Remothered: Tormented Fathers

Maybe auteurs with initials that include C and D shouldn't be in games, because Chris Darril might be the worst 'visionary' this side of David Cage, at least off the back of this game. Remothered: Tormented Fathers is an absolute joke in almost every way. While the direction and attempt to match the complete helplessness of Clock Tower, Haunting Ground and even a bit of Rule Of Rose are admirable, the game's atmosphere only really succeeds in its dank Gothic colour pallette and occasionally some nice bits of environmental detail. Otherwise, none of the game's parts really function on their own and they come together in an incoherent and borderline unplayable mess. There's a surprising amount of depth to the stalker mechanics, being able to set distraction traps, lock some doors, use defence items, dodge, hide in cupboards and so on, but it doesn't really amount to much when they're so blind and dumb you can get away with running everywhere most of the time. And you should, because Rose's default walking speed is ridiculously slow. Combined with some adventure game pixel hunting and byzantine key item solutions, it makes the game a slog even with a very small mansion size and no real puzzles to speak of. No part of Remothered's gameplay loop is at all tantalising or engaging, and delving into the game's style, it doesn't get any better.

While the game has a few neat audio occlusion techniques when characters are behind walls and doors, and the voice acting is mostly passable and occasionally way too good for its script, the house isn't really that interesting to explore or look at, and the stalker designs are all ridiculous. What could have made for an interesting set-up with several unique enemies is undercut when you realise the biggest threat in the game is a geriatric 70-year-old wearing nothing but an apron and boots. Kind of hard to be intimidated by someone when you spend most of the game seeing their wrinkly ass cheeks. And the reasons for why all this is happening are at once totally bizarre and very by-the-numbers. You could CinemaSins this plot to hell (like how the Feltons could feasibly afford a three story house with this much decoration), but it's just a badly told hodgepodge of some of the oldest horror tricks in the book, with complete rip-offs of plot points from Psycho and Silence Of The Lambs, but so obfuscated by what I assume is a bad translation (but occasionally a failure to flesh out the story with collectible photos and diaries) that I relied on a story recap available in the pause menu to entirely understand what happened. It's a baffling situation where we find out why our protagonist would even go to this haunted house and it just brings up more "chicken or the egg" questions. I didn't think Ghostwire: Tokyo would be beat out for a tasteless religion vs. atheism debate that comes out of nowhere, but Tormented Fathers was up for the challenge.

And so on. The music seems well-integrated as a tool to detect your enemies but gets very annoying very quickly, and its use of "licensed" music is no Returnal or Alan Wake and feels like a bit of a cop-out. Engine performance is pretty bad, and lacks a lot of post-processing to truly bring Felton Villa to life, animation is stiff, and the game is only scary because of how loud the audio cues are. But it doesn't even do that as well as Dark Pictures or FNAF because the danger is so limited. And the problematic aspects of the story are difficult for me to ignore, even if it's probably just a by-product of the game's reliance on old tropes as well as its translation issues. But Signalis shows you can make Euro-centric horror with a lot of fanservice that still tells a unique and interesting story, and pre-Signalis as this game is, it still feels like I would have been too good for it in 2018.

Pretty much what everyone else is a saying, a Clock Tower clone mixed with some Outlast/Silent Hill influence. The game is you're pretty much in a mansion and your goal is the hide from psychopaths while going to different areas of the mansion to find items that allow you to progress, think similar to Resident Evil where you need to find items to progress and solve puzzles. This seems cool at the start, like a game where you are constantly being stalked and need to always be hiding and alert, but the first part of the game you are hiding from an old man with sickle, there is nothing scary about him at all. The game picks up later on when you have to hide from a creepy nun. But this game kind of gets old because you are constantly backtracking to the same areas and hiding in the same places. If you get caught you pretty much are forced to run in circles around the mansion until you find a room and hiding spot and are undetected. The game goes way downhill in the final act when you have to run away from a psycho girl who shoots you with a nail gun and then in the final act you have to navigate an area around a blind girl who can kill you in one hit and is very trial and error. The story is just bad and makes little sense, and the characters are really weird and odd, I felt like the twist in this game was almost a rip off of Resident Evil Code Veronica. The voice acting is pretty bad and sounds like it was recorded in a tin can. The main character just feels so generic and boring.

This game had potential, and at times I did find myself a bit nervous playing this and even enjoying the game, but it just has no variety and doesn't have enough to it, its short and can be beaten in around 5 hours, it only has 3 main villains, well 2 technically, the gameplay just consists of hiding and running away for like 3/4 of the game. Plus the design is just annoying, often I found myself not knowing where the enemy is, and going into a room only to bump right into him, despite not being able to hear the enemy. There should have been a way to use your hearing to determine which room the enemy was in or see through walls like last of us. I mean even Alien Isolation gave you that radar to detect where the alien was. This game you can't even tell where the enemy is because if they are a floor below you, you can still hear them. And the lack of maps also makes this game annoying, I mean a survival horror game without a map makes about as much sense as a FPS game without the ability to jump or an RPG without an open world to explore. Remothered isn't a bad game and has good ideas and even is tense for the first 1/2 or so, but it just gets a bit old fast and the final act just feels so rushed and poorly put together with a bad story. This is a game I'd love to see a sequel for because it has so much potential, and I hope they do something with it, I just would hate to see this franchise go the way of Outlast, where the first game was solid then the sequel completely disregarded what made that game great.