take starts leaving before I even know what's going on. Then...

"Sorry, Isaac."

OH, YOU BITCH!

"Blah blah blah, conspiracy, blah blah, experiment, blah blah can't let you screw it up."

Oh, and Isaac's girlfriend you're supposed to be rescuing was a hallucination the whole time.

But enough about what the plot does wrong. Let's talk about what the game does right.

Dead Space actually has a very nice difficulty curve. You start out tripping over ammunition and facing relatively weak enemies. As the game progresses, you find yourself facing new enemy designs, and lamenting your sudden lack of ammo. This leads to some very intense situations and often barely making it out alive as you limp to the nearest save point.

And now, I fondly recall my most badass moment in Dead Space: One certain type of Necromorph has an explosive sac on its arm that self destructs when it gets close to you. This explosion also damages other enemies in the immediate area. I found myself near the end of the game, having just fought off another massive wave of Necros and considerably light on ammo. Another wave decided to attack, headed by one of these suicide bombers. I dismembered his explosive arm and it rolled over to me. I ran out of ammo and was getting slashed from all directions when I noticed it on the ground. Seeing that I still had a reasonable amount of health, I stomped it. Boom. No more Necros. I like a game that encourages this kind of desperate creativity.

Part of your equipment is the "stasis module" which is basically a toned-down version of the bullet-time effect in F.E.A.R. I think it's actually more useful here, though because it only slows down what you aim it at, rather than everything around you. It's used to slow down malfunctioning machinery, and of course some of the faster Necros.

In addition to the stasis module, you're equipped with the "kinesis module" which is basically the Gravity Gun from Half-Life 2, or the telekinesis Plasmids from Bioshock. It allows you to pick things up and throw them.

There are also sections of the game that require maneuvering in zero gravity. These are very well designed and fairly disorienting (in a good way.) One boss fight takes place in zero gravity, and is extremely difficult if you forget that fact. You can't outrun massive tentacles, but you can jump to the other side of the room.

Dead Space is an enjoyable action game with decent atmosphere. It's just that the enemies, while somewhat uniquely designed, lack all pretense of subtlety and therefore are incapable of producing anything more than occasional heart-stopping jump scares. The level designs are linear enough to easily figure out where to go, but with enough side paths and alternate routes to have fun exploring. The story is cliched beyond all reason, but it's hard to think about it when your legs are being torn off.

In the future, when mankind is out exploring the galaxy, if we ever "mysteriously lose contact" with a ship, just send in the guy you brought along to fix the comm systems with no weapons. He'll fix everything intentionally or otherwise.

Dead Space gets a 7.5/10