This is Supermassive’s newest title, Supermassive are the developers who crafted Until Dawn, The Quarry and The Dark Pictures games. It follows almost the same structure as the previously mentioned games with a focus on the narrative and branching paths. It was released on the 3rd of September for all platforms except the Switch.
The Absence of Horror
This is supposed to be a horror title, just like Supermassive’s other games from their portfolio, this game is set in the Dead by Daylight Universe. The game manages to hook you in by the first hour mark with intriguing dialogue, suspense and a jumpscare. This invites curiosity as to what will happen once you get taken to the Fireworks Factory.
But as you tensely wait for more of the Supermassive charm with choices which would impact how the narrative plays out it becomes painstakingly obvious that maybe Supermassive haven’t looked at the narrative themselves. The player will just have to keep on waiting as they go forward and seemingly backtrack for no reason as some sort of way to advance a lacking story.
The foundations of the story aren’t all bad, they had a good setting with it being split in 3 parts. There is a prologue that takes place in the 60s, where an officer is tracking a serial killer through a factory, the main part of the story taking place in the 80s where a bunch of teenagers are looking to make a horror movie and lastly a couple of adults meet at a haunted mansion in the present day.
The 3 parts of the story are poised to be amazing setups which naturally one would assume would lead to a proper narrative advancement to the story but that never arrives, players just get more “setup”, more details getting revealed which aren’t needed to advance but are still fed to the player almost forcefully. Now people can argue that they are maybe world building here but what good is building a world if the game itself has a forgettable storyline.
The Graphics Are Amazing, Which Just Stings More
In terms of graphical fidelity, it looks amazing although at times there are some issues seen but those can be fixed with patch or two, sound quality wise the nails whatever parts there were which would invite excitement with their quick time events. This makes it all the more saddening when by the time you finish the game expecting to see Frank Stone make his appearance, you realize he just showed that one time and that’s it.
The Absence Of Gameplay Innovation
A major issue arises now, the narrative is good at first but quickly devolves into making it consistently feel like you’re at the eclipse of it but you never actually reach but most other games if the story is unappealing, the gameplay can make up for it but here Supermassive haven’t innovated on anything, there is no new mechanic to play around with here, you just walk around, inspect puzzles and open doors.
It just becomes a walking simulator, where you have to backtrack across the areas featured in the 3 time periods and you keep seeing the same set of hallways, stairs, factory floors etc etc with no change in them, it’s just the player going back for a fetch quest.
Another sad thing to experience is again, the lack of actual change when making choices, you’d expect there to be actual branching paths like in Until Dawn, but here the game presents us more with choices where picking either one doesn’t change the outcome, now there are choices which do lead to the death of some characters but they seems too obvious for the player to pick thus most would pick the choices where the characters don’t die.
The Lacking Of A Narrative
This is a certain miss of Supermassive, they made mistakes they shouldn’t have, their previous titles, The Dark Pictures duology did keep the narrative interesting, had a plethora of choices which would actually change outcomes significantly and the game did have scenes of satisfying horror.
This game should’ve innovated on the features of their previous titles but alas, it seems the game lost itself for the sake of building the world by only giving perpetual eclipses instead of anything of substance.
