When you’re looking along walls, you’ll see blurry pixel-soup posters alongside crystal clear high res ones. You’ll find an immersion-killingly high number of high-res assets mixed in with low-res ones. Those Who Remain is unpleasant to look at. Instead of the stealth sections being a tense test of your ingenuity, they’re either just too easy or frustrating for all the wrong reasons. There was another section a little later on where I needed to carry some lion statues to a platform while avoiding a giant mud monster, except the walls of the maze are about four feet tall and the monster is about twenty feet tall, meaning it’s easy to see him and avoid him at all times. There’s generally one or two places to hide and wait while Handylight slowly lumbers past and if you do anything other than wait in exactly the right spot, it just gives you a slow motion slap before the screen fades to black, which was more than a little underwhelming. Sadly, everything is so bloody dark, you actually need to look directly at Handylight half the time to see where to go, his spotlight illuminating the dark. The best horror games disincentivize the player looking at the monster for too long, because psychologically the unknown is scarier, and because you should generally be running or hiding in fear from the monster. However, since Handylight’s stealth sections are some of the most boring parts of the game, I could certainly relate to Edward here! I loved the tired, languid way he responds to Handylight appearing with an exhausted sounding “Oh, it’s you again?” with the same passive-aggressive sass as the rolling eyes emoji. Oddly, the protagonist’s voice actor, who’s meant to engage us emotionally in the horror, sounds less like he’s nervously navigating a town suffused with supernatural terror and more like he’s doing his tax returns on a wet Wednesday afternoon. It’s meant to be really scary but it kinda looks like a Silent Hill monster made of play-doh. One monster in particular (let’s call it Handylight because its head is a hand holding some sort of a spotlight) is a mishmashed humanoid phantasmagoria of limbs, faces and jagged metal. However, once I found out how the vast majority of them can be dispelled by sneaking cautiously into a doorway and flicking on a lightswitch, they quickly started to lose their intimidating aura.Ĭharacter models resemble monsters or people but are weirdly blobby, shiny and lacking in detail to the point they look like they’re made of plasticine. This was admittedly really creepy the first time I encountered them. Within the darkness lurks shadowy beings who stare ominously at you, their eyes glowing through the murk. Dormont seems to be in a state of perpetual night, meaning any areas not illuminated by fire or electrical light are shrouded in darkness. One of the core concepts of the gameplay is the titular “Those Who Remain” themselves. It all goes a bit pear-shaped though when he sees his car getting stolen and finds himself trapped in Dormont in a world where reality has been warped by an existential force seeking retribution and judgment. It starts off with the protagonist Edward driving to a sleazy motel to end an extra-marital affair. Those Who Remain is set in the cursed town of Dormont.
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