HIGH The last monster is a doozy.

LOW Having to do a boss fight six times because of an AI glitch.

WTF Is that a wading pool full of dentures?

Despite what feelings they might have about a Little Nightmares they didn’t make, the developers at Tarsier should be proud that they created a franchise with vibes so iconic that it’s possible for another studio to make something that is so instantly recognizable as Little Nightmares.

For all of its flaws, no one can make the argument that Little Nightmares 3 doesn’t feel like Little Nightmares. It hits all of the important franchise beats – there are creepily adorable main characters, an oppressive, oversized world, and monstrous entities wholly focused on the heroes’ demise.

What it lacks, by comparison, is a sense that these elements meld together to form a whole — because right now, Little Nightmares 3 feels more like a series of levels than a coherent experience.

Set in a horrible dreamworld recognizable to anyone who’s played any of the others in the franchise, LN3 follows children on a journey through four distinct worlds — a necropolis, a dusty wasteland where birds are slaughtered, a disgusting candy factory and a Dark Carnival where the displays are as upsetting as the attendees. Finally things move to a final level that I won’t reveal, save to say that it is seemingly tied closely to the series’ oblique mythology.

Hopefully one of my major issues is clear based on the list of levels I just outlined – namely that LN3 has no coherent flow to its progression.

While individual levels might have a sense of rising action – players invariably meet that level’s threat about a quarter of the way through and then have to deal with three further encounters before vanquishing it or making good their escape – there’s never a sense that an overall tale is being told. Low, the lead character, has a map that he consults before using his powers to teleport to new areas, but what these areas have to do with one another, or the goal he’s attempting to eventually reach never become clear. At the end of the adventure, I was left with more questions than answers.

To its credit, on a moment-to-moment basis LN3 works well. The puzzles are cleverly designed and clearly laid out, and the AI is good enough so that if a player doesn’t have a live co-op partner, they should have no trouble completing the many two-person objectives. I played most of the campaign in single-player mode, and almost never found myself getting stuck because the computer partner was too slow or confused about what to do.

That said, LN3 really does play better when two live players are involved, and it’s delightful being able to speed things along by having two people working on puzzle elements simultaneously. As such, it makes the lack of single-screen co-op feel like an oversight. There are a few locations when two characters have to separate, but they’re few and far between, and the success of things like It Takes Two and Split Fiction have proven that split-screens work just fine. At least they aren’t forcing players to buy two copies – as long as the host has a copy of LN3, their co-op partner can simply download the demo and play with a Friend’s Pass.

In a large sense, I don’t have many complaints about Little Nightmares 3. Each new area is beautifully realized, the monsters are scary, and the skin-of-the-teeth escapes are as thrilling as one would hope. However, as I closed in on the end, I couldn’t help but feel that it all felt vaguely hollow. It’s definitely a Little Nightmares title, but it never feels like it has anything to say, or that it’s building to something profound. Even the ending was underwhelming, although given that it has to be compared to the sadistic gut punch in Little Nightmares 2, that was probably always going to be the case.

Little Nightmares 3 might be the least of the trilogy so far, but anyone who wants to have a new experience in its horribly bleak and oppressive world will still find this a great opportunity to do so — it just doesn’t come together as darkly perfect as it should.

Rating: 6.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco. It currently available on PC/PS5/XBS-X/SW. Copies of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play was devoted to the single-player mode. The game was completed. 2 hours were spent in Multiplayer modes.

Parents: This game was rated T by the ESRB, and it features Violence and Blood & Gore. This is a disturbing world full of violent imagery, but it’s presented in such a cartoony and grotesque way that I suspect even younger teens won’t find it excessive. Be prepared to be haunted by some of these creatures, though. That will happen.

Colorblind Modes: The game does contain colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All information is provided via text, which can be resized. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post Little Nightmares 3 Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The return of Frank Stone.

LOW That rescue attempt came with some pretty harsh consequences.

WTF This ‘happy ending’ raises more questions than it answers!

There’s a horrific beast at the heart of the Dead By Daylight franchise. It lives in a dimension that it has all to itself, and whenever it feels like it, this ‘entity’ grabs people from their world and pulls them into a playfield where they’re hunted and murdered by tireless killers. Escape is temporary, and death isn’t the end to their torment — no matter what these prisoners do, the entity resets everything to ensure that its dark game can go on. With this knowledge, it’s clear that Dead By Daylight happens in a world where the bad guys have already won, so how can a satisfying dramatic story take place there?

The Casting of Frank Stone is all about answering that question.

A narrative adventure from Supermassive Games, the creators of Until Dawn and the Dark Pictures franchise, Frank Stone is played from a the third person perspective and rotates through a varied cast of characters who must make tough choices to progress a shockingly expansive story that unfolds over the course of a comparatively short five-hour run time.

Taking place in three different time periods, this ambitious story follows a cop who stops the rampage of serial killer Frank Stone in 1963, teens who make a movie at the site of Frank’s killings nearly twenty years later, and the present-day adventures of people haunted by the events of the other timelines. It’s convoluted as heck, but Frank Stone does a magnificent job of keeping things coherent. It helps that the stories are told in parallel, with each chapter swapping back and forth between the present and past, giving the player a chance to see the long-term ramifications of their decisions play out immediately.

Dead By Daylight is known for its relentless brutality, and Frank Stone doesn’t disappoint on that front. After an intense prologue — probably Supermassive’s finest to date — there’s a bit of a lull in the action as the middle section of the story is mostly about exploring characters’ backstories and discovering Frank Stone’s secrets. Things pick up in the final act, however, as the characters find themselves besieged by supernatural entities and forced to make quick choices to keep themselves alive. Whether it’s a bad decision or a failed quick time event, there are dozens of ways to die here, each more gruesome than the last. Frank Stone, the game and the character — does not skimp on the brutality, offering some of the most shockingly upsetting deaths in the videogame horror genre.

This kind of branching narrative only feels satisfying if players have major impact on the story. While the possible options may not be as varied as those found in Supermassive’s earlier work like House of Ashes or the Devil in Me, the developers have finally made those plot paths accessible in a way that none of their other games have offered.

After players complete Frank Stone once, they’ll gain access to the “Cutting Room Floor” — a map of every outcome and variation that they could have experienced while playing. Every death, every location, every twist in the conversation — it’s all there for the player to see. More importantly, the player is able to jump back to the start of each chapter so they can try out the different permutations. Now, all the devs need to do is add the ability to skip dialogue that’s already been heard, and they’ll have created one of the most accessible narrative adventures around.

While the story is conceptually fascinating, The Casting of Frank Stone falters a bit in the execution. With so many characters and multiple timelines to cover during roughly five hours of running time, things can feel rushed at times, and the characters get short shrift. There’s almost no downtime to explore them in detail or their feelings about one another, and a single flashback stands out not just because it’s beautifully realized — which it is — but rather because it’s the only time Frank Stone pauses to let the player inside a character’s head. I’ve played through the campaign a handful of times, and I still don’t feel like I know the characters anywhere near as well as the cast of Until Dawn, for example, which I’ve played fewer times.

At least the gameplay picks up the slack that the character work leaves. In addition to the wealth of branching options, the exploration and puzzle mechanics are some of the best that Supermassive has offered. There are actual puzzles this time, with players having to operate strange machines and work out complex locks to continue their progress. There’s even the equivalent of a first-person shooter sequence, although it’s themed around filmmaking rather than gunplay. These elements keep thing engaging even when the characters don’t, and while they don’t feel like Dead By Daylight‘s core mechanics — only a few generator repair sequences fit that bill — they manage to keep things active enough so that the experience is never just a bunch of talking.

At its best, The Casting of Frank Stone works as an exploration of inevitability. Before the player ever takes control of the teens making a movie in the ’80s, they already have some inkling of how that part of the story will end. What makes the game special, though, is how much latitude it gives the player within that structure, allowing them to play out their version of the story to a truly impressive degree by using Dead By Daylight‘s dimension-hopping Entity as a justification for the wilder swings that can be taken. In this world the bad guys always win, but that doesn’t mean the conflict can’t lead to some amazing drama.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by Behaviour Interactive. It is currently available on PC,PS5,XBX/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed multiple times. The game has no multiplayer modes.

Parents: The game was rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Strong Language. Keep kids far from this one. It is one of the bloodiest games that Supermassive has ever produced, and that’s saying something!

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no audio cues that will affect gameplay, I played through once without audio and had no trouble whatsoever. All dialogue is subtitled, and the subtitles can be adjusted to the player’s comfort. The game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post The Casting Of Frank Stone Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The Devil In Me boss fight.

LOW Trying to kill hordes of rats and scarabs.

WTF The ‘flesh tube’ tunnel.

Rail shooters are just better in VR, to the point where it doesn’t seem like there’s any point in offering them in any other format. Gun controllers for consoles are a thing of the past, and clicking on a screen makes even the most detailed and thrilling shooter feel like little more than jumped-up whack-a-mole.

Move things into VR, however, and suddenly the action is immersive and compelling. Every enemy is a looming threat, and every killed foe a triumph. Rail shooters, at their best, drive players into a panicked frenzy as they struggle to cope with the hordes of foes coming for them, and moving that action to VR, where the player is trapped inside that world, puts them completely at the developers’ mercy.

A spin-off of the Dark Pictures franchise, Switchback takes players on a journey through the first four Dark Pictures games as they attempt to blast their way out of hell. Players take on the role of a victim of a train crash who finds themselves in a series of strange locations — rolling through a derelict ship, a puritan village, and more — all while taunted by a demon who’s desperate to collect their soul.

The first thing players will notice about Switchback is how perfect the motion feels. It’s vital that the moving rollercoaster feels natural, of course — if they hadn’t captured that rush, there really wouldn’t be a game. Whenever the cart reached a hill and started being gently pulled up the track, I found myself holding my breath knowing that a big dip full of breakneck turns was on the way. The physics of whipping through Switchback‘s various worlds are so good that I literally had to play sitting down — not only is it the intended experience, but I found myself getting wobbly on my feet every time we hit a sharp turn.

As could be expected from the developers of the Dark Pictures franchise, the scares on offer are stellar. While most of the levels are focused on fast movement and constant shooting, each one takes time for slower moments of terror. Whether that’s the gradual introduction of a transforming villain, a fog-shrouded highway filled with ominous shadows, or far too many sinister dolls crammed into a single room, Switchback knows how to set its players on edge — especially in the Devil In Me-themed levels, which slow things down to recreate the feeling of a “dark ride” pulling the player through a spookhouse full of combat setpieces and deadly puzzles.

Switchback‘s shooting is fundamentally satisfying — weapons sound and feel powerful, and whether I was shooting zombies, bats, or just bits of scenery, every trigger pull had an engaging weight to it. There’s a decent variety of weapons, but the developers made some odd choices in how they handle. In what must have been an attempt at realism, weapons without pistol grips have to be aimed completely differently than the main weapons, tilted far down in order to be fired ‘straight ahead’. This logically tracks when the player’s hand holding their controller is mapped onto the model of the gun, but it’s jarring to suddenly find myself aiming at the ceiling.

One element of the shooting that might prove annoying to some is how liberally Switchback employs aim assist. While I won’t say it’s impossible to miss targets, I will say that I had to put in effort to not hit things. So long as the player is pointing their gun in the general direction of the thing they want to shoot, they’re basically guaranteed a hit. I understand why the developers did this — it’s hard to shoot moving targets, and that’s basically all the targets here. Still, it would have been nice to have a ‘precision’ mode, where instead of enemies being bullet sponges that are impossible to miss, the guns do a ton of damage but the player has to earn the hits.

Another issue is the strange lack of enemy variety. Other than a handful of setpieces involving mannequins that move when the player blinks or some killer hellhounds, each of the four settings offers only three or four types of enemies, which might not be so bad, had the developers managed to do some visual differentiation within the types. Each area takes around 45 minutes to play, and after a few minutes it becomes impossible for players to overlook the fact that they’re fighting the exact same pair of zombies or mannequins over and over again. A little more variety would have gone a long way.

Also troubling is Switchback‘s lack of bells and whistles. It’s a thrilling arcade experience while the player is inside it, but very little thought has gone into giving the player a reason to replay.

The one major hook are four fellow train passengers who appear in the levels — the player is asked to solve a little shooting puzzle to either save or kill them. There’s no real story outcome to these choices, however, and Switchback has just one ending. The game keeps track of the player’s score, but there’s nothing to unlock via good performance. At the end of each area, the player will be presented with a series of things they did or didn’t do during the level (seeing a sneaky monster or setting off some dynamite, for example) but it’s just a record of things that happened, and there’s no record to act as a checklist for the player to complete.

Switchback is a compelling ride — it’s spooky and adrenaline-pumping and exactly what players want out of a rail shooter… but it could have been so much more than it is. There are flashes of innovation and brilliance, but I wish some of that kind of forward-thinking design had gone into the metagame. It may have been released in 2023, but the lack of features and replayability make it seem more like an arcade machine from 1996.

Rating: 7 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Supermassive Games. It is currently available on PSVR2. This copy of the game was obtained via paid download and reviewed on the PSVR2. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood, Strong Language and Violence. Children under 13 shouldn’t be playing PSVR2, and that’s also a good cut-off for the game, despite the M warning. For a Dark Pictures game, there’s a surprising lack of gore. Yes, the player will spend a lot of time blasting off zombie heads, but it’s not particularly gruesome. Even the humans who can be killed die in oddly bloodless circumstances. I’m not saying this horror rollercoaster shooter is fun for the whole family, only that it’s nowhere near the kind of brutal one might expect from the franchise.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: The game has subtitles which cannot be resized or altered, but there’s a huge number of enemies that use audio to warn players that they’re approaching, with no accompanying visual cues. Be prepared for frustration if you play on anything but easy difficulty. This game is not fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. The game is controlled exclusively with PSVR2 motion controllers, using the trigger to fire weapons and choose options in menus, and the face buttons to reload weapons.

The post Switchback Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH The action-packed finale.

LOW Trying to sync with my co-op partner to close a door with the right timing.

WTF Every single one of the villain’s animatronics.

At the end of what they’re calling the ‘First Season’ of the Dark Pictures Anthology, the developers at Supermassive Games have decided to dial down the strangeness. Where previous entries have featured haunted ships, ghost towns and bloodthirsty vampires, The Devil in Me has a single, grounded threat — a madman has decided to pick up where famous serial killer HH Holmes left off by murdering people in a hotel full of deathtraps. In a surprising twist, though, the entry with the simplest ambitions is also the one offering the biggest changes to the series format.

Earlier Dark Pictures titles were comfortable being slotted into the ‘Interactive Movie’ genre with characters walking around and investigating items, talking to one another, with the most important interactions coming down to binary choices made at key moments. While all of that is still present in TDiM, the developers have expanded gameplay to feature elements more traditionally seen in graphic adventure games — things like players being asked to leap across gaps, shimmy over ledges, hunt down keys, and figure out door codes. The result is a longer, more robust experience, which makes the player feel like they’re actively taking part in the story, rather than mostly watching it.

After a prologue set during the original HH Holmes killings, Devil in Me jumps forward to introduce its cast — a documentary crew filming an episode about Holmes — who are lured to an isolated island with the promise that it contains rare memorabilia from his crime spree. Right away things feel different from the rest of the series, allowing the player a chance to explore a surprisingly open area while searching for clues and solving puzzles as they gradually approach the replica hotel where the majority of the adventure will take place.

From a presentation standpoint, TDiM is leap forward. The central location — a murder hotel built by psycho killer Granthem Du Met, is absolutely gorgeous. Players see rooms in every possible condition, from perfectly restored recreations of turn-of-the-century accommodations to rotted wrecks being slowly consumed by neglect. Each location, from wooded paths to concrete bunkers, is beautifully realized, with every bit of art design contributing to an overwhelming sense of dread.

While the characters are a little on the bland side, they find themselves in a series of situations so horrific that it’s impossible not to root for them, despite their lack of personal magnetism. A feature of the Dark Pictures series has always been offering players impossible choices on tight timelines, forcing them to decide who lives and who dies. In a clever meta twist, that philosophy is also the M.O. of the villain — he has filled his hotel with a series of deathtraps that pit two people against one another, with only one having the chance to get out alive… Unless, of course, the player is clever enough.

Not that thinking carefully will always result in the best result, however. Just like its obvious inspiration the Saw series, the odds are stacked heavily in the killer’s favor, and there are a number of situations in which doing what seems like the smartest thing will result in a gory death, while sometimes luck or trial and error are the only way through. This is easily the most challenging of the Dark Pictures games to date — and getting everyone to the end alive should be considered something of a major accomplishment.

Normally the best way to play Dark Pictures is the multiplayer mode and that’s doubly true here, as the killer’s conceit of pitting characters against one another ensures that real live players will be in a position to sacrifice or save themselves. It adds an aspect of competition to the co-op gameplay that the series has never explored extensively, making the whole thing feel that much more engaging…

…At least when the co-op functions.

At the time of review, the singleplayer version ran fine with no hiccups. However, I was plagued with technical errors whenever I attempted to play online. From randomly teleporting characters, to visual glitches, to the game failing to register my responses, the experience was a mess. Thankfully TDiM lets players restart chapters whenever they want, and no individual level is so long that it felt like a major chore to go back and replay. That said, any pair of people hoping to co-op should prepare as much patience as they can muster, because they’ll need it.

The Devil In Me is a brutal, harrowing experience. The killer is monstrous, the choices to be made are nail-biters, and the story, when finally revealed, offers all the satisfaction of a opened puzzle box. The new gameplay mechanics fit seamlessly into the experience, and the additional player agency encourages investment in the story, rather than distracting from it. While nothing in the plot reaches the audacious heights of House of Ashes‘ finale and technical issues prevent co-op here from being the series’ best to date, it’s still a great experience, and the developers can be satisfied that they’ve ended the first phase of this series on extremely solid footing.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 16 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 6 hours were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, and Strong Language. Keep children as far as you can from this one, please. In addition to all of the horrific violence and omnipresent swearing, there’s a scene where the player can murder a dog. It’s horribly traumatic, and you can’t risk children seeing it.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no important audio cues that don’t have accompanying visual cues. I played most of the game without audio and encountered no issues. The game is fully subtitled, and subtitles can be resized. There is also a dyslexic-friendly font available. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable.

The post The Devil in Me Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

Spooky season is here, and while the actual game is going to miss Halloween by a two and a half weeks, it’s the perfect time to dive into The Devil In Me‘s preview, which spans 90 minutes towards the end of the first act.

The latest entry in the Dark Pictures franchise — and in point of fact, the final entry in what Supermassive Games is calling the “First Season”, which includes Man of Medan, Little Hope, and House of Ashes — The Devil In Me puts the player in control of a team of documentary filmmakers who’ve been lured to an island in Lake Michigan in the hopes of ‘classing up’ their unimpressive H.H. Holmes documentary by exploring a recreation of the killer’s famous ‘Murder Hotel’. While there, they also hope to interview the tourist trap’s owner, one Granthem Du Met, an H.H. Holmes super-fan. It doesn’t take a psychic to see just how badly this is going to go for everyone involved.

Right away, TDiM impresses with the main location’s set design. The hotel has a rich, lived-in look to it, with everything from carpets to light fixtures offering a satisfying level of worn grime. The demo gave me the chance to explore some hallways, offices, a crumbling library, and even some maintenance rooms, and every one of them was built and furnished with the same level of care. Every part of the hotel is designed to unnerve the player, and a combination of fantastic level design and stellar lighting ensures that the player can never feel safe for a moment — and that’s before we’ve started talking about the creepy animatronics with cameras in their eyes that populate a few of the rooms.

A good amount of the preview functions as an extended tutorial with the player swapping from one character to the next, thrown into situations that allow each one to use their special ability in turn.

Charlie can pick locks, Mark can find things in out-of-the-way places, Erin can hear through walls, and Jaime can use her electrical tools to solve puzzles. The only one who didn’t get a showcase moment is Kate, but since she’s the box-art star, I’m sure there will be plenty for her to do as the night marches on.

In addition to special talents, I encountered a few of the new environmental puzzles, which is a fancy way of saying that the Dark Pictures series is now adding some traditional adventure game elements to flesh out the interactive movie format. Players will be grabbing items to use elsewhere, searching for codes to unlock doors, and shifting large pieces of furniture around to open up new routes through areas. While the gameplay hasn’t shifted all the way into graphic adventure mode – players won’t find themselves digging through and testing a long list of items against a lock or anything like that – the developers have gone a long way towards giving the player a chance to interact with the environment, rather than just passing through it on the way to their next life-or-death decision.

The little slice of the story I saw did a fantastic job of setting the hook. Tensions arise between characters because the show they’re working on hasn’t been going particularly well, and everyone needs the career boost a viral hit could provide, to the point where even after their host mysteriously disappears, they still decide to press on and get the shots they need for their documentary. This, naturally, leads them into a series of harrowing encounters with at least one possible death that I encountered. A brutal one, at that!

With the killer being a mute cipher at this early point in the story, all of the mystery elements are delivered via genre-standard notes and audio files which combine to paint an intensely sinister picture.

It seems that the story of H.H. Holmes’ crimes has created a sort of meme that infects the minds of other would-be killers, prodding them to commit more brutal and numerous murders than they otherwise might have.

The game’s villain has run with it, building a hotel themed after Holmes and dressing up in a Holmes costume, right down to an eerie mask that features a painted-on moustache. While the subject of copycat serial killers is nothing new, The Devil In Me is embracing the concept with such aggressiveness and brutality that it become almost audacious. The demo ended with a cruel murder caused by a SAW-style trap, and I truly can’t wait to see what else the killer has in store once the full game is released just in time for the anniversary of the actual Holmes’ capture.

Apart from the standard sneak-peek flaws — some of the art obviously wasn’t final — I only ran into one major issue in the game and, oddly, it was related to audio, of all things.

Where most of TDiM lives up to Supermassive’s track record of making completely accessible titles — resizable subtitles, dyslexic-friendly fonts, QTEs that can be customized to suit any physical ability — one section was bafflingly inaccessible to the hearing-impaired. It’s a pity, too, since it’s one of the demo’s most eerie sequences.

Erin, the team’s audio technician, slowly creeps through the hotel’s hallways, listening to hidden speakers in the walls play clips of the killer’s previous victims, as well as a retelling of Holmes’ execution. Ideally the player will be so engrossed in finding one clue after another that they won’t even notice that the walls are moving around them — I sure didn’t. What’s the problem with this sequence? None of the audio that Erin detects is subtitled. So, unless players are able to hear, this will be the most baffling five minutes of the game as they’ll be doing nothing more than following a hot/cold indicator down some dark hallways, missing out on key background information and intensely creepy dialogue, not to mention harrowing screams! Hopefully this is a simple glitch and not an oversight, as one of those is much easier to fix than the other. All of the other dialogue was clearly subtitled.

Oh, and there was one other thing that I found utterly baffling — in one of the strangest sound design moves I’ve ever seen, the developers have arranged it so that the player can hear their characters’ breathing all the time. Not just when they’re panting after running for a while, or trapped in a cold location, but all the time.

Basically, if the player is controlling a character and nobody’s talking, there’s going to be oddly loud breathing noises playing constantly, to the point where it’s weirdly unrealistic.

It’s not like this is a first-person game and the developers are attempting some kind of radical verisimilitude — it’s a third-person horror title where characters are constantly panting. If this was used sparingly to heighten tension when they’re creeping around in darkness or being hunted by the killer, that would be one thing, but it’s all the time. Just like the lack of subtitles in the ‘noises in the walls’ sequence, I hope this is a glitch, because I can see it getting irritating very quickly.

Those qualms aside, this demo has accomplished everything it needed to — specifically, it’s gotten me incredibly excited to play the rest of The Devil In Me. The story is compelling, the characters are interesting, the setting is fantastic, and the new gameplay elements all work like a charm. Supermassive Games and Namco are taking a big swing with this one, as it’s purported to be nearly twice as big as the other three games, which each clock in at the 4-5 hour mark on a first playthrough. However, it’s as good a demo as I’ve seen from the series, so I don’t think we’ve got much to worry about as November 18^th approaches.

The Dark Pictures: The Devil In Me will be available on PC, PS4/5, and XB1/SX – This preview was played on PC.

The post PREVIEW: The Dark Pictures Anthology – The Devil In Me appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH When a last name reveals the villain.

LOW There are some incredibly cheap unexpected deaths.

WTF Is this whole game based on a cryptid meme?

Seven years ago, Supermassive Games made a splash with Until Dawn, a game designed to look and feel like a Hollywood-level horror movie that offered recognizable (if not quite-yet-famous) cast members, dramatic action setpieces, and truly disturbing gore. Now they’re back with The Quarry, a spiritual successor which aims to outdo Until Dawn in every way possible. Bigger names in the cast, scarier action, bloodier gore. The Quarry wants to be everything Until Dawn was, and more — and in nearly every aspect, it succeeds.

Tellingly, The Quarry opens with a solid five minutes of characters talking and quick-time events before the player is ever given the chance to take control of a character and have them walk around the beautifully designed 3D environments. An interactive movie through and through, it lets players know that while they’ll be free to walk around the maps from time to time to look for clues, the meat of play is in the branching conversations between characters and the many timed decisions they’ll have to make.

Unlike the Dark Pictures titles, which are of a similar ‘scary movie’ nature but built with a co-op focus, The Quarry is a decidedly single-player experience. Only one character is ever controlled at a time, and the developers do a fairly good job of sharing screentime between cast members for most of the running time. However, a few do wind up as standouts towards the end of the story and one gets sidelined very early on, but there are strong narrative reasons in both cases.

There are multiplayer options as well. First is a couch co-op mode where up to eight players assign themselves characters at the outset, then pass the controller back and forth every time there’s a switch. there’s also an online mode where one player controls searching and action sequences while an audience votes on decision points along the way, but this latter mode was not available during the review period.

Whether singleplayer or multiplayer, every design decision seems built around making the game as accessible as possible to as wide an audience as possible.

The industry standard for QTEs is to have players tap a face button on the controller to perform an action, but anyone who’s ever tried to get a newcomer to play a console game will know that screams of ‘Which one is the Y button?’ are a common occurrence. So, The Quarry has players pushing thumbsticks in different directions for all of its action scenes, which is a more difficult instruction to misinterpret.

QTEs aren’t the only things that are streamlined. Have trouble aiming guns with the right thumbstick or have issues with tapping buttons quickly? The game can be set to either help with or simply auto-complete challenges for the player, ensuring that literally anyone will be able to play from beginning to end.

The Quarry goes one step beyond accessibility, though, by offering “Movie” Mode. This mode lets players choose what kind of story they want to watch, and then they can sit back and take in the game as a viewer rather than participant. There are two preset versions initially available — “everyone lives” and “everyone dies” — but there’s also a “Director’s Chair” setting which allows players to decide how each character will react in a given situation. In this mode The Quarry isn’t an interactive movie any longer, it’s transformed into a storytelling experiment where the player winds characters up and sees what happens when they start bumping into one another.

For those interested in engaging directly, The Quarry offers exciting action setpieces and scenes packed with enemies both human and otherwise, and it never fails to find new and interesting ways to put the eight main characters in peril The camerawork and choreography in these sequences is magnificent, making every brush with death a nail-biter.

Another of The Quarry‘s main attractions just how replayable it is. Every conversational interaction offers the player a chance to be aggressive or understanding in one way or another, and those choices can have momentous impacts on the plot. Scouring the map for clues is also vital. The developers have come up with some truly clever consequences based on whether certain items are found or not. I was shocked and impressed when a seemingly random thing I picked up in the first hour wound up being integral to my survival in the final showdown, and the campaign is absolutely packed with tons of twists and surprises just like that one.

I can’t talk too much about the plot without spoiling the surprises that are The Quarry‘s bread and butter, but I will say that its greatest strength is the labyrinthine plotting. The first half is all about setting up a series of bizarre and baffling mysteries that the second half pays off beautifully.

The cast acquit themselves quite well in their roles, although there are two standouts — Siobhan Williams as Laura, whose journey is meant to mirror Until Dawn‘s Mike and proves every bit as harrowing, and Ted Raimi, who puts in a fantastic performance as Travis, the most complex and compelling character. The only place where the experience suffers in comparison to Until Dawn is in emotional resonance. In The Quarry all of the characters are innocent people who stumble into a bad situation through no fault of their own, whereas in Until Dawn they’re all dealing with the consequences of their own actions.

The Quarry sits comfortably near the top of the interactive movie genre. Equal parts clever and terrifying, it earns its ten-hour runtime with a series of twists and turns that are sure to delight. There’s action, romance, comedy, and unbelievably disgusting violence. Supermassive Games have delivered a rollercoaster that serves as a fabulous follow-up to Until Dawn, so anyone who enjoys the genre will be in for one hell of a ride.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by 2K Games. It is currently available on PS4/5, XBO/S/X, PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS5. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 10 hours of play were devoted to couch co-op.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated M and contains Blood and Gore, Intense Violence, Mild Sexual Themes, and Strong Language. It’s not just that the game is gory, it’s that the game dwells on the gore to an almost obscene extent. Faces aren’t simply blown apart by shotguns, the camera then lingers on the blown-apart face for a few seconds, making sure that the player didn’t miss any detail. There’s plenty of swearing and a few people kiss, but for a title inspired by ’80s slasher horror, the game is surprisingly chaste. Beer is discussed, but no one is ever depicted actually drinking any. While a number of characters appear in their underwear, there’s zero nudity, even though the plot literally calls for it on a number of occasions. Although that’s likely a consequence of the performers having no-nudity clauses in their contracts.

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are available.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue in the game is subtitled, and there is a close-captioning mode in which key sound effects are listed as well as dialogue. Text can be resized, and there is a dyslexia-friendly font available. It’s fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls are not remappable.

The post The Quarry Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

HIGH A friendship for the ages.

LOW Trying to wrangle the camera when exploring a house.

WTF The whole last hour of the game.

Supermassive Games is at the absolute top of the interactive movie genre. Until Dawn was my game of the year in 2015, and other than a poor narrative choice in Little Hope, they haven’t disappointed me since. They’re on a roll and there’s no point in being coy here — House of Ashes is their best yet, delivering a tense action/horror story featuring the strongest plot, characters, and production values they’ve ever attempted.

Set in the late spring of 2003, House of Ashes follows a group of marines who travel into the rural mountains of Iraq looking for Saddam Hussein’s hidden chemical weapons. Instead of discovering a storage facility, they come across an ancient buried temple packed with hideous bat-monsters hungry for blood. Over the course of a single night, the marines are forced to get over their interpersonal animosity and team up with an Iraqi officer if they’re going to have a chance of surviving until the sun comes up.

House of Ashes‘ presentation is a big departure from previous entries in the series. Where they formerly used fixed camera angles to great cinematic effect, this time the developers have gone with a standard third-person viewpoint, allowing players to freely look around the map at their own pace. Despite being set mostly underground, HoA has some of the largest maps the developers have ever worked with, and this new camera system really lets players get a sense of the majesty and scale of the locations they’re exploring.

In the game’s first hour when players are moving through realistically-cramped houses, the camera has some real issues, but once the action moves underground, everything works perfectly. The developers have even taken into account how difficult it could be to find collectibles and interaction points without camera angles designed to call attention to them. By massively increasing the range at which points of interest gleam with light, they ensure any player willing to scour the maps will have no trouble finding all of the pickups detailing the story — and what a story they’ll find!

Drawing heavily from the works of H.P. Lovecraft, as well as a few other influences that would likely constitute spoilers, House of Ashes does an incredible job of gradually ramping up the tension over the five hours it takes to play the game.

Things start simply enough, with marines searching a small farming village for signs of military activity while holdout Iraqi forces prepare to ambush from above. An earthquake then carries them into the temple, where man vs. man turns into man vs. beast, and the player has to figure out who they can trust while trying to learn anything they can about the monsters in an effort to fight them off.

The plotting is fantastic, but House of Ashes’ biggest accomplishment is its character work. Not only do each of the five leads give great performances, the writers have managed to create interpersonal drama that doesn’t feel cliché or out of place. There’s marital stress between two characters, the marines are all trying to process a war crime they committed, and the Iraqi character, Salim, is simply trying to survive the last days of a war he wanted no part of.

They’re all fantastically-drawn characters, especially considering how much latitude the player has in molding their relationships with one another. By making the right dialogue choices, the player can bring characters closer together or push them further apart, and the state of those relationships will have huge impacts when situations start getting stressful. While the story may be fairly linear compared to the earlier entries in this series, there’s so much variation in how it plays out that someone would have to go through it a half-dozen times before they’d seen it all.

Mechanically, the action is built around a variety of quick-time events. Rather than offering dynamic difficulty that ramped up or down depending on how well someone played, House of Ashes offers three difficulty levels ranging from forgiving to lethal, and lets players decide whether they’re coming for the challenge or the story.

House of Ashes also offers the same robust multiplayer options as its predecessors, with Movie Night mode letting a group of players swap controllers on a couch as their characters’ turn comes up, while Shared Story mode lets people co-op the entire story online. This is perhaps the best use of Shared Story mode yet — since the characters are actively at each others’ throats (or even pointing guns at one another!) House of Ashes gives players the opportunity to actually play against one another. Backstabbing probably isn’t the best way to get out of these deadly subterranean tunnels alive, but it can make for a surprisingly entertaining experience.

Supermassive Games is responsible for the most compelling interactive movies around, and House of Ashes proves that the Dark Pictures Anthology is on solid footing after a divisive second entry. While it shares the same basic structure of the previous two games — a mismatched group explores an abandoned location, discovering the secrets of what happened there — it’s so wildly different in tone and theme that it feels nothing like the others. This was a big swing in a few different ways, and I’m glad to say that they knocked it out of the park.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive Games and published by Bandai/Namco. It is currently available on PC, PS4/5, XBO/S/X. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 10 hours of play were devoted to the singleplayer mode. The game was completed multiple times. Three Hours were spent in mutiplayer modes.

Parents: This was rated M by the ESRB, and it contains Blood and Gore, Drug Reference, Strong Language, Mild Sexual Themes, and Intense Violence. The second shot in the game is of a severed head, and it doesn’t get any less brutal from there. Keep kids far away from it. The drug reference just involves drugs being depicted in the most passive way possible, and the sexual themes are tame at best.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: I played almost the entire game without sound and encountered zero difficulties. All dialogue is subtitled, and players can resize subtitles to their comfort level. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Yes, the game’s controls are remappable.

The post The Dark Pictures: House Of Ashes Review appeared first on Gamecritics.com.

House of Ashes is Supermassive Games’ newest title in the Dark Pictures Anthology, a series of interactive horror movies.

Where the previous titles featured ghost ships and haunted towns, House of Ashes heads in a more visceral and action-packed direction — the player takes control of a special forces team at the tail end of the 2003 invasion of Iraq who’s looking for chemical weapons in the Zagros mountains, but they find something more terrifying than they could have imagined.

Thanks to the courtesy of Bandai Namco and Supermassive Games, I had the chance to play the House of Ashes preview and, long story short, any hesitation I may have felt towards the game has been completely dispelled.

To give a bit of meta backstory about this specific title, there’s been a cloud hanging over House of Ashes in the Dark Pictures fan community because after two games in a row featuring monsters which were, in one way or another, figments of the main characters’ imaginations, people weren’t willing to take the developers’ word that HoA was going to feature actual beasts. However, every bit of promotion has shown more and more of the monsters, and this preview is no exception.

Of the demo’s six scenes, three give the player a chance to run away from, fight, and even kill monsters. At this point the conversation is definitively over — there are actual bat monsters filling the rough-hewn caves and sprawling temples, and they’re gorgeously designed.

Amazingly, though, the monsters aren’t the most impressive aspect of the demo. No, the thing that drew my attention was how great the storytelling was.

After an opening movie set up the first couple of chapters, I was dropped into the action as a marine trapped in an ancient tunnel system. After just a couple of minutes of looking around, I’d caught a few glimpses of strange creatures, reunited with a squadmate, and nearly suffocated a man to keep him from attracting unwanted attention. While I’m sure the developers have packed the most attention-grabbing sections into the demo, the action and character moments are undeniably great.

The demo also does a fantastic job of getting the player on board with the entire cast in a short amount of time — there are six chapters, giving the player the chance to walk in each character’s shoes at least once. There weren’t a ton of conversation scenes in the demo, but the writing I saw was top-notch. Each character gets a clearly-delineated starting worldview, which the player can then decide to change or stick with, via the series’ standard branching conversations. Whether it’s a married couple talking around the reasons for their separation or a 60-year-old audio tape of an archaeologist going Lovecraft-level insane, the scripting is some of the best we’ve seen from the series.

While the action hews closely to the series’ standard timed choices and QTEs, the exploration sequences are completely changed by the decision to give the player control over a third-person camera locked on their character. Now the player is free to search each area without the game’s engine directing them down a particular path.

This has enabled the developers to craft huge, open levels, which they’d always avoided doing in the past — likely because camera placement becomes a problem in rooms the size of football fields. With the camera locked to the player, on the other hand, there’s no limit to the kind of expansive locations they can allow the player to explore.

The only real drawback is while that fixed cameras can transition naturally into cutscenes, it’s a little jarring when control is stripped away from the player so that an action scene can start. It’s not a huge problem, but it feels awkward compared to the fully-cinematic feel that previous entries offered. On the plus side, the developers have massively increased the range at which important objects light up — it would otherwise be too easy for players to miss the clues that let them figure out what’s really going on in the lost caverns.

House of Ashes is poised to be the high point of the Dark Pictures series thanks to terrifying monsters, fantastic location, great characters, and action scenes as impressive as anything they’ve offered so far. I’ve said for years that Supermassive Games have been consistently raising the bar for interactive movies, and this proves they’ve done it again. Anyone who ever wanted to play Aliens meets The Descent (with a little bit of Enemy Mine thrown in) can count themselves lucky — this Halloween they’ll be able to do just that.

House of Ashes will be released on Xbox, PlayStation and PC platforms on October 22nd.

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House of Ashes, the next game in Supermassive’s Dark Pictures franchise, just hosted a hands-off gameplay reveal and it seems as if the developers are focused as much on making up for missteps in previous entries as they are at telling a compelling story this time around. Given the content of the preview, I’d say they have a pretty good chance of accomplishing everything they’ve set out to do.

Ashes takes place in 2003, at the end of the initial invasion of Iraq by the American army. The plot follows a team of soldiers who head to the Zagros mountains in a futile attempt to discover hidden weapons of mass destruction, hoping to retroactively justify their incredibly illegal military push. The fruitless search is interrupted by an Iraqi ambush, and during the firefight an earthquake opens a hole in the ground, trapping the survivors in an underground temple full of hideous beasts hungry for their blood.

Yes, House of Ashes features real monsters.

Anyone who’s played the previous Dark Pictures entries, Man of Medan and Little Hope, will be all too familiar with their most popular criticism — that at each game’s climax, it was revealed that all of the monsters players had encountered were actually hallucinations caused by chemical weapons or mental illness. Supermassive Games obviously has no interest in getting a third strike from their die-hard fans, so a decent part of the House of Ashes preview was devoted to the not-imaginary beasts that will be stalking the player through the buried temple where the adventure is set.

While we weren’t treated to a good look at the monster design, Supermassive has made sure to make these beasts key to the promotional campaign. Not only did the presentation feature an extended clip featuring a monster attack, the designer specifically namechecked the films Aliens and The Descent as influences, and they even included a clip of a stunt performer doing motion capture for a beast throwing a giant piece of stone at someone. At this point, the advertising campaign may as well be ‘House of Ashes: This Time the Monsters Are Real‘.

Ravening beasts aren’t the only big change this time — the camera system has been completely revamped for a second time. Rather than the hybrid system Little Hope offered, House of Ashes gives players full third-person style control of the camera, allowing them to freely rotate and search the world to their heart’s content. This doesn’t mean Supermassive has lost their passion for cinematic presentation, however. In the eight-minute clip available, there were plenty of conversations and QTE sequences directed with all of the drama and intensity the series is known for.

Speaking of QTEs, Supermassive has gone out of its way to more effectively balance the difficulty this time around. This has always been a bit of a tricky issue for them — the best ending in Man of Medan was locked away behind a heartbeat-based QTE that was universally decried as too difficult, so in Little Hope the difficulty was dialed back so far that it was a breeze for most fans. This time they’ve eschewed the idea of a one-size-fits-all solution and added codified difficulty levels, letting players decide for themselves exactly how challenging they want things to be.

With its extreme gore, horrifying monsters and gorgeous presentation, The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes might be Supermassive’s best interactive movie yet — and of course, just like its predecessors, the entire game will be playable in co-op experience. Given the kind of extreme situations the teaser demonstrated, having some backup will likely be the optimal way to play.

Personally, I can’t wait to dig into the secrets that lay waiting beneath the mountains of Iraq. While the official release date is yet to be announced, look for more info on House of Ashes soon.

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HIGH The ruined house fight.

LOW The inexplicably awful ending.

WTF Seeing the tchotchkes in The Curator’s library.

The term ‘Stick the Landing’ comes from the world of gymnastics. It refers to the end of a routine, where the gymnast dismounts from whatever piece of equipment they were using and hits the ground perfectly with both feet. Managing to complete a routine while still having the composure to land and stand ramrod-straight is the true test of an athlete’s ability. It doesn’t matter how great the routine is up until that point — if the gymnast stumbles on the landing, it can invalidate all of the work they did up until that point.

Sticking the landing is also a potent metaphor in the world of storytelling because a plot is only as good as its ending. One might enrapture the a huge chunk of the world for a decade with a tale of dragons and court intrigue, but if the ending is terrible, all of that goodwill can disappear in an instant.

It should be clear by this point why I’m using this framing to begin a review of Little Hope, the latest entry in the Dark Pictures Anthology of interactive horror movies from Supermassive Games. I can say this is the developers’ most mature, interesting, and technically accomplished title yet. Sadly, after getting 99% of the story right, Little Hope absolutely blows it in the last five minutes and crashes to the ground in a heap of bruised bones and damaged ligaments.

After a series-standard horrific opening, a group of students and their teacher survive a bus crash on the outskirts of the titular city, then find themselves trapped by a mysterious fog that blocks their exit. The only choice is to press on and discover the secrets that the town holds.

Little Hope controls like the rest of Supermassive’s third-person interactive movies, with a couple of notable improvements. Players are in charge of one character at a time while walking through environments and looking for glints of light that indicate clues that they can examine. When characters have to perform a physical task or evade danger, a button prompt will appear onscreen and they’ll have to complete a QTE to safely continue their journey.

The developers have gone above and beyond to make sure that Little Hope is accessible for players of any skill level. They know that QTEs have a bad rap, but they’ve adjusted the difficulty so that even the most dedicated hater should get through them with little trouble. Quick tapping-based inputs can be switched to ones where the button must be held down. Input variety can be winnowed down to the point where only a single button has to be pressed. Most importantly, players can turn of the fail timer so they can take as long as they want before pressing X to continue.

Even more importantly, it’s now almost impossible to accidentally move the story along before the player is ready. In previous entries, players could accidentally click on the wrong interactive element and move out of an area before they were finished searching. Now a visually distinct button prompt appears to signal continuing the story and moving to a new location, so players have to actively make the choice to be finished with an area.

Rather than being a solo horror experience, Little Hope is designed first and foremost for co-op, and on that front, it excels. Its predecessor Man of Medan toyed with the idea of separating players from time to time, but generally there would be two characters in each scene, each one controlled by a real player. While there’s still some of that in Little Hope, the game frequently splits teams up and has them running through parallel adventures. While one player investigates a ruined police station, the other explores a dilapidated grocery store. Then the two halves of the party meet up again and get the chance to fill one another in on what they’ve discovered about the town’s mysteries.

This co-op is a wonderful experience, and I have to recommend it as the best possible way to play. Everything still works in solo mode, of course, but since players have to see what everyone is up to in order to understand the story, it leads to some repetition. Characters will complete searching one area, and then Little Hope will cut to the other characters who have to perform the exact same kind of activity. Yes, it’s all necessary, but it simply doesn’t flow as naturally as the co-op version does.

This is especially true in the many action sequences. Unlike Medan, all of the action sequences here are multi-character affairs, and while they play perfectly in co-op, trying them solo forces the game to do a strange ‘pause and shift’ effect where the player constantly switches who they’re playing as from moment to moment. It’s functional and visually impressive, but it just doesn’t flow the way the co-op action scenes do.

Technically, Little Hope‘s presentation is excellent, and Supermassive’s best-looking work. Little Hope is an eerie, claustrophobic environment whether inside or out, and being able to shine a flashlight wherever they want won’t make players any more comfortable. All of the acting is solid, as is the writing — I can’t reveal anything about the story since figuring it out is the entire point of the adventure, but it’s their most interesting tale so far.

…Right up until that ending.

I can’t fully express how betrayed I felt by the way Little Hope wraps up. I can’t say it was impossible to see coming since there are plenty of clues which point in the direction it ends up taking, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s terrible. I don’t want to risk spoiling anything, but I can safely say that it’s one of the worst endings I’ve seen in ages, and an absolute betrayal of the audience. Many players complained about Man of Medan’s big reveal, and I suspect the audience will react even more harshly towards this one.

I truly wish I could just say ‘ending aside, this is an incredible game’, because it’s true. This is the best-paced interactive movie I’ve ever played, and the mysteries of Little Hope are both intriguing and satisfying to solve. However, that ending. I simply can’t overstate how atrocious it is, and I wish I could just erase the last five minutes of it. I can still recommend it as an excellent interactive movie, just be ready for love to become hate right before the credits roll.

Disclosures: This game is developed by Supermassive and published by Bandai Namco. It is currently available on PC, PS4, and XBO. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PS4 Pro. Approximately 15 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed multiple times. 4 hours were spent in online campaign co-op.

Parents: According to the ESRB this game is rated M and contains Blood, Intense Violence, and Strong Language. There’s extreme horror violence here, and it’s scary as hell. This is not safe for children by any means.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available in the options.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: There are no audio cues to speak of. I was able to play the entire game with the sound off and encountered no difficulties. All dialogue is subtitled, and players can select the font size. Font colors can also be assigned to each speaker. The game also features a dyslexia-friendly font option. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: No, the game’s controls cannot be remapped. The left thumbstick controls movement, the right thumbstick is used to control the camera and make decisions. Face buttons and triggers are used to perform QTEs.

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