Those Who Remain (Multi)
By: Camel 101
CALIFORNIAN micro-budgeted developers Camel 101 describe themselves as “game makers, dream shapers and overall great guys”. While I can’t comment on the last point, their attempt at videogame horror makes it hard to agree with the first two.
Its dimly lit arthouse shenanigans are a creaky take on psychological horror, where, as misery-guts type Edward, players investigate unfinished monkey business up at t'old town of Dormont involving shadowy mentalists on the rampage.
A man with a mysterious, tragic past and a fondness for the sauce, Edward travels to a motel to break up with his mistress and ends up galumphing through a deserted town, avoiding baddies and solving puzzles with equal precision. With knifey shadow creatures following him wherever he goes, Edward must jigsaw together a convoluted plot surrounding a young girl’s murder, dealing with lashings of psychological guilt en route.
The similarities to Microsoft’s classic Xbox horror Alan Wake are rife, with light-dodging enemies that spell mucho puzzling around fire and phosphorescent bulbs. Visiting various landmarks in Dormont, you’ll discover how people wronged the tragic Annika and her mother before deciding on whether each individual deserves forgiveness or punishment.
But if you’re going to pilfer from the best, you’ll get compared to it, too, and whereas Alan Wake’s slick production and canny plot kept hairs on edge, Those Who Remain’s first-person exploration involves a tedious root through abandoned buildings, finding light sources and searching for pretentious, oblique clues.
Most of the gameplay involves opening drawers and combing your cursor over objects in the hunt for clues, keys or tools. Once you’ve gathered enough evidence, a masked figure shows up and asks you to pass judgment on the offending person.
It’s certainly nice to play a horror that doesn’t involve plugging zombies with hot lead, but despite lashings of atmosphere that leans more on the psychological hoo-ha of Silent Hill, Those Who Remain just isn’t any fun.
Its confusing, fright-free schlep is crippled by infuriating checkpoints (often chucking you back half an hour at times) and punishing one-hit kills that are a lesson in frustration. The limited, repetitive gameplay is hog-tied by its lack of hints or even a map, and while mercifully short – taking only four to six hours for a playthrough, you’ll barely be bothered to trudge through it more than once to suffer those multiple endings.
