S&S Indie Review: Blackwell's Asylum
Title: Blackwell's Asylum
Platform: PC
Release Date: 7 June, 2012
Publisher: Blackpipe
Developer: Blackpipe
Price: Free (Demo)
ESRB Rating: N/A
A "survival horror" game that has very little of either.
Premise
The game opens with you (a young girl named 'Nelly') being held down by a couple of orderlies. The more evil-looking of the two injects you with something, then both of them are called away (presumably to do more nefarious deeds). They leave you to your own devices and forget to lock the door behind them, leading me to think that this is the most incompetently run asylum in the world.
The game keeps you in the dark as much as possible about the story and plot. Fair enough, that's one way to build tension, but Amnesia: The Dark Descent did an awesome job of setting the stage for the game in the opening sequence, giving us the outline of our character and the plot, without detracting from the experience as a whole.
I had to go online to figure out what the point to all this is and why I should care. Which, aspiring game devs, is really something you need to establish in-game.
Apparently, you're a girl who's been put into Blackwell's Asylum for Women. The goal seems to be "navigate the asylum and try find your way out" and presumably along the way you have plenty of time to ponder whether or not it's all in your mind and you've just dreamed it all.
But no. What we get is a fairly scary and intense 5-10 minutes on the Scaresville Express, but then the conducter shows up and the train breaks down, so everyone has to take a bus to Screw-Up Central. And the bus driver smells.
To put it more succinctly, the game gets real bad, real fast.
Gameplay and Mechanics
At first, I was genuinely scared. Honestly! The game has a good opening, and up until the ten minute mark everything is awesome - the atmosphere is oppressive, the corridors are wonky and misshapen, and at one point you stand on a balcony and the room you were in changes to a completely different one. I don't think you could ask for a better set up.
But then they had to ruin it with the most god-awful 'bad guy' in the history of survival horror.
Those of you who have played Amnesia: The Dark Descent know that monsters are serious business. When you see one, you know that shit is going to go down (in more ways than one). They're hideously mangled humanoids, they make gargling noises, you hear this nails-on-chalkboard sound when they come running after you, and have you seen their face? I didn't sleep for days after seeing that... thing up close.
So forgive me for thinking that Amnesia well and truly set the bar for survival horror (with due credit to Silent Hill). And to say I was underwhelmed at the bad guy in Blackwell's Asylum is a massive understatement.
It's just... It...
It's just a dude.
There's nothing inherently scary about this dude. He's got a syringe and a creepy, somewhat rapist-y mustache, but he's still just an orderly in a plain blue shirt and white pants. He doesn't yell or warble at you either, he just sort of says "Hey! What are you doing out of bed?" as if it's a genuine question. As if this sort of thing happens all the time, and it's just so routine. They still have the nails-down-chalkboard sound effect when he's running at you, but instead of a hideous abomination lurching at you, it's a run-of-the-mill, 9-to-5, here's-your-apple-juice-Mrs-Higgens orderly.
That isn't even the worst part. I guess they thought that the bad guy being about as scary as a dozing kitten just wasn't mild enough, so Nelly has the ability to sense where an orderly is via eco-location. What this means is you can see where the enemy is, even if he's in a completely different room, just by keeping an eye out for the extremely visible white soundwaves giving away his exact location.
I mean, come on - this is supposed to be a survival horror game. How could they possibly think that telling the player where the bad guys are would make it frightening? I shouldn't even need to point this out! That isn't even textbook - you don't ever tell the player where the bad thing is! It's like making a first person shooter and giving you a rapid-fire BFG that never runs out of ammo!
This is basic, people! The monster under your bed or just outside your door never revealed it's exact position, which made it all the more terrifying because, well, it could be right next to you in the darkness.
Imagine if it did tell you were it was; "Alright Timmy, if you move your left ar- no, left arm, yep, about three and a half inches - bam! There it is, that's my foot! I am exactly three and a bit inches away from you, standing on your bed! I'm also a bit hairy." That's not scary! It's a little creepy, I grant you, but it's not scary!
AAAAARGH.
Let's talk about something else before I burst a blood vessel.
Art, Sound and Visual Design
As I mentioned before, the corridors and walls are all wonky and angular. Not saying that's a bad thing - I mean, they clearly weren't going for realism the way Frictional Games was. Personally, it's a great start to a horror game, if only it actually was horror! arrargh hsssss nash nash
Deep breaths, Kieran.
The sound is pretty good, if a little loud. There's not a lot of music, which arguably makes it scarier, but I felt Amnesia's music helped set the scene and to sell the room and atmosphere. Blackwell's Asylum has no ambient music, just the rustling of your character's pale green scrubs. And her breathing, if you're hiding somewhere. I guess they were trying to make you feel more isolated and alone. And I sure was, because the game forgot to invite Horror or Pacing or any other of the friends I made when I first played Amnesia: The Dark Descent.
The absolute nadir of the game for me was just after the first enemy. You bypass him fairly easily (due to your ecolocation superpower), and as you progress down the linear path of rooms and corridors, your vision becomes more and more wavy. And it's not a gentle waviness either, it's the kind of waviness you might get after taking half a kilogram of LSD and being aboard the sinking Titanic.
I remember ducking out of the game to write some notes about my experience, and I was so dizzy from being exposed to the comically overdone wavy room effect that I started to feel seasick. My head spun, I was wobbling and rocking in my chair, and I was thinking about running to the bathroom in case I had to vomit, but I was worried that I would stumble and fall face-first into one of the many heaters populating my house (how's that northern hemisphere weather working out for you guys? 'Cause it's freezing down here in New Zealand).
Conclusion
I never finished the demo - the waviness got way too intense, and I was worried that playing any further would cause me to violently coat my laptop with what I had for dinner. Even thinking about that particular section is enough to make me feel nauseous and waver about.
Trying to pinpoint where they went wrong is like trying to pinpoint why a submarine made out of bread wouldn't work, in that it's really easy (it's made out of fucking bread, you moron) but wouldn't necessarily penetrate (but I like bread!). In this case, don't make the main character half-dolphin. But I suspect no matter how hard you try to explain that to the game developers, it wouldn't go through, because surely to god if the developers had half a lick of sense they would've already come to that conclusion, and I wouldn't have to replace my shredded couch because I needed to take out my frustration on something, and can you think of a better use of an old chainsaw?
Play the demo on Steam if you want to see what I mean, but I really don't recommend it. If you were thinking about buying it, don't. Save up for Frictional Games's next game, and buy the Penumbra series and Amnesia: The Dark Descent if you haven't already. They're infinitely better games.
Two Sentence Summary:
"I've never seen a more clearer example of premature ejaculation in a video game before. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go not think about being on a boat."
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