You Will Die Here Tonight

There are some neat ideas to arcade-ify the survival horror experience, but few of them feel fleshed out outside of the narrative ties between gameplay and story, and You Will Die Here Tonight has little else going for it. It is, like so many indie horror throwbacks, a total rehash of RE1's Spencer Mansion, and features many of the same layouts and setpieces. The greater focus on trial and error, and being able to swap characters after death, does mean the level designers have a bit more fun with the death traps on offer; if losing progress is less of a blow, they're allowed to be more cheeky with killing you suddenly. And while it ends up far too easy, the ideas behind the combat system are pretty salient. Featuring an RE Gaiden or Dead Aim sort of first person mode, it's fast, snappy, and the pixellated filter on top of combat sequences does well to hide enemies in plain view, making it more scary than...well, the atmosphere of the house when you're not shooting things, funnily enough.

You Will Die has few other ideas to it, and what ideas it does have aren't fully developed. You can lock and unlock many doors to keep zombies out, who will chase you outside of combat, but the house has many ammo drops, both random and as permanent buffs for the rest of the playthrough, so by the time you can get your SWAT or Doorkickers on, it's just as easy to shoot everything. Similarly, there are a few clever twists to the plot that are forecast pretty well, giving off serious DRV3 vibes, and getting the true ending requires being clever with the characters you play...but only really in two instances. Out of six, only half the cast is literally useful, and their differences only amount to combat prowess and some characters being able or unable to upgrade your gear per run. But what gear is brought over from death to death feels very arbitrary, and doesn't lend itself well to the design of this classic survival horror formula. You can just as easily brute force the game as get by with perfect planning, which robs the game of a lot of its danger. Shame as most of the puzzles are decent enough; within the old mold of matching clues together but with just enough secrecy to be interesting.

There's technically a lot to love, but You Will Die Here Tonight is more fun to talk about, think about and look at than it is to actually play. It's too short, shallow and easy to take advantage of its fun gimmicks, and too derivative to stand on its own.