Review: Bloodlust

[The Wobbler]

Reposted from a review in HamsterSpeak #2: http://superwalrusland.com/ohr/issue2/bl/bl.html
This game has changed since this review and not all comments may still apply.

This review covers the demo version of this game posted in March 2007.

Bloodlust is an interesting game, and I can safely say I haven't played another OHR game like it. The themes and images are much darker and more disturbing than you'll typically see in a game on this engine, and while it still uses a turn based RPG battle system, the game is clearly more in tune with the horror genre popularized by Resident Evil and Silent Hill. As a disclaimer, I will say right now that I have not finished this game. I cannot pass a certain boss, even with the solution given in the solutions manual that's included with the game. I will address this later in the review.

I need to start off by saying that this game is extremely dark, in two very different ways: in content and visually. I'll cover the visual part first, since it bugged me almost the entire time I played. When I started playing, it was hard to tell where doors were, and even harder to make out any details on the map sprites. I was expecting to find a flashlight item that would make navigation easier, but I never found one. Instead, I turned my monitor's brightness to its maximum setting, and even then I still had trouble seeing certain things. I understand that the author is trying to create a dark, nightmarish world, but when the visual style gets in the way of the game's playability, it becomes a bother. For the purposes of this review, screenshots have been modified to be easier to see. Brightness has been increased dramatically in all but one of the images.

The other type of darkness that fills this game is its horror. Our hero wakes up in a house where everyone is either dead (and quite disgustingly dead) or missing, and blood is everywhere. He leaves his house in search of his parents, friends, or any other survivors. Throughout the game you will see tons of blood, often in disturbing contexts, so it's really not something for the faint of heart.

I personally find gore horror to be, by far, the least effective method of inspiring fear, both in videogames and movies. There is plenty of content here that will leave you disgusted (ripped up corpses, bathtubs of blood, a flying vagina monster) but none of these things are actually frightening. All right, the flying vagina monster scared me, but only because the idea of someone deciding to use such a thing as an enemy in a videogame scares me. The other monsters are not nearly as grotesque, and are all quite well drawn.

Thankfully, gore isn't all the game has to offer. The atmosphere is great, even though the maps are very simple in both design and graphics. This is the first OHR game I've played that has used sound effects, and it uses them wonderfully. The scene that stands out the most is early in the game, before the first enemy encounter. In this scene, our hero is inside a bathroom while a monster bashes itself into the door to break through. The sound effect used for this collision is great, and it's timed perfectly with the shaking of the camera. There is also a telephone you encounter in this first area that plays very bizarre, creepy sounds. A good understanding of sound is incredibly important in horror, and OnlyOneInAll clearly knows when and how to use it. There are no awful "loud noises out of nowhere" scares; all of the sound in the game is appropriate and well placed.

The dialog throughout the game is good, and contributes in large part to the game's effectiveness. The author does a great job of establishing the confused, dreamlike atmosphere of the game through the characters' thoughts. The worst part about the game's cutscenes is that they're drawn in a very cartoony anime style that feels completely different from the game's tone, but thankfully the author is addressing this in the next version. He has posted updated art work that looks much, much better, but for now we have a bunch of very cutesy characters in a very ugly situation.

While the dialog is interesting and the use of sound still impresses me, the game has several significant drawbacks as well. The environments are huge, but mostly empty. With a few exceptions, they are drawn in extremely simple ways, and it is hard to find them compelling. The school that you explore is particularly dull. You wander around a huge field looking for the one building that isn't locked, and your reward is a set of keys that you'll use to unlock a couple other buildings, where you'll find more keys to unlock more doors. The gameplay consists almost entirely of searching for keys and the doors they go to, and this gets dull fast due to the size of your environment. You can hold the Z key to run, but only in certain areas, and not where you'd want it the most (inside the school itself). Battles, which are engaged by touching wandering NPCs rather than random, are meant to be avoided, since your character is weakened after nearly every fight by the game's very unique fatigue system, in which stats decrease as level increases. A big problem with this is that these battles are often hard or impossible to avoid, so you're going to take a beating no matter what. Thankfully, most battles are short.

While the battles themselves are generally fine, they lead to a number of problems. If you use up all of your healing items in these lesser fights, you will absolutely not be able to beat the game's first boss. Healing items are scarce, and don't recover nearly enough health (A single hit from an enemy can deal more damage than either of the two lower level healing items can recover). Once they're gone, they're gone. There's no renewable source of health items, and no way to rest or recover yourself naturally without them. Unless you know exactly how many enemies you'll encounter and where, as well as how many items you can safely obtain, you're going to be screwed when you reach the boss of the school area.

I tried defeating this boss four times before I gave up, because I was clearly far too ill equipped to win. I simply didn't have enough supplies to last out the battle, and there was no way to get more short of restarting the entire game. This was a shame, because the game was interesting up to this point and I really want to know where the story is going. However, the long, boring trek between the school's save point and this boss, who killed me before I could defeat more than one of his four parts, made me give up.

The lack of useful recovery items and the long empty areas aren't the game's only problems. The puzzles that don't revolve around finding keys and opening random doors are, with one exception (in the school at least) only necessary for finding optional items that won't actually help you much. There are a couple of clever puzzles you'll encounter, but the reward for solving them is barely worth the effort. There is also an item that's required to progress that you likely won't find unless you consult the solutions manual or inspect every single tile you encounter, and in a game this large that's just not viable.

This game has a lot of potential, largely because OnlyOneInAll has some pretty unique (and some pretty horrific) ideas and because he has a great understanding of how to make a simple game appear very cinematic, but for now the cons outweigh the pros. I recommend trying it if you have a strong stomach, but with a few revisions this could become a far better game in the future. It's certainly one to keep watching.