Flesh Made Fear -- Grindhouse like it’s 1999

Flesh Made Fear “gets it.”

I’ll start with the big mistake this throwback to the PS1 era of survival horror makes, because it’s also the start of the game -- its start to zombie time is entirely too long, at roughly 25 minutes. It’s a fault that’s especially baffling given how no-bullshit of a survival horror game Flesh Made Fear is in all other respects, a game that’s high on zombies, low on ammo, controls like a tank, and understands that puzzles were a tool to compliment and complicate survival strategy, not the goal in and of themselves. Fans of the genre will notice nods to all three games in the classic trilogy -- the player characters have the same advantages and disadvantages as Chris and Jill did in the 1996 original, and from RE2, we have slightly different areas seen by the two separate characters as well and a couple of other ideas that it’s probably bad form to spoil in a review. 

However, it’s the third game of the trilogy, the one that is often considered a black sheep, that seems to have truly captured Tainted Pact’s heart. Ammo crafting appears in Flesh Made Fear, but the bigger nod is in the overall structure of the game, with the player moving around between smaller buildings planted on overrun city streets. The contrasts between the open streets and claustrophobic buildings are used to strong effect, with the latter featuring the player dodging dense swarms of zombies and sweating through the occasional chokepoint, and the latter featuring claustrophobic and intimate encounters -- most players will probably run away while outdoors and fight while indoors most of the time, but that’s certainly not a hard-and-fast rule, and resources are tight enough here (both ammo and healing!) that choosing well when to fight and when to flee will matter.

Another strength that is created by this contrast in styles is that it, in many ways, allows Flesh Made Fear to have its cake and eat it too when it comes to methods of crafting horror, featuring slow-burn tension and visceral peaks. The exterior areas play on anticipation of known threats the way that backtracking always created tension in Resident Evil -- you will have gut wrenching “oh crap, I have to go through that again...” moments as you know that you need to backtrack through that heavy swarm that is waiting for you to get to your next goal. However, this is set off against some of the bloodiest and most violent combat I’ve seen in a game of this style. Flesh Made Fear wears its B horror movie influences proudly on its sleeve and enemies absolutely explode in blood and gore. The combat’s most unique touch plays into this well -- unlike most Resident Evil style survival horror games, the knife isn’t a waste of inventory space but is a highly valuable weapon, since it can stunlock single enemies to death easily. This, combined with the classic ability for the shotgun to take out multiples at close range, leads to a particularly vicious style of combat that’s very up-close-and-personal, and fits the bloody tone well. At first, I was worried about the knife’s power against single targets taking the edge out of resource management, but that doesn’t happen at all -- Tainted Pact were smart about making the smaller encounters mostly come in twos or threes, frequently leading the player to ask themselves questions like “can I keep these two separate for long enough that knifing them is safe, or do I need to spend some bullets to take one down safely before I knife the other one?”

I guess I should probably mention the puzzles at some point because people seem to think they’re important in these games. Flesh Made Fear, wisely, keeps them mostly humble and serving their purpose of making the player explore the game world -- most of them are simply “bring the funny shaped key to the funny shaped hole”, and the few that have some kind of riddle or puzzle on top of that are typically about as hard as the baby’s toy where you put the right shape in the right hole. You will not make a cat-hair mustache in this game, nor will you deal with water samples¹. The flow is largely smooth and uninterrupted, and the focus is kept where it belongs -- on the meta-puzzle of figuring out how to survive the trip from point a to point b while bringing with you the items you need at point b.

In conclusion, aside from the mystifying first 25 minutes, Flesh Made Fear is what it presents itself as and exactly what you want from it -- a blunt force, bloody, survival horror experience done the old way with no pretensions towards being an adventure game, a third-person shooter, or a piece of art. Highly recommended for right-thinking folks who think the peak of survival horror is mechanical stress, not for those who think that the peak of survival horror is an angsty teenaged girl moping around. Grab your pistol, shotgun, and knife (don’t leave the knife in the inventory box for this trip!) and enjoy your trip to Rotwood.

¹I mention the water sample puzzle here because it’s by far the most hated of the original Resident Evil trilogy, but I’ve always thought the vaccine synthesis puzzle is far worse.

Put a Zombie in the First Three Rooms.

This post was inspired by Flesh Made Fear, which is a pretty cool game all things said (there will probably be another post on it later), but it made the same awkward pacing decision I'm seeing in entirely too many recent survival horror games.

In the original Resident Evil the player will encounter their first zombie in the third room of the game, right after the dining room (unless they have hopelessly bad judgement, in which case they'll be gifted some extra dogs in the first room which will probably kill them at this early point).  It takes only a few minutes from getting control of the character until we're playing the game "proper", we've been introduced to the game's main enemy, and we're dealing with it in some way or another. In the sequels it comes at us even faster, with a zombie on-screen as soon as we get control of the character -- before even getting the chance to save our game, we have to learn to deal with zombies, whether by running/slipping past them (almost a necessity in Resident Evil 2's starting scenario!), or by shooting them (more practical in Resident Evil 3, fitting given its larger action emphasis than the first two games).  

This, of course, fits in well with how modern "ludology" (lol) wants us to think of first levels (when they're not telling us that level design is drawing lines on screenshots).  I'll spare you another Super Mario Bros. 1-1 essay here because I'm sure you already see the connections.  Given the supposed lessons that are being widely taught and disseminated, and the origins of the genre discussed above, surely the recent indie fixed-camera survival horror renaissance would be filled with games that start off with a bang and have us making survival decisions right from the jump?  After all, it's not just good "ludological pracitce" (lol again), it's fitting for the emotional and aesthetic resonances these games want, a panicked struggle before you're accustomed enough to the game to have any sense of comfort in dealing with enemies.

Credit where it's due -- Alisa gets this right, with a zombie in its second room.  One of the numerous ways The Mute House shows its superiority over its contemporaries is by putting a zombie in its second room... provided we don't count the (skippable) prologue.  The Hotel, while scuffed in many ways, wisely puts its first zombie in its third room, right after our first save point, before we've found a single key item -- just like RE1, wonderful!   Their contemporaries, though?

Them And Us puts its first zombie in its fourth room, which doesn't seem too bad, until you realize the player has already solved two puzzles by this point.   That's nothing compared to the Tormented Souls games, which could easily have you wandering around for thirty minutes before you finally see an enemy.  Labyrinth of the Demon King wants me to walk around an empty field for about twenty minutes after the combat tutorial before I'm allowed to actually put some of that to use (and before you protest "but it's a King's Field-like just as much as a survival horror!", every King's Field game killed me in the first room *at least* once, and if you're honest, you'll admit the same is true for you).  Heartworm doesn't even come close.  And even Flesh Made Fear, a particularly violent grindhouse take on the genre that revels not only in its level of gore but in the giant hordes of various types of undead that it gleefully throws at players, asks you to solve puzzles for about 20 minutes before finally pulling the trigger and getting the party started.

Why?

There is no good answer to that question.  Building tension?  As if there's any tension to be built in solving item puzzles!  The tension in these games comes from making imperfect decisions about how to use limited resources, decisions I'm not making if you're not throwing zombies at me.  Giving the player a chance to get the hang of the controls?  They can do that with a zombie in their face.  Lengthening the game so that the player this the magic "two hour" threshold sooner and can't refund your game?  I'm going for a refund if I don't see a zombie in the first two hours!

Thus, in the spirit of the classic "start to crate" rating system for '90s classics, I'd like to introduce "start to zombie", except this time, lower is better and the ideal is zero, a number reached by Resident Evil 2 and 3.  For you Silent Hill fans out there, don't worry -- we can also count giant flying bugs and vomiting psychosexual demons.  While the original was a measure of when a level designer ran out of ideas, this new version is a measure of how well the developer understands that the "survival" part of "survival horror" is the more important word of the two and that puzzles are here to aid this, not the other way around.

Now, aspiring indie dev, go into your level editor and add a zombie in the first three rooms! 

Tormented Souls 2 -- a decent tribute to the PS2 Silent Hill games

If you'd have asked me what was on the gaming agenda for 2025, I wouldn't have thought "an indie resurgence of classic fixed-camera survival horror" was a particularly likely entry, but here we are.  Tormented Souls 2 lands where most of them seem to -- a decent enough game that also isn't as good as what it pays tribute to.

In this case, it's Silent Hill 2 and 3 we're re-living today.  Tormented Souls 2 wears its influences on its sleeve, with the melee weapons, backstep, and "downed enemy" ideas from Silent Hill 2's combat, the Silent Hill flashlight mechanics,  a story about family members, boss fights heavily inspired by SH2 and 3, "otherworld" areas that are reflections of the real world, etc.  And, it does this reasonably well -- resources are appropriately tight, there's enough backtracking to mean that running from enemies isn't always the default best answer, the atmosphere is spooky enough to enhance the flight-or-fight decisions, and the mechanics surrounding the lighter in the first half of the game are a fun wrinkle.  It's impossible to not notice that the quality takes a hard dive in the last few hours reflecting a game that's pretty clearly unfinished, though, and there's a lot of "puzzles for the sake of puzzles" that are just there to make you fidget around with some clunky interface to pad the runtime out, a problem made even more egregious because the one thing this game doesn't steal from Silent Hill is its save system, deploying a variant of Resident Evil's ink ribbons instead.

But overall, it's fine.  This is a short review because there isn't a lot to say -- it's a reasonably competent retreading of ideas that were well known and understood twenty years ago.  If you like survival horror, you'll have some fun here.  But if you haven't played The Mute House, you really should play that instead. 

Them And Us -- Strong survival horror with some unfortunate flaws that will make it "not for everyone"

 (Holy shit, we're back from the dead!)

 

Released in 2021, early in the days of the recent fixed camera/tank controls revival, Them and Us is a cool tribute to Resident Evil and Silent Hill (moreso the former in gameplay, and a bit of a blend between the two thematically), one that does a lot of things better than almost any other game in this survival horror renaissance, but also comes with some serious flaws that mean that, as much as I enjoyed it, some people are going to bounce off of it, hard.

Let's just get the big one out of the way early -- several of the puzzles in the second half of the game *will* send you running to a walkthrough. Two have literally no hints at all as to what you're supposed to do; another has a very vague hint that looks like it's a hint for another puzzle *and* a misleading "fake hint" in the room with the puzzle itself. It's frequently really hard to guess what key items can be used where (the number of places that say simply "it has a round indent" is insane), which leads to situations where you have no idea if any of the key items sitting back at your item box are what you need or if you just need to come back later. If you're a primarily puzzle-driven survival horror player, "hem And Us is almost certainly *not* the game for you.

In terms of atmosphere and aesthetics, it's not bad, but a lot of it is a bit generic. It puts its best foot forward here at the start -- the early areas of the mansion are the best looking part of the game, with a lot less care taken for a lot of the later stuff. Much of it lacks cohesion, with the Otherworld and the portals not jelling with the rest of the game's aesthetic well at all, and there's some pretty jarring texture misalignments in some of the exterior areas. It's never terrible, but outside of the northern-most side of the mansion itself, it doesn't have a strong aesthetic identity -- despite being "lower fidelity", even games like Alisa or Heartworm are stronger in this regard, and The Mute House or Tormented Souls both leave it in the dust.

Where Them And Us excels however, beyond anything else I've played in the recent fixed-camera revival, is in the *survival* part of survival horror. It *nails* the "planning routes around a small gameworld, figuring out what items you should take with you as you do so, and figuring out how to use your limited resources" part of survival horror gameplay. Especially early on, resources are genuinely *tight* -- you simply will have to avoid enemies for much of the game -- and save items (here, it's vinyl records of classical music that you play on phonographs taking the role of the classic ink ribbons and typewriters) are also scarce (and only come in packs of one, unlike the packs of three that RE fans are more used to). If you're like me, and that type of survival planning is your favorite part of classic survival horror, then Them and Us is an absolute feast, and one that you probably overlooked; while I think that, in terms of overall package, The Mute House comes out ahead of it and is clearly the best game thus far out of the recent genre revival, if you're the right kind of player then you'll want to try Them And Us for certain.

It's probably worth noting that the above review is for the "fixed camera" mode, which is the only way I've played the game. The option is also there for a close over-the-shoulder third person mode, as well as a first person mode, and these modes change more than you'd expect, with item and enemy placement reworked and even a few areas having different layouts; however, I've only played the fixed camera mode.

The Real Reason Everybody Loves Super Metroid

(This post was originally written for a planned "nostalgia about the classics" series for another website, where multiple writers would all write a short piece on why a game was important or memorable, that was scrapped.)

When I was a kid, our neighbors were on vacation without their daughter Kristen, and my parents were charged with taking care of her for the few days they were going to be out. I was playing Super Metroid, running around lower Norfair, putting up attempts against Ridley (who was giving me hell at the time), and Kristen was watching intently. Being a nice kid (the jaded asshole Cynical that you all know and love wouldn't be a thing for many years still), I offered her the controller, and she turned it down, saying "I don't want to play it, it looks scary."

Funny how a seven year old girl understood Super Metroid's appeal better than twenty-five years of supposed "professional" game critics.

While one segment of the fanbase goes on about speedruns and sequence-breaks and another goes on about the silly "mommy to the metroid" story, everyone ignores the fact that Super Metroid was appealing entirely because it did the most credible job of creating a consistent 2D world of any videogame in 1992, and even today is only rivaled by Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in that regard. Yes, it handles the "lock and key" mechanics better than any later entries in the "Metroidvania" subgenre by making its keys inherently interesting to use; yes, it controls like a dream; but it's still dull-as-dishwater as an action game taken on its own. The key to the game is that it's just barely threatening enough to keep the thrill of plowing into the unknown alive, while designing its world so that adjacent areas remain coherent. The underground fungus-forest is adjacent to an ocean boring deep into the planet's surface; as you go further and further underground, the tunnels get hotter and hotter, with magma flowing through gaps in the rock. Level design is frequently sacrificed for this world verisimilitude, and this hasn't always worked out well for videogames (it made the previously-mentioned Symphony of the Night something that no right-thinking person ever wants to play a second time), but it works out reasonably well here, thanks to a combination of general openness and particularly powerful jump abilities that let you quickly speed past any "squidgy" bits. It's notable that most of the game's transversal from area to area is vertical, while traversal within an area is generally horizontal (the major exception to this being the aforementioned forest-to-ocean transition), furthering the feeling of travelling through the stratas, away from the safe surface. The art direction finishes the dish, with most everything being recognizable as "natural terrain", "plant of some sort", "lava", "weird acid stuff", "Praying Mantis alien monster", etc., but while everything is recognizable in broad terms, none of it looks quite like anything that exists in the real world, which creates an unsettling "uncanny valley" effect that makes sure the alien world stays alien.

Super Metroid's enemies are mostly speedbumps (Ridley aside), and its action game elements are about as perfunctory of a "give the player some buttons to hit while they explore our cool world" exercise as exists within the medium. But, with a world like this, who cares?

About this blog

"Beauty of Button Mashing" -- the title is intended to reflect the cyclic relationship between aesthetics and mechanics in videogames. The current professional standard tends to be to treat the two separately and average them together to find a game's worth, but the two are inseparable -- aesthetics are a part of a game's mechanics, and, more importantly, mechanics are a part of a game's aesthetics.

The former of these two ideas is straightforward. What you see on your screen is a full half of the feedback loop between player and game. Imagine choosing dialogue options in an RPG where the text was replaced with random gibberish -- the mechanical challenge of talking to a threatening NPC would be ridiculous nonsense. Choosing guns based on what "feels good", moving slowly because an area feels creepy, or even an enemy camouflaging itself against the background -- all of these are aesthetics behaving as mechanics.

The latter is a bit trickier, but is the real magic of this medium. That twinge of regret when you blow a big retrieval in Dark Souls; that adrenaline rush when a huge boss appears at the end of a grueling level in Ketsui; that cleverness you feel when you find an alternate route around a guard in Dishonored; the elation you feel when you overcome the seemingly insurmountable final Vergil fight in Devil May Cry 3 -- all of these play into the narrative and thematic elements of the game, forcing the player to feel what the protagonist does. Even at a micro level, elements such as the UI of Supreme Commander echoing a desktop UI, a Guitar Hero controller mimicking the movements used to play a guitar, the motions for Shen's BnB combo in King of Fighters XIII with the rhythmic quarter circles mimicking his looping haymakers, or the elasticity of Blanka's and Guile's special moves off of their equally-elastic "charge" joystick motions make the player empathize more with the character representing them by having them make physical motions akin to what their onscreen alter-ego are performing.

A lot of people aren't going to like the above two paragraphs. The "gameplay is king!" types are all angrily yelling about how there's nothing more to gaming than perfecting a rote performance or reaching the peak of a competition -- never mind that the most popular games of all time in the physical world (Chess, combat sports) have been meant to simulate warfare in a safe (or at least safe-ish) manner. Meanwhile, the sensitive art-game hipsters are all crying about me instantly invalidating Gone Home, since they want "their feels" cordoned off in a remote area where there's no chance of experiencing it aside from the most distant empathy. They don't want to risk having to feel it themselves. And, finally, all of the masses who are most comfortable with Kotaku and IGN ran away the first time I wrote a long sentence with an em dash or used the phrase "cyclic relationship". For those of you who are left, you'll never see a review broken down into discrete "gameplay/graphics/sound/boobs" categories. You'll see a better type of game discussion, and hopefully, you'll think about games in new ways and get more enjoyment from them.

So, what kind of articles can you expect from this site? At the date of this writing, I expect you can expect a bit of everything -- proper reviews, musings on the workings of gaming, a bit of history, articles on specific aspects of some game or another that are worth looking into, and maybe even the occasional shitpost just for fun. You'll see things you disagree with (especially if you click that Discord link), you'll see things you agree with, and, if you're lucky, you might see a new idea that interests you. Welcome to the Beauty of Button Mashing.