I guess it’s true: Every Family is Dysfunctional in Some Way.
I find it interesting that survival horror did not take as well on the PC compared to the consoles. There are very few PC games that could be considered horror such as the System Shock series. Some games like the Thief series featured a few scary sections, but the game wasn’t designed from beginning to end with horror in mind. In 2001 with help from famed horror writer: Clive Barker, PC gamers got an amazing horror title to call their own.
Clive Barker’s Undying is a unique game all around, from story to gameplay. The premise is that you play as Patrick Galloway: a paranormal investigator who has been summoned to his friend’s estate. It turns out that his friend and his four siblings as children decided to perform a demonic ritual for fun, as children find that sort of thing cool. The problem is that now his four siblings are dead and have been resurrected as demons and are haunting the estate and want to kill him.
The story and setting help add a sense of atmosphere to the proceeding. Undying came out during that transitional period as First Person Shooters were moving away from the massive wide open levels of Doom, to the linear corridor style we see today. While Undying was a linear game, the player had wiggle room to explore for items and plot related scenes.
What I find interesting about Undying is that all the atmosphere and interesting story, was also wrapped up in an engaging combat system, which you don’t normally see in horror games. Undying featured a dual weapon system: Patrick’s left hand held any weapons he picked up, while his right uses spells.
Combat is a mix between close ranged, long ranged and magic attacks. Patrick starts the game with a magical stone that allows him to push back enemies in close range. Combined with his spells adds a touch of strategy beyond just circle strafing.
Besides finding new guns, players could also explore to find upgrades to their spells making them more potent. The magic system is viable as an alternative to the basic weapons. The flask you can see in the screenshot represents magic power and it recovered quickly. This is good as enemies won’t stand around while you charge up.
Enemies moved quickly to close the distance and attack the player. Each time the player was attacked the screen lurching violently which caused me to jump several times when I got attacked from behind. Each sibling had their own personal army of monsters for the player to deal with and this helped the combat from getting too repetitive.
Undying’s mix of horror and combat was one of the best I’ve seen and it managed to avoid the pitfall that FEAR fell in. In FEAR, the designers sectioned off the horror segments from the action, which turned the horror parts into a sightseeing tour. In Undying, the player was always in danger of being attacked from the dark or around the corner by any of the monsters. That tension also helps as players had to decide whether or not to risk entering a dark room to find any potential upgrades.
What I like the most about Undying is that it debunked two annoying trends in horror titles today. First that for a horror game to work, the protagonist must be weak, either by personality or weak in limited control. In Undying, Patrick can wield a double barreled shotgun in one hand, and summoned exploding skulls with the other and by choice goes after the demons. Even with all the spells and weapons, the game still managed to be scary and tense thanks to monster variety and the situation.
Besides regular monsters, the boss battles in Undying helped to further differentiate the content, with each sibling providing a different fight. One fight had the player lose their magical rock removing their ability to deflect enemies. While in another part, the player was chased by the ghost of one of the siblings through the halls of the estate. The only real low point would be the final boss, which was a repetitive battle where you just had to repeat the same attack constantly to win.
The other trend is just throwing monsters willy-nilly at the player thinking that it makes the game scary. Titles like Resident Evil 4 and Dead Space featured very basic enemy AI and it’s easy for the player to just line them all up and blast them. In both series, eventually the player will have a big enough arsenal to just tear through anything that gets in their way removing the horror aspect. After several hours of fighting the same enemies the same way, combat became more boring than it was terrifying.
No matter how many weapons the player gets in Undying, they are still in danger of dying thanks to the fast paced combat. Enemies in close range were very dangerous due to screen lurching that messed up the player’s aim, requiring the player to move quickly. Whereas in Resident Evil 4 styled games, the player’s movement is restricted to tank like controls and enemies tend to come as small groups.
Undying is sadly one of those games that fell through the cracks. Even though it received positive reviews, the game was not ported over to consoles. Clive Barker did collaborate a second time with the game: Jericho which did not hold a candle to Undying. Maybe with the craze surrounding kickstarters these days, we could see Undying rise from the grave one more time.
Up Next: A Not Scary Intermission
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