Review - DreadOut
Release: 2014
Technical Score: 5/10
Enjoyability Score: 8/10
We’re all dying waiting for you to get here.
I can’t tell you where I first heard of this game. It just showed up in the consciousness of the survival horror gaming community one day. It combined the gameplay and tonal leanings of Fatal Frame with the unique and engrossing mythology of Indonesia. The result was a two-part game that struggled valiantly to display good writing and awesome game direction through buggy mechanics and outdated graphics. It’s also worth an honorable mention right off the bat that the game had a significant gap in release dates between parts one and two, and that part two fixed many of the problems that plagued part one.
This is a game that by its very nature isn’t going to appeal to everyone. DreadOut is heavily inspired by 2000’s era survival horror and the Fatal Frame series (also known as Project Zero) in particular. It does, however, fit cozily into a niche that had been left void outside Japan for a long while. The main character is Linda, one of several teenagers whose van becomes lost on a school trip, stranding them in an abandoned village. As Linda drifts between waking and dreams she finds herself alone except for a myriad of strange creatures she can only drive away by photographing them with her cellphone.
Part 1 features the outskirts of the town and a large high school building in traditional survival horror tone, and part 2 has faster paced action-oriented segments throughout the residential areas of the town. The story is extremely vague, told through documents and the occasional chatty enemy. What can be pieced together from hints and the game’s visual storytelling is often contradictory, and it soon becomes apparent that someone or something has been lying. If you’re not familiar with Indonesian mythology it makes the story, and the tropes supporting it, completely unfamiliar. For me, that was a breath of fresh air after decades of the same horror tropes. It also means that all the pondering in the world may not make the story clear to a non-Indonesian player. The only problem I have with the story, however, is that the protagonist, Linda, is completely silent alongside a voice acted cast.
Concept and game design are really solid. Unfortunately, it’s clearly the engine that lets the game down. Many people are turned off immediately by the game’s graphics, which look about ten years out of date. Combine that with buggy gameplay and clunky controls and it’s another black mark against the game. Finally, playing this game on PC caused me some motion-induced nausea, though it went away when I switched to playing on my TV. However, that remains something to take into account for fellow sufferers.
For the most part, gameplay is centered around exploration, searching for items and the solutions to puzzles. Many puzzles make use of the camera mechanic, having the player frame photos in certain ways to reveal secrets or to effect the environment via Linda’s mysterious power. These puzzles are highly hit and miss. When they work, they’re clever and satisfying, but sometimes they’re incomprehensible, require unintuitive steps, or are heavily prone to frustrating, otherwise undetectable glitches. When something seems like it should be working and isn’t rebooting the game is usually the answer.
As Linda variously explores or tries to escape she encounters various entities from Indonesian mythology and folklore. Most enemies can be defeated by photographing them with Linda’s trusty cell phone or the more modern camera she finds later on, but other enemies require special tricks or puzzles to be solved before defeating them. Others must merely be endured. Enemy encounters, particularly boss battles, are where DreadOut really shines. What developers Digital Happiness couldn’t do with their technological capabilities they more than made up with gameplay design. I’d have to give spoilers to say more, but many enemy encounters in the game are among the most dynamic I’ve played in this genre. Both their obstacles and solutions are clever, tricky, and surprisingly intuitive. The system in the second half of the game in which Linda has two camera options is an innovative twist. The phone is useful as a flashlight, and ‘sees’ better in the dark, but has a smaller viewfinder than the SLR camera. The camera also has a flash feature which lights up an entire room for a moment, which is useful in and out of combat.
With all this going for the game it’s a shame the engine wasn’t just a touch more stable. Aside from the fact that sometimes things that should work simply don’t, another issue is the game’s performance itself. It looks old, it feels old, but it needed settings cranked up to maximum on my PC to run smoothly. Meanwhile, the camera was jerky, and in finder mode it can be hard to track enemies as smoothly as desired. The camera has a nasty habit of jerking or over-correcting at poor moments. Death has limited consequences, merely a repetitive sequence of Linda running back towards an increasingly distant light, but it can be very frequent in the hardest boss battles. Anything the makes deaths more frequent, especially when it’s the game’s fault and not the player’s, is not appreciated. Meanwhile, Linda and the camera are both clunky and prone to not going where the player wants. Again, not game-ruining, but certainly a persistent inconvenience.
DreadOut makes the best out of limited components. Back in the day, Gamespot used to attach ‘stickers’ to the tops of their reviews that gave the highlights of a game’s features. Right now, I wish I could borrow the ‘better than the sum of its parts’ sticker. Because at the end of the day, that’s exactly what DreadOut is. Despite being hamstrung by technological limitations it did what it wanted to do and managed to display some impressive creative chops in the process. It wasn’t going to win any awards overseas, but it has generated a small cult following, and apparently enough profit to enable a sequel which I eagerly await. DreadOut is just the right length and difficulty to fill a weekend, and with a low pricetag on steam might be just right for anyone looking to get spooked just a little off the beaten path.