The Inpatient
PSVR
Developer Supermassive Games Publisher SIE Format PSVR Release Out now
Wouldn’t you know it, we’ve only gone and got amnesia again. The use of a classic horror cliché is perhaps appropriate: Supermassive Games’ latest serves as a prequel to Until Dawn, the schlocky 2015 slasher that subverted contrivances with wicked glee. You’ll find no such verve in The Inpatient, however. This is a lifeless VR horror that manages to make a monster-infested mental asylum boring.
The series’ infamous Blackwood Sanatorium and its staff are in fine nick, all sumptuous ’50s decor and craggy faces with glittering eyes. After a wheelchair ride through the facility you’re thrown into a cell, where the majority of the game’s first half is spent. Picking up sparkling objects flips scenes between reality, memory and the collapsing corridors of a surreal dreamscape. Cheap, but effective, jump scares provide welcome hits of adrenaline in lieu of any tangible atmosphere.
With the sanatorium outside supposedly descending into wendigo-related chaos, there’s only your cellmate for company. Conversation is, in theory at least, a smart conceit: you can speak lines aloud, voice recognition technology and the headset’s microphone determining which dialogue choice you’re reading. Delivering a sarcastic retort and having it recognised provides the Sanatorium owner Jefferson Bragg is highly underused, appearing in the unsettling opening before going AWOL for most of the game. A late choice involving him is moot: thanks to Until Dawn, his fate is already sealed illusion of acting in a horror flick – but certain sentences won’t play ball, even when we use a monotone pitch, and picking the alternative, working response out of sheer frustration becomes common.
Until Dawn’s ‘butterfly effect’ choices return, key decisions leading to drastically altered chains of events. But nearly every pathway is riddled with plot holes. Any meaningful backstory The Inpatient attempts to give Until Dawn is lost in shoddy construction: our first run never reveals our cellmate’s hidden identity, or gives us more than a vague idea of who we are.
A constant in every playthrough is the ineffably dull back half, which has you slowly following two fellow strandees through the bowels of the sanatorium. The sole glimmer of wasted potential is the VR-compatible return of Until Dawn’s ‘Don’t move!’ mechanic in one scene: afterwards, it’s back to sitting through thin exposition, or yawning at blackness for long stretches while listening to shootouts occur off-screen.
The cracks show frequently (the reuse of character models from Supermassive’s recent Playlink release, Hidden Agenda, is particularly distracting). If there are ways to disguise the smaller team and budget required to make experimental fare viable, The Inpatient doesn’t appear to employ any of them. It’s yet another curiously half-hearted side project from Supermassive that, appropriately, won’t linger long in the memory.