Gameplay

Bringing back the ole tank controls, they took the reinvention of the classic horror games down to the D-pad. The movement is styled and feels as smooth as tank controls can possibly feel, which for some can be an issue. There was only one thing missing when it came to the movement for me, someone who doesn’t have trouble using tank controls after playing through classic games countless times, and that is the ability to quickly turn your character around. You have to slow turn yourself if you need to turn around, but otherwise the controls feels just as they did back in the early 2000’s.

The main focus of the game is making progress by completing puzzles. If you know the answers, it doesn’t take long to get through the first Chapter, but solving these puzzles ended up taking me a few hours. They did an amazing job at bringing back the strange puzzles in a strange atmosphere. These ranged from a few different types of puzzles. My favorite of these puzzles were the ones I have nicknamed the Seeds, the Clocks, and the Repeating Rooms. Very few of the puzzles were easy, so be prepared to be using some brain power on this one and I do strongly suggest taking notes just like we did back in the days of Silent Hill puzzle solving (without the help of the internet).

There are a couple creature encounters in this chapter, but sadly there is no combat system set up just yet. I did talk to the developers about this and they stated,

“This chapter wasn't designed with combat in mind. It was a creative choice and a time-saving one. Before Christopher joined the team I was working on this thing alone - to be a web game that wasn't more than 20mb. So combat was cut because of my lack of modelling and animation skills, to save space and to save development time.

When the plugin that supported that idea was no longer supported the game grew into a standalone game - but by then the thing had already been fully designed and somewhat fully programmed and modeled. And while the systems got refactored there was never time or desire to add combat into this chapter. It didn't feel right to shoe-horn it.

But in the second chapter we are planning... well, maybe you might just find that lead pipe.”

The view itself is how it was in the classic horror games as well. You are given a series of stationary cameras with the occasional one that follows you slightly. The goal is to let you see what you need to see and control the players view which, as classic horror players know, can give you an eerie or uncomfortable sensation on its own. Don’t expect to be able to control the camera angles yourself as you tank your way through the map.