Onimusha: Warlords is an interesting trip through history, but a bad game.

Honestly, an article for this game is almost redundant with the title -- so redundant that I'm struggling with ways to approach actually writing an article.  Existing at a strange point in history where Resident Evil was well established but character action wasn't, Onimusha: Warlords was an early attempt at creating character action using the basic conceits of fixed cameras and tank controls.  If you like Ninja Gaiden (especially Ninja Gaiden Black) or Devil May Cry (especially 1 and 3), you might find it interesting to see where a lot of their ideas came from; however, it's unlikely that you'll particularly enjoy playing the game for its own sake.

It's probably easiest to approach this by discussing what later games took from Onimusha: Warlords, because that's a lot.   Of course, both Ninja Gaiden Black and Devil May Cry 1 and 3 took the basic structure -- a contiguous semi-linear world with lots of combat against minor enemies, some light key hunting and puzzle solving, and with segments broken up by boss fights.  Onimusha: Warlords doesn't explicitly break things up into individual chapters, a distinction that's almost completely pointless in NGB and DMC 1 for anything other than score, but the basic idea is the same.  At the micro level, DMC's rather weird dodge comes straight from this game (although it arguably makes more sense here, where it's always left or right on the d-pad rather than whatever the character's left or right are in screen space, thanks to tank controls), as do Stinger and High Times (although the launcher here functionally is more like Aruthur's launcher in Knights of the Round, since you can't juggle and are limited to taking advantage of an okizeme situation).  Meanwhile, NGB draws heavily from O:W thematically, but also its powerful blocking is derived from this game (complete with certain attacks guard crushing and grabs beating blocking), as are the behavior of knockdowns and Field Sealer, and essence management, ninpo, weapon leveling, and ultimate techniques are clearly inspired by how magic attacks and soul absorption work with each other in O:W.  Ninja Gaiden Sigma fans will be delighted to learn that the "chick ninja chapter" idea finds its origins in O:W; those who, like me, think that NGS was a horrible rendition of a classic will be far less sanguine when they find themselves taking control of Kaede.  

So, with the titans of the character action genre taking their cues from this game, how is it bad?  

A big part of it is in its treatment of 3D space.  It's almost inaccurate to say that Onimusha: Warlords is a 3D game, since at no point does the player traverse the z axis in any way except for climbing stairs.  With no ability to jump at all, the action is reduced to being a fairly slow moving 2D action game in every way that actually matters.  Combos are mostly limited to basic strings with a Stinger or High Times tacked on at the end, and most of the player's defense consists of holding LB until there's an opening (some bosses can't even hurt a player who just holds down LB forever).  But, worse still, is how the lock-on dependent movement options behave; the lock on in this game behaves really strangely, and since this game has tank controls, that means that the direction you move can suddenly surprise you because your facing instantly changed because the lock on decided to go for a different enemy.  And there's no way to influence what enemy a magic attack decides to go after, which can be infuriating; a big magic attack you intended for a high HP enemy can just be wasted on a random popcorn enemy with you having no say in this at all.

And then, on top of this, there's some pretty nasty QoL issues.  Unskippable cutscenes are a bad time.  O:W includes puzzles as a part of its Resident Evil heritage, but it fundamentally misunderstands the role they played in that game, so we get timed self-contained sliding block puzzles unrelated to the rest of the game interrupting the action for no good reason (do yourself a favor and just look up the solutions in a walkthrough).   The difficulty curve is almost entirely random, with the second Kaede chapter being far harder than anything that comes after it, and the game's two hardest bosses both coming in the first half, one of them being the very first.

I've expressed amazement before at how influential a game as bad as Devil May Cry 1 managed to be, but its predecessor is almost as influential and almost as bad.  If you're really curious about character action history, I guess you could play this... but why not just play NGB instead? 

Kojima Shouldn't Switch to Movies...

...but I wouldn't blame anyone whose only exposure to his works is Metal Gear Solid 3 for thinking otherwise.

(Before you ask, this article is written about Metal Gear Solid 3, and not Metal Gear Solid Delta.  If you think a remake can take the place of an original, or even eclipse it with the endless march of technological progress, please do not participate in any conversations involving culture, ever.  Also, if you're playing any of the re-releases of the game, be sure to set the camera to the original Snake Eater style overhead camera and not the third-person camera, which makes an already flawed game even worse.) 

By now, the story around Metal Gear Solid 3 is well known -- Kojima doesn't want to make more Metal Gear Solid sequels, having attempted to kill the series with Metal Gear Solid 2, but his overlords at Konami force him to.  He trudges onwards, and despite himself, creates one of the best games of a console generation.  Like most stories, there is a kernel of truth here.  It should be (this sentence originally read "is", but the intelligence of the average gamer forced revisions) very obvious to anyone that plays Metal Gear Solid 3 that Kojima did not want to make it.  The rest of this story is a lot more dubious in the face of the evidence.

Metal Gear Solid 3 is ultimately an ugly patchwork of unrelated scenes and mechanics, with deep flaws remaining unfixed but simply band-aided over because the director didn't even want to make the game he was forced into directing, and certainly wasn't going to go to the effort to rethink basic assumptions of content he resented from the start.  The most obvious of these is with its approach to resources and "survival".  Becoming hungry and running out of food is a condition that creates a feedback loop -- because your character is less capable when hungry, this also makes you less able to get more food, which makes the hunger situation worse.  Heavy injuries require limited resources to heal, and if you can't heal them, your life will drain out until you die, so if you run out of these resources, you're just screwed.  Unlike the survival horror games I've been writing so much about recently, Metal Gear Solid 3 came out in that unfortunate era when developers were seemingly banned from considering their meta-mecahnics, when "save anytime" and checkpoints on every screen became pre-requisite for the commercial success of any title before Demon's Souls reminded everyone that developers, in fact, are allowed to think of the implications of save/reload/checkpoint/game over, and as such, there simply isn't any room to allow for "dead end" gamestates or encourage strategic use of saves.  Unlike Metal Gear Solid 1, there is no retreating to previous areas for more resources; items missed are missed permanently.  As such, softlocks were clearly a major concern for Konami -- they knew the game's design inherently had them, had feedback loops that made them worse, and that its design fundamentally could not work with them, and so instead of fixing the core problems, they deployed two different band-aids.

The first of these is at least clever in a classically Kojima-esque sense.   If you quit the game for a while, when you come back to it, your character will have taken a nap and have his energy/hunger bar full, his life full, and all of his injuries healed.  While it's unclear exactly how Snake takes a nap in the middle of a pistol duel with Ocelot, leading to all sorts of silly ludonarrative dissonance in a game that generally takes its ludonarrative aspects extremely seriously, it's at least a nice idea to get a player to "come back fresh".  It doesn't change the fact that this is an ugly kludge to fix fundamental issues with the game, it doesn't come anywhere close to actually fixing the game's horribly broken core, but it's at least clever.

The second of these is appalling.  If you die on any given screen enough times, the game just fills up your health and energy and makes you completely invincible for the duration of that screen.  This is the ultimate admission that this is a videogame that has nothing to teach the player about how to play it in most of its scenes;  that skipping a scene now won't leave you underprepared for something later.  It is, to quote a great article by Danbo, palliative care for a terminally bad video game.  What Kojima is saying about his game by including this is that there's nothing of value for us to take from one scene to a later one, no interesting set of questions we can ask the player and then build on with increasingly complex level design, and not even any pretension towards creating such.  This is a series of scenes to be seen one-at-a-time as "content", that build on each other only in the most superficial way of story cutscenes that are barely related to the game itself, philosophically indistinguishable from Dragon's Lair.

Kojima might be the first director ever to include his own one-star review of a game with the game itself.  Metal Gear Solid 3 is an openly waved white flag, a complete capitulation to everything Kojima railed against with Metal Gear Solid 2 ¹.  While he previously mocked the idea of single-screen challenges with no relation to each other being any kind of "Substance", here he begrudgingly accepts it and creates it for a playerbase ready to lap it up.  If this was meant as satire, or as a cutting critique of the state of the medium, it would still be bad as a videogame, but it would at least be laudable as criticism.  Unfortunately, other evidence indicates that this isn't the same kind of act of rebellion that Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance was, but merely an act of resignation, a justifiably bitter director saying "fine, here you go, have what you want, I don't care anymore," and half-assing his way through a title destined to sell millions.

Let me be clear here, Metal Gear Solid 3 is not a work of subversion, it is no "External Gazer".  As a stealth game, it is a clear response to the Thief series, Splinter Cell, and Far Cry (the original, not the sequels).  The basic stealth mechanics, where the player crawls across a surface that provides a good background for their chosen camoflage, is clearly intended to maximize player satisfaction.  The tension provided as a player acts almost as an observer, hoping that their camoflage is good enough that they won't be spotted as they await their moment to act (in contrast to the first two Metal Gear Solid games where stealth consists mostly of not being in the line of sight of enemies, and as such is based more around movement) is clearly an answer to western stealth games on the PC and XBox, and their usage of shadow and foilage, and it is safe to say that it is not played for any irony, given how intrinsically satisfying these moments are when they work well (which, in turn, robs the narrative of any guile as characters extol the exhilaration of battle).  This is a game that desperately wants to be a videogame, not a referendum on the medium itself.  Kojima has always had a difficult relationship with boss fights, being a director who makes videogames that are usually not focused on direct combat but still feeling a need to respect traditional videogame structures, but the ones here are about as traditionally, mechanically, good as they could be, given how poorly stealth games tend to handle the idea of a forced, direct confrontation (which is to say "they're mostly bad, but not in an ostentatious way like Metal Gear Solid 2 where they are clearly designed to be unsatisfying to drive a narrative point").  The survival mechanics detailed above that laid bare the contempt the creators had for their creation weren't added as a way to make sure that even the dumbest player saw the mechanical ironies and was ready to raise pitchforks and torches against the idea of one-screen bits of content as laid bare; it was the opposite, a desperate way to try to tie together a game of moving from one screen to the next in unrelated setpieces, with the Metroidvania² structures of the first two games having been consigned to the flames of "progress" (remember, this game was released at the end of 2004, when backtracking was most definitely out unless you were a sidescrolling handheld game), because we lived in a post-Deus Ex world (lol) and "realism" (lol) was the future (lol).

But, it's actually even worse than the above makes it sounds, because as much as it attempts to ape the superior western-developed stealth games of the late 1990s and early 2000s, it fails to learn their most important lessons.  "Chokepoints with guards" abound with few to no options for navigational circumvention (the original Metal Gear Solid was actually far better in this regard!)  And, once the alarm is tripped, you might as well drop the controller to get to the game over screen as quickly as you can if you're not next to a screen transition that turns off alarms, because fighting isn't an option because of infinitely respawning enemies and there's zero hope of re-establishing stealth, completely ignoring the lessons in elasticity that should have been learned from the Thief and Splinter Cell games it tries so hard to ape.  I have written in the past that Metal Gear Solid V must have been designed by a team who were smoking crack, given that they thought that regenerating health in a stealth game was a good idea, but condemnation where it is due, Metal Gear Solid 3 beat it to the punch on this particular mystifyingly bad decision by over a decade.  It's just absolutely dire all around, taking the mechanics that didn't work in the past while removing the ones that did, and marrying them to the mechanics of the game's present but without understanding any of the "why"s behind those mechanics.

So, why is this obviously bad game heralded as a classic?

Simple -- it came out in 2004, when aesthetic separation was at its peak in videogame criticism, and when the affirmative answer to "are games art?"³ consisted solely of "yes, because they contain bad movies within them."  If your review has a separate section labelled "gameplay", and your review score is the average of that, "graphics", "music", "sound", and "story", as was the norm in that cursed era, then Metal Gear Solid 3 will score about as highly as any videogame conceivable, with its production values being what they are.  Kojima's sense of style is proven to come to him effortlessly naturally in this game, because a product that was so obviously the result of band-aids and a "eh, good enough" mentality is dripping with style everywhere.  That seems to be where the commonly held idea that "Kojima wants to (or should) make movies!" comes from (I certainly never heard anyone saying that about Metal Gear Solid 1).  However, that seems to be a misreading of the actual evidence; attempts at mechanical expression are constant, just not very well done.  This is probably most obvious in the boss fights; most representing an emotion that Snake needs to overcome, but also being designed so that the player themselves needs to overcome it (i.e., the player needs to overcome their fear of The Fear's arrows and just stand in first person and blast him; he needs to overcome impatience and romanticism against The End and just knuckle down for an hour-long fight; he needs to overcome a need to push the action against The Fury and mostly let the boss come to him; etc), with touches like the "What a Thrill!" song coming in against The Boss as the timer ticks down obviously marrying a mechanical conceit (hunting down a camouflaged enemy as a timer ticks down) with an emotion (the adrenaline of battle, knowing that you're operating on the clock to get this job done).  However, it's consistent in the stealth mechanics as well, with the exhortations to "become one with nature" on this mission being complimented by the stillness of using camo as opposed to the motion-based "keep a wall in between us" stealth of earlier Metal Gear games.  No, Kojima wasn't trying to make a movie here instead of a game; he just made such a flawed game that many people didn't even notice that the baseline efforts of mechanical expression had been made.  The End may be a test to see if the player has actually "become a soldier" and will knuckle down and do the job, but it's also about as simple as a boss fight can be -- take your time, don't do anything stupid, and you'll never lose this fight.  In failing like this, it also becomes a pretty damning indictment of the whole camouflage system.  The Boss may be intended to be a climax visually and mechanically, with the white-on-white visuals fueling the battle, but it fails at all of this because the player will invariably realize that the Thermal Goggles are the easiest way to approach the fight, thus completely ruining the aesthetic effect.  Almost every screen of the game has some similar flaw, and because almost every screen of the game introduces some sort of "unique" wrinkle that's discarded on the very next, the player never enters a flow where flaws can at least be understood and accepted; instead, it becomes a milder case of the same syndrome that makes The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess the worst videogame ever made, where the game becomes more of a sequence of minigames, each failing to get its point across and therefore preventing mechanical immersion to the point that most players don't even notice that it's failing⁴.

Kojima doesn't want to make movies, but quality comparisons to the brilliant Death Stranding also make it clear that he sure didn't want to be making Metal Gear games, either.

1.  This is not to say that I think that Kojima has ever viewed satisfying moment-to-moment gameplay as unimportant, or less important than postmodern narrative implications, or that I think it is unimportant to a Metal Gear Solid title.  Indeed, Metal Gear Solid 3 was a large step backwards from at least Metal Gear Solid in that regard, and, based on my limited knowledge of Metal Gear Solid 2, probably that game as well. ↩

2. We really need to come up with a better term for "games built around repeated transversal of a small, contained, world."  "Metroidvania" has too many other connotations, being derived from two series of sidescrollers, and in this case, the original Metal Gear used this structure before Metroid became the primary association gamers had with the concept of "search action". ↩

3. They're not, BTW ↩

4. I do think it is telling that the "Subsistence" camera, which removes many of the vestiges of mechanical identity that the game has left over from earlier Metal Gear titles by not making the player rely on the first-person and wall-press cameras for information, is usually preferred by this game's fanbase. ↩ 

Random Thoughts About Resident Evil: Director's Cut, Advanced Mode with Chris

Continuing from last time, I was curious about the "Advanced Mode" in Resident Evil: Director's Cut, so I gave it a spin with Chris.  Random thoughts:

--The remixed key item placement makes more and less difference than you think it will.  Less difference in terms of finding new ways around the house, but more difference in difficulty, since it really steers you back and forth across the mansion more.  More chances to get bitten by dogs.

--The remixed enemies and weapon/ammo placement, on the other hand, makes a huge difference.  The Colt Python is available for Chris before the shotgun (!!!), but only with the stock six bullets, which makes the weapon itself a valuable limited-use key item, since there are certain rooms where the crowds are just too thick to bust through with the pistol that you'll have to work through before getting the shotgun, and you'll have to figure out how to really make the most out of those first six Magnum bullets. 

--Neptune actually matters in Advanced Mode!  

--Not Advanced Mode specific, but it's really shocking just *how* much better the entire Plant 42 scenario is in the PS1 version of RE1 than in REMake. It's more detailed, with more ways it can play out, and has higher stakes.  The REMake situation of "Jill solves a puzzle and ignores it, Chris fights it" is *so* reductive and uninteresting by comparison.

--Holy shit, the Hunter chapter is brutal on Advanced Mode -- sometimes in good ways, sometimes in dumb ways.  I'm really glad REMake got rid of the whole "lol they have no hurtboxes during half of their animations" nonsense.

--It's weird seeing poison actually matter.  Putting spiders in more places, and places that aren't right next to blue herbs, was a nice touch.  Having to figure out how to deal with an enemy that could poison me in a situation where it wasn't trivial to cure was a unique puzzle!

--As you may or may not know, advanced mode has some different camera angles.  Most are improvements (and REMake seems to be based on the new angles), but one of these removes the early shot of the helipad!  Why?!?! 

--Tyrant gaining the ability to stunlock the player was really not something the game needed.  Yes, the final boss fights were always easy.  No, the game isn't improved by stunlocking the player to death and making them sit through 10 minutes of cutscenes again.

Overall, if you haven't tried "Advanced Mode", it's a must-play for any fan of Resident Evil, IMO.  It brings a real viciousness to the "survival puzzle" aspect of the game that's even stronger than in REMake, while also keeping the more varied scenarios and branching story aspects of the "original" PS1 version that we're all familiar with.

Some Random Ruminations on Resident Evil: Director's Cut

This will take more of the form of a journal entry (like a traditional "blog", if you will) than any proper criticism of Resident Evil: Director's Cut for the PS1.  I've been playing it lately, and completed a playthrough with Jill (with a bad ending!  I didn't wait for the second rope), and I plan to continue with a Chris playthrough since I'm curious about "Advanced Mode."

It's been a very long time since I last played the original -- I usually reach for REMake -- so I was coming into this very fresh, in a lot of ways.  I had remembered some, but not all, of the differences from REMake -- no crimsonheads and no graveyard or forest are the big ones, but also the early Helipad shot is a big place where the original is superior, and pathing through the mansion is very different than in REMake, with a lot of rooms that require keys in REMake being available earlier in the original.  What I didn't remember is how much more effective the boss presentation is in the original.  If you've only played REMake and not the original, the original's takes on the boss fights alone is worth going back and seeing the originals.  The overall take on pacing is also interesting -- while REMake generally wants to be more oppressive, an effect created with both more backtracking (I was surprised at how little I found myself going back and forth between rooms in the original!) and crimsonheads, the original is very "up and down" with its difficulty but in a deliberate, calculated way.  It very much wants you to become overconfident and to overspend resources only to dry them up more later while also throwing more enemies (and, sometimes, camera dick moves) at you.  Interestingly, the genesis for crimsonheads kinda appears with those faster, stronger zombies in that one room in the lab that also respawn every time you re-enter the room, so the idea wasn't unknown to them; they chose a pacing that lets the player make much more of the game world safe intentionally, it seems.  

The original is also a lot less linear, with a lot more story branching points -- this is well known.  What is a bit more surprising is that it branches more than just the story -- there's entire areas of the game that will become on or off limits depending on your choices.  The path to Jill's good ending mostly cuts out the mansion basement, for instance, and there's rooms Underground that are tied to particular story decisions.  It's a decision that really seems to follow the zeitgeists of their eras -- REMake follows a more modern "don't make content that a lot of players aren't going to see" philosophy, while the original follows a more old-school of thought.  

Another interesting tweak is that item boxes, typewriters, and ink ribbons aren't tied as tightly together in the original as they are in REMake (or, indeed, RE2 and RE3).  They *usually* go together... but not always.  There are typewriters without item boxes, item boxes without typewriters, and typewriters without ink ribbons scattered throughout the game, and this is used to interesting effect in a few ways -- at the guard house, you get a with no ribbons, and suddenly saves feel a lot more potentially scarce, even though you probably have tons of them sitting in your item box (and there's also a pack of ribbons just a couple of rooms away, but you don't know that yet!)   In the basement segment of the game, the layout of the mansion combined with the lack of an item box for the "main" mansion typewriter means that it's tough to get to a "full" safe room from that section, so blowing an inventory slot on ribbons becomes a remarkably reasonable idea.  In the lab, the opposite is true, with item boxes being far more available than a typewriter, which really pushes the tension of that section without making the key item juggling there (especially with the [in]famous MO Disks) unfeasible.  In general, it feels like the original likes to play on your inventory limits more than it likes to play on overall resource availability -- you'll basically always have a ton of crap sitting in your box, so once you're past the early game (which is surprisingly stingy and tough!), the idea of completely running out of supplies is laughable... but how much of it is practical to take with you?  Not a lot!  Yes, that's typical Resident Evil, but it does seem less convenient to get to boxes here than in other RE games (including REMake!), which really adds some sting to this.  

Overall, it's easy to see why this became an instant classic on release in 1996.  Is it as good as its remake?  No, but even if you have access to the remake, you should still go back to play the original, it diverges enough to have its own identity and is better in a few ways. 

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.