Cursed Mountain

Platforms: Wii
Release Date: 2008-08-25
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
Buddhism at high altitudes is a great premise for a horror game, but mundane problems mar the experience.

Cursed Mountain would be a great horror game if the developer had spent another two months polishing it. As it is, it’s a great idea for a horror game, but the execution is so inconsistent that it only comes off as ok.

The story in Cursed Mountain is a little hard to follow (more on that in a minute), but the basic premise is that Eric Simmons, a famous mountain climber, is called to a remote Himalayan village because his brother has gone missing on the slope of Chomolonzo, a fictional Himalayan mountain. By the time he arrives, however, he finds the villages practically deserted. Making his way through a series of increasingly remote camps and Buddhist temples, he finds that the local population has been replaced by angry, hungry ghosts. Simmons must find his brother somewhere on Chomolonzo, figure out what happened, and avoid getting killed in the process.

As I mentioned in my initial impressions of this game, Cursed Mountain is an old-school horror game. The combat system borrows a lot from Resident Evil 4, and the graphics are nice and all, but this is a classic horror game through and through. The most obvious indicator of this orthodox pedigree is the pace; things move along at absolute snail speeds by modern horror standards. There are sections that remind me of the bygone era that spawned games like Silent Hill, where nothing happens for minutes at a time as the player walks through some increasingly foreboding place. This is not a knock on this game–the pace was clearly selected with care by the developers, and as long as you’re cool with the old-school horror style, it won’t bother you. If you’re looking for an action game or a game that is light on story but heavy on game play, you probably want to look elsewhere.

Cursed Mountain perpetuates other key traits of the traditional horror genre. There are documents to find all over the place, so lots of room ransacking is required. Health items can be collected but only used at certain points. Saves are also strictly gated. And the game has no life bar, almost no hud, and no continue system; if you die then your only recourse is to restart from a save.

If you’re a fan of old-school horror game play, this should feel really comfortable. And the developers know why this sort of trade-off should be made: it lets them focus on setting and story, which is where Cursed Mountain really shines.

Despite being difficult to follow, the story in Cursed Mountain isn’t bad at all. It’s unorthodox and interesting, if not exactly surprising. The setting in which the plot revolves is particularly fascinating. The whole game is steeped in Buddhist lore, specifically Tibetan Buddhism. Buddhism is a religion that has a lot of great ghost stories, and the developers have done a good job of integrating those ideas into the game. Of course, this is hardly a document on Buddhism; many liberties have been taken with the content in order to make it fit the mold of the game. But, as far as I can tell (and while I’m in no way an expert, I did study Buddhism at some length in school), the developers knew their source material really well. The interesting setting of remote villages, abandoned Buddhist temples, and eventually the deadly slope of the mountain itself is what makes Cursed Mountain worth playing.

Unfortunately, the value of the story and setting is degraded by mundane implementation issues. It’s not that Cursed Mountain is buggy, it’s just that it lacks a lot of polish–it looks like a game that was released just a little bit too early. All the necessary systems are there and working, but a few tweaks to the core game play and camera systems would have improved the game dramatically. All games go through this phase in development, it’s just unfortunate that Cursed Mountain had to be released this way.

The single biggest problem with the game play is the combat system. The concept is good: your character can either deal hits in 3rd-person melee mode or shoot in a Resident Evil 4-over-the-shoulder camera mode. When shooting, the Wii remote can be used as a targeting reticle. There’s some strategy between switching modes at the right time so that you can shoot far off guys and then hit close range guys. The problem is that the system doesn’t work well in enclosed spaces or when you have to fight more than one enemy at once. Once you go into the shooting mode, all of your peripheral vision is lost; half the screen is taken up by your character so you can really only see guys that are right in front of you. In Resident Evil 4, enemies are smart enough not to hit you in the back when you are aiming, because it sucks to be trying to line up a shot and get hit by some guy who snuck up on you. Unfortunately, that is exactly what happens all the time in Cursed Mountain.

Even worse, the ghostly enemies can teleport, so sometimes they’ll just appear behind you and go to town. And god forbid you get stuck between two or three enemies trying to hit you at once; getting hit interrupts whatever you are doing, and you can take a hit while reacting to a previous hit, so it’s possible to get stuck into a state where the enemies can pound on you repeatedly and you can’t move or shoot or do anything about it.

The combat system further breaks down when in tight, enclosed spaces. Since enemies can come up and hit you in the back at any time, the only viable strategy is to keep moving. If you can’t move because the space is small, you will take a lot more hits. And the enemies can fly through solid walls, meaning that even if they are not teleporting you may not be able to see them until the last second as their claws come out of the wall next to you and take a chunk out of your life bar.

Transitioning in and out of the combat states is too slow too; I often took hits while trying to get out of the shooting mode. And when going into the shooting mode, it always takes me a few seconds to get my Wii remote reticle on the screen, which is another opportunity to take a cheap hit. And the collision detection system seems way more accurate than it needs to be–it’s possible to have a character dead-to-rights and still miss because your axe slid under his arm pit or something. Not fun.

The final nail in the coffin for the combat system is the gesture-based banishing system. Rather than just killing enemies, you can take their life down a bit and then banish them with a series of Wiimote swipes. This feels cool and gives you a health boost. This is actually a really cool mechanic, but it’s totally ruined because one particular swipe, the “push forward” attack, isn’t properly detected about 50% of the time. It’s extremely annoying to get three or four gestures into a banishing move and then struggle to get the stupid push attack to work. Seriously, at least half the time I couldn’t get that one to work.

It’s not that the combat system is totally broken–it’s not. It’s just that these little errors add up after a while to a frustrating experience. The combat is really unpredictable; depending on where guys spawn in and how close the quarters are, I found myself dying over and over again on enemies that I had previously defeated without taking a hit.

The other complaint I have about Cursed Mountain is that it makes rookie mistakes with regard to health and save rationing. Specifically, the save points are very often placed just a little bit too far before or after a boss. For example, in some areas there’s a significant distance (and sometimes even enemies) between the save point and the boss. Every time the boss kills you you’ll have to re-traverse this same space and kill the same enemies over and over again. In some cases when the boss takes a lot of tries, that repeated level segments in front of the boss fight become way more frustrating than the fight itself.

The developers also, time and time again, mess up the placement of health items. In one particularly egregious example towards the end of the game, a health station is rendered useless because a cut scene occurs right after a major fight. When the cut scene ends the scene has changed and the protagonist is somewhere else. So even though there’s health right there, you can’t use it right after the fight because you’re warped elsewhere. In fact, you have to go through several more fights before another health station shows up. This kind of thing happens over and over again, and it makes the game a lot harder than it should have been.

Finally, though the story is interesting, Cursed Mountain does its best to hide it from you. Documents can’t be read immediately when they are picked up, and the cut scenes are really hard to follow. The cinematic style is interesting, but the cutscenes look like the storyboards of an animated sequence rather than a final film. They strobe so much that it’s really hard to figure out what is going on. The style is likely the result of time pressure, like every other problem in this game.

So, I enjoyed Cursed Mountain. The setting was fascinating and the story was interesting. The sounds is really good, and I liked the way that the game desaturates the screen when something ghostly is present. The meditating mini game was really neat too. The game is surprisingly long–it took me something like 15 hours to beat. And the staging and cameras are pretty good; for some reason the quality of the cinematography suddenly improves dramatically about half-way through the game.

It’s just that while the ideas are all solid, the actual execution leaves a lot to be desired. All of the problems that Cursed Mountain has are minor and easy to fix, I think. When put together they have a significant negative impact on the overall quality of the game.

Nanashi no Geemu

Also known as: Nanashi no Game
Platforms: DS
Release Date: 2008-07-03
Regions: Japan
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
An extremely innovative, if somewhat dull, take on handheld horror.

Nanashi No Geemu (lit. “Nameless Game” or “Game With No Name”) is a really interesting example of survival horror. First of all, it’s a Nintendo DS game, and despite the difficulty of building tension on a handheld device, Nanashi No Geemu does a pretty fine job. Second, it’s self-referential and uses its medium as an axis for horror; the game is about a cursed handheld game that kills its players. Finally, there is a hard-core attention to detail when it comes to the cursed game itself; in addition to looking and playing just like an 8-bit RPG, errors and visual artifacts reminiscent of NES-era consoles begin to appear as the curse takes hold. When I wrote about my initial impressions of the game I was pretty excited–this is the kind of thing us survival horror geeks love. It’s innovative, different, interesting, and surprisingly effective.

But now that I’ve completed the game my feelings are a little more mixed. Yes, the game is a fantastic idea, and yes, the use of a Dragon Quest-like RPG as a way to build tension is a stroke of genius, but the rest of the game lacks this same charm. Most of the game is spent exploring 3D environments, and the game play in these sections is, quite frankly, lame. The environments themselves look good, and though it’s a bit arduous to move in first person using the stylus and D-pad while holding the DS like a book, the mechanics basically work. The problem is that there’s just nothing to do in the environments. They are all mostly linear, there are no items to find or collect, no major puzzles blocking your path. It’s pretty much just “walk from point A to point B.” You can’t even examine most of the objects in the game world.

Along the way you will be occasionally accosted by strange ghosts, who walk around like zombies and can kill you in a single hit. The only puzzles in this mode involve deciphering how to avoid the ghosts. You have no means to attack them, so avoidance is the only option. Sometimes the solution is to leave a room and re-enter it again, which often causes any ghosts in the room to vanish. But when that doesn’t work, your only option is to try to run away and wait for the cursed game to “call” you.

At regular intervals the cursed game will show up and you are compelled to play (even if you are standing only inches away from some malicious ghost monster). The purpose of the RPG mode is to give you hints about how to complete the area you are currently exploring in 3D. It contains a lot of dialog (it’s an RPG, after all) and occasionally presents a puzzle, but mostly it exists to advance the plot. I did like how it recreates the layout of the dilapidated hospitals, hotels, and homes that you must explore in 2D top-down 8-bit graphics; the idea is very cool but in the end there’s very little depth.

So that’s the entire game. A short introductory text sequence, followed by a new area to explore in 3D which is interrupted periodically by the cursed game. Lather, rinse, repeat. Famous game designer Sid Meier once defined games as “a series of meaningful choices.” By that metric, Nanashi No Geemu is hardly even a game. There’s almost no choice involved at all. There’s only ever one solution to every problem, and the path to each solution is forced and linear. Even worse, there are some extremely frustrating sections where you must either wield the clunky controls perfectly or continue blindly into certain death and rely on an exception to the regular game rules to survive.

It’s fair to say that Nanashi no Geemu has some serious problems. The game play is extremely shallow, and while the story isn’t poorly written, it’s pretty hackneyed and routine (although I expect game development folks to get a kick out of the over-work-at-a-game-company-drove-me-to-murder angle). The game is so dark on my first-generation DS that it is almost impossible to play with any sort of ambient light; I ended up finishing it in a pitch-dark room because that’s the only way I could see where I was going. And the save points are way too few and far between; even though the DS can sleep at any time, I lost progress more than once because I ran out of batteries before I was able to reach the end of a section and save.

And yet, despite all the problems, the thing that confounds me the most is that Nanashi No Geemu can actually be pretty scary. I think that the combination of 3D exploration of some foreboding locale and the meticulously recreated 8-bit RPG makes the game more believable. As I wrote in my initial impressions, The authenticity of the RPG lends authenticity to the rest of the experience. Once the RPG shows up and is so expertly created, players who themselves have experience playing RPGs can’t help but be sucked into the rest of the experience. And the game backs this up with a completeness to its presentation; even a false (but completely believable) DS main screen is present to reenforce the game’s fiction.

But the real source of horror, I think, is the sound. The audio design is very well done, and it is the final (and perhaps most important) ingredient in Nanashi No Geemu’s horror formula. The game advises you to play with headphones, which turns out to be critical to the experience. In the 3D mode, the positioning of sounds in the world helps you navigate, but it also means that you can hear the ghost monster behind you dragging his feet as he approaches. In the RPG mode, the sound and music become another vector by which the corruption of the game is made evident. And by the time the game music starts to become audible in the real world, it’s so familiar and recognizable that its presence alone feels malicious.

Nanashi No Geemu is a fascinating game. As a game, it lacks depth and longevity, and just isn’t all that fun. As horror, its approach is extremely interesting and fairly effective despite its technical constraints. I can’t decide how I feel about it in total; the lack of compelling game play is a big dent, but it’s almost completely compensated for by the fantastic presentation, attention to detail, and innovative game-within-a-game mechanic. I guess what I can say is that this game is highly recommended for folks who, like me, are interested in the various forms that horror games can take. If you are just looking for a good horror game on the DS, this might work for you if you can stomach slow, repetitive game play. If not, you might want to look elsewhere.

Dead Space

Platforms: Xbox360, PS3, PC
Release Date: 2008-10-13
Regions: USA Europe
Chris’s Rating: ★★★☆
A high-end combination of Resident Evil 4 and Event Horizon that is technically excellent but ultimately unsatisfying.

Usually when I finish a game I try to write a review for it as quickly as possible, while the experience is still fresh in my mind. My goal with reviews is to get the feeling of playing the game across to my readers–I’m not so interested in just enumerating the whiz-bang graphics features or pointing out every functional flaw in a given game. If too much time passes between my completion of a game and my review, I worry that I will not be able to capture the essence of playing the game effectively. That’s why some key horror games (such as Silent Hill 2) have no review; I didn’t write one early enough and now I don’t feel like I could without playing the game through again.

But in the case of Dead Space, I finished the game a few days ago and have had a really hard time figuring out what I want to say about it. The thing about Dead Space is, I didn’t like it all that much, but I am not exactly sure what about the game turned me off. It’s not the technical execution; that area is flawless. It’s not the game play–it would be hypocritical for me to criticize a game so similar in game play to Resident Evil 4, which I loved. There are no obvious problems with the pacing, or the enemy design, or the dialog, or anything like that. Dead Space is a very slick game, made by a team of extremely hardworking pros. And yet, something about it just doesn’t sit right with me, and I’ve delayed writing this review to try to figure out what the problem is.

Dead Space is a horror game that takes place on a derelict space ship sometime in the relatively far future. A small crew arrives to respond to a distress call and finds the ship abandoned and completely devoid of life. At least that’s what they think until the lights go out and big fleshy things with blade-arms start cutting them to pieces. The protagonist is Isaac, an engineer who, with the help of a few other survivors, must try to find a way to get off the ship and while he’s at it maybe make sure that the alien monstrosities that inhabit the vessel are driven extinct. Oh yeah, and his fiance was aboard this ship too, so it would be good if he located her as well. Basically it’s the same setup as the plot from Event Horizon.

The moment-to-moment game play is almost completely lifted from Resident Evil 4. The key differentiation points are that Isaac can move and shoot at the same time, that the way to kill enemies is to shoot off their limbs, and that he can apply telekinesis or a time slowdown effect to enemies to help him slaughter them more effectively. And in fact, it is these derivations where the game is strongest; stopping an enemy in mid launch with the time slowdown power and then leisurely shooting off its limbs to see the blood spray in slow motion is a treat. The rest of the design is very much the RE4 formula: there’s a store where weapons can be purchased or sold, a shooting gallery mini game, melee combat that acts as a way to open storage boxes and as a close-range quick attack, laser sights and a focus on localized targeting, the same over-the-right-shoulder camera system, a special, unkillable enemy, scenes of the protagonist being decapitated by enemies when the killing blow is dealt, an inventory of limited size, items that can be upgraded by combining them with other items found in the world, boss fights involving tentacles that must by individually shot, et cetera et cetera. I am sure that the basic design for Dead Space began as “Resident Evil 4 in space,” and the influence of Capcom’s revolutionary title really shows. It’s almost as if some of the design choices were made just because they also existed in Resident Evil.

Which isn’t a bad thing. RE4 is a great game and it is a great model for other games to follow. Dead Space does an admirable job of retracing the path that RE4 blazed, and it lays claim to a number of unique innovations too (in addition to the interesting combat system, the HUD system is pretty awesome and I haven’t seen the time slowdown power used outside of Viewtiful Joe). By any technical standard, Dead Space is a well-made game. And on top of that, it’s pretty fun to play. Like I said, nothing obviously wrong here.

I also need to give some serious props to the sound system in particular. The sounds in Dead Space are great, but the sound system is phenomenal. The system is capable of reacting to real-time play scenarios and it’s really good at picking out contextually appropriate sounds. I really liked how a stinger is automatically played when an enemy surprises you and the camera swings it into view for the first time; even the volume of these stingers seems to be adjusted dynamically depending on the content of the scene. I was very impressed with the sound in Dead Space, and I think it’s easily the strongest piece of the game’s attempt to build tension.

But there is something missing from the whole formula. Some key element that, in its absence, prevents Dead Space from rising above “merely entertaining.” All the pieces are in place but they just never click together. Dead Space is a deep dish pizza with all the toppings and five different types of cheeses that tastes inexplicably bland. I racked my brain to figure out what it is that Dead Space is missing, and the best I could do was decide that the game lacks soul.

But then it occurred to me that it might not just be one particular problem. Maybe there are several individually minor issues that in sum somehow suck some of the life out of this game. With that in mind I came up with the following list of reasons I think Dead Space is less compelling than it should be:

  • The characters are paper-thin. Though they talk a lot and the voice acting is good, we know nothing about them. The audio logs that Isaac collects throughout the game have way more character than the various main characters, but the voices in those logs are from people who are obviously already dead.
  • The plot is under-developed and predictable. At no point was I surprised by any turn of events in Dead Space. The core story components were there and there was a lot of exposition, but the plot itself ended up being pretty inconsequential.
  • The player is always in control. There are several aspects to this point. First, the player is a badass and pops a cap in everything that moves. Second, he has support from external team members who are safe. Third, the game is incredibly linear, so much so that there is almost never any time for actual exploration; it’s just go from point A to point B over and over again. I think this level of linearity is ultimately comforting and routine, which is not what you want for a horror game.
  • The game play is repetitive. The moment-to-moment play is great, but there’s really only three or four types of challenges in the entire game and all of them are introduced in the first few chapters.

Ultimately, I think my problem with Dead Space is that it didn’t require me to think about anything. I really like seeking out the extra content in this kind of game, be it ammo packs tucked away in the corner of a level or ancillary plot content that helps flesh out the game scenario; I enjoy games that dangle little clues about the plot in front of me and let me try to piece them together in my head. Dead Space doesn’t have any of this; it’s just way too straightforward. The game play is fine, the graphics are hot, the production quality is universally high. But that’s all there is to it–there’s nothing here requiring any sort of problem solving or cognitive reasoning. Your thumbs get a work out and your eyes get some candy but your brain can fall asleep. I felt the same way about Gears of War.

I should mention that multiple people have told me that the real magic of the Dead Space design isn’t really evident on the Normal difficulty, and playing on Hard is a significantly better experience. I can see how that might be true; anything that requires the formulation of a strategy or any kind of other critical thinking would help this game be a lot more fun and a lot more scary. My experience, however, was that it’s an extremely well produced game that I had a lot of trouble staying interested in.