DreadOut - Act 1 Review

I think it's safe to say I'm officially sick of zombies. They've been a stock enemy in games since the days of the punch-card, ubiquitous and as universally acknowledged as dust on the mantelpiece, but in recent times, largely due to the success of that 'act like a complete tosser to your fellow man' simulator DayZ and the outbreak – if you'll excuse the term – of open-world zombie games, they've enjoyed something of a resurgence. It's a disappointing state of affairs, frankly, because zombies are never really going to be fresh again. Once you've done slow shambling zombies, fast marathon-running zombies and zombies with improbable projectile attacks, what else is left? Zombies don't have complex motivations or strategies; the only time they ever do anything remarkable is the split second between being hit by a grenade and lying around on the ground in a hundred fleshy pieces. You can buff those gibs with your shiny new graphics engine until the player can smell the rotting meat, but it won't make zombies a remarkable enemy type ever again.

Strangely enough, the genre that seems to be bucking this trend right now is, of all things, survival horror. Outlast? Mutilated patients, great stuff. A Machine for Pigs? Full of pigs, love 'em. Daylight? Alright, that was a congealed pile of soggy tissue paper and sadness, but did you read about anybody complaining that there were too many zombies? Didn't think so. And now there's the first act of DreadOut, an indie survival horror game carrying the intriguing promise of having enemies based on creatures from Indonesian myths and folklore. If that doesn't sound like a breath of fresh air, I don't know what does. Especially the title. Seriously though, you can't treat capital letters like that; they've served us well for far too long to be roundly abused.

Of course, one has to always be wary that what appears to be a breath of fresh air isn't just the spittle-flecked yawn of somebody experiencing some cliché horror game exposition. You play as Linda Meilinda, one of several high school students on a holiday trip that goes wrong when the group takes a wrong turn and ends up wandering into a deserted town. The whole place has clearly been vacated in a hurry and there might as well be a big tatty banner in the town square that reads “Congratulations from the Silent Hill Committee on your recent Town With A Troubled Past award”, but they nevertheless decide to explore. A combination of coincidences and supernatural happenings separates the various group members, leaving Linda alone in an abandoned school to save both herself and her friends from whatever it is that's out to make their lives hell. It's hardly original, but it gets presented in a light that's just new and interesting enough to let it slip comfortably out of the way, leaving the game to knuckle down and get a nice tight grip on the bits of your brain associated with soiling one's pants. There's actually a fair bit of ambiguity as to what exactly happens to the group that fragments it and leaves Linda all alone, and although it leaves a lot of questions unanswered I actually kind of like it. You could say it affords the story an extra air of mystery, even if the mystery in question is “what on earth were you doing while all this was happening, you pillock?”

Since we're making such a big deal of the enemies, close examination should probably be afforded to them. Maybe I'm just too culturally ignorant to appreciate the subtleties of DreadOut's monsters, but I'm afraid I'm a tad underwhelmed. The very first enemy you meet in the game – and I'm not making this up, seriously – is a giant pig. Not an Amnesia-esque pig-man-monster, just a pig. Alright, maybe it has a humanoid face, but it's still a pig, and it's hard to feel threatened by a supernatural monstrosity that goes “oink”, has a hairy bottom, is incapable of climbing stairs and cannot outrun a teenage girl. Next up is an actually fairly spooky invisible woman, who fares a bit better right up until you encounter her method of attack: a full-on obnoxious first-person jump-scare. Oh yes, and if you don't kill her by attacking her weak-point, she'll just respawn a few feet away and do it again. And again. And again. I'm not saying you can't startle the player occasionally, Digital Happiness – and incidentally, that's a pretty upbeat name for the developers of a game like this – but after the fifth time I was a bit too busy engaging in a long, luxurious yawn to really feel the full effect of it, you know?

Speaking of attacking weak points, if you're the sort of person who has grown accustomed to the first level of every game being a tutorial in a big baggy overcoat then you are in for a nasty shock. Everything you need to know about the gameplay is written in a handful of 'How To Play' screens that can only be accessed from the main menu, and while I'm not complaining about getting a break from the overbearing hand-holding tours, it does seem like a crude solution when the gameplay is so achingly far from self-explanatory. To put this into context, the main character's primary means of defence is a camera phone, which will – under the correct circumstances, at the right distance and with enough cooperation from its target – destroy ghosts. It's actually a pretty cool idea that adds some interesting points of depth to gameplay – I like, for instance, how you don't start off with a map, and have to instead have to take a picture of one somewhere – but unless you played Fatal Frame – which was apparently a PS2 survival horror game with a similar mechanic – that sounds like the most counter-intuitive combat strategy known to humanity. Oh no, there's an unspeakable monstrosity chasing you! What should you do? Run away? Hit it? Throw rocks? Engineer an elaborate trap? Nope, you should take a picture of its big ugly mug seconds before it gores you. Little notes like 'some puzzles involve taking pictures of very specific things from very particular vantage points' also wouldn't go amiss.

What really gets me is that the game never justifies why any of these mechanics make sense. Sure, the inexplicable can do wonders for atmosphere, but that only goes so far before the only explanation left is 'we wanted to be Fatal Frame'. What is it about your phone's camera that makes it the perfect means of supernatural defence? Did Linda buy it from a sketchy electronics stall that mysteriously vanished when she went back to look for it later, or are the ghosts so self-conscious that the mere sound of a camera shutter is enough to drive them away? And what about being able to just inherently sense nearby ghosts? I'm grateful for the feature, believe me – especially when the invisible whimpering jump-scare lady is on the prowl – but why exactly Linda is sensitive to the machinations of the non-living, anyway? At least the Silent Hill games would contrive a way to drop a broken radio into the protagonist's lap.