DreadOut - Act 1 Review

Having said that, if you're going to contrive a game mechanic built around slowly assembling the world's most disquieting album of holiday snaps, you might as well do it the way DreadOut does it. You spend most of your time walking around in a third-person mode, navigating the area and searching for puzzle items, but for combat you have to bring your phone up to your face and deal with the supernatural nasties in first-person, staring them right down before you start clicking away. It doesn't sound like much, but the way it gets presented does wonders for the game's sense of horror. With the phone so close to your face and its effective field of view so small, looking through it feels terribly claustrophobic, like peering through a sniper scope without the comforting weight of a high-powered rifle in your arms. However, some ghosts – like our old friend, five-jump-scares-in-ten-seconds – are completely invisible unless you look at them through the camera viewfinder, so you're in a constant uneasy state of flipping back and forth between third- and first-person, trying to maximise what you can see in order to make sure you're not about to get jumped by something with a face like a basket of rotting fruit. It's a clever way of making you feel blind and vulnerable without surrounding you with impenetrable pea-soup fog, or submerging you in pitch darkness that would make the Tomb of the Giants feel like a showroom by comparison.

Nevertheless, I felt that the whole effect was somewhat diminished, knowing that my only real concern was the possibility of something startling happening to me, the player, while in first-person mode, and not what actually happened to Linda. The essence of a third-person horror game is that we sympathise with the character on-screen enough to care about what happens to them, and DreadOut just sort of absent-mindedly leaves that by the wayside. There is precisely one character in the entire game with a distinct personality more engaging than a piece of soggy cardboard, and not only is it not Linda, but it is the person who goes missing about fifteen minutes in and never gets seen again. I know games have had a funny obsession with mute protagonists over the years, but Linda's apparent complete lack of a voice really limits the amount of expression available to her. Actually, you know what? I don't think she's mute at all. I think she just doesn't speak because she knows she'll be bestowed with the same voice acting capability as the rest of the group (i.e. that of an infomercial presenter cold-reading lines ripped straight from the first draft) .

And it has to be said that after a while I really was hanging a big mental question-mark over the whole 'survival horror' thing. There really doesn't seem to be a lot of survival going on here. Your camera has an infinite battery life and can store an infinite number of pictures, so there's no sense of needing to choose your shots carefully, and while you can be damaged – your health being represented by a monochrome screen overlay – death doesn't seem to hold any penalty besides setting you back to the last checkpoint, which usually was only a few minutes ago at the absolute most. If it wasn't for the presence of puzzle items and occasional titbits of back-story there really wouldn't be any reason to scavenge whatsoever.

Actually, death does have a penalty, and it's a real head-scratcher. When you die, you are transported to the inky black void of The Abyss (two Dark Souls references in one review, woohoo) and are tasked with walking forwards until you reach a glowing angel-like figure, at which point you are returned to the last checkpoint. The first time you die you'll find yourself practically deposited in front of the angel, but with each subsequent death you'll find yourself further and further away, as if your grip on life is getting weaker every time. Great, but the kicker is that you have to run the ever-increasing distance every time you die, making DreadOut one of the few games I have witnessed actively using boredom to punish the player. I'm not saying that it isn't effective, but I'm not sure it's the right way to go about doing things.

Of all the games to leave obvious bugs in, though, why a horror game? No, seriously. Do you know what happens when I encounter a bugged enemy in an action game? I laugh (or grumble) and move on. Do you know what happens when I encounter a bugged enemy in a horror game? Two hours of immersion, atmosphere and effective tension go down the drain, leaving me trying to goad the game back into its normal modus operandi – which is to say, making me lean as far away from the monitor as is physically possible – via any means necessary. You just can't get away with it as easily. There's one particular sequence that involves running from a giant crawling indescribable thing down an infinite corridor, and while it was certainly intense the first time, subsequent attempts reversed the situation, with me trying to chase it down and trigger whatever subroutine had failed to tell it to start attacking. Any horror game where you end up trying to actively bait supernatural monstrosities into biting your head off and doing unspeakable things to the neck stump is either an ingenious psychological masterpiece or a product in dire need of more QA testing.

I have to admit, though, I'm intrigued to hear that this is only the first act of DreadOut. By the end of the game so far – which is, incidentally, about two to three hours long – you have escaped a building. That's it. It's not even as if it's a big building. Nothing else has been achieved, the plot has not been progressed, there have been no revelations or signs of the school group; the entire act is dedicated to getting through a single door. It makes me wonder how many acts DreadOut is going to have, or alternatively, how much more quickly Act 2 is going to resolve things. Better step on it, chaps, because I'd really like to see the story's ending before entropy consumes the Milky Way.

The uncomfortable thing about DreadOut – to bring this rambling set of disconnected points to a conclusion – is that I enjoyed it most when absolutely nothing was actually happening. The atmosphere is actually really solid, partially due to the aforementioned camera mechanic but also thanks to some truly excellent sound design; discordant snatches of music and distant ambient sounds that had every cell in my brain internally screaming at me even while I inched closer to a blood-stained cupboard door. Unfortunately, just about everything else the game does only serves to muddy that, and much as I'd like to believe otherwise, you can't carry a game on pacing and atmosphere alone. Plenty of good games will just do one thing really well, and DreadOut has that, but it just doesn't redeem all the buggy, awkward, unintuitive nonsense you have to go through to experience it.