Song Of Horror
PC
Much as we appreciate Resident Evil’s recent mastery of the over-the-shoulder camera, it’s a relief to play a game that relishes the claustrophobia of a fixed perspective. The long-indevelopment debut of a youthful Spanish team, Song Of Horror is a five-part homage to survival horror classics that will treat you to atmospheric views of some wonderfully ghoulish locations. Sometimes, it glares down at your character like a gargoyle. Elsewhere, it peers menacingly through a shelf as you cast about for clues. The locations range from a deserted manor house to a crumbling asylum, each haunted by a dark Presence that takes different forms at different times in response to your behaviour. The Presence is more convincing offstage – in action, it reveals itself to be a grab-bag of spooky quick-time events, some rather obnoxious – but the slow-burning threat of its appearance is crucial to the charm of a game that is both a solid throwback piece and more ambitious than it seems.
Song Of Horror is rife with inventive touches that stop just short of greatness. Take the way it uses permadeath to flesh out your sense of place. The story focuses on Daniel, a bumbling Englishman who rouses the Presence’s ire after listening to a cursed music box. Daniel can’t fight the Presence alone, however. He’s joined by a few other characters per episode, all of whom may perish without affecting the final outcome, who you send one by one to search doom-haunted locations for clues about your adversary’s origin. The characters have different stats: stealthier explorers may encounter the Presence less often, providing they don’t annoy it, while stronger or saner types may find it easier to beat certain QTEs. More importantly, they’re all distinct personalities, drawn from a range of backgrounds.
Some characters are locals, relations of those who’ve succumbed to the Presence; others are bystanders who’ve wandered in off the street. Each has different things to say about the items you’ll find, the bulk of them non-interactive, and slightly different ways of navigating the challenges involved. Sophie the art collector can date the paintings you discover in the manor, for example, while Alexander the janitor will tell you where they used to hang. To play as one is to understand the history of these artefacts in themselves; to play as the other is to understand the histories they’ve acquired through being owned. The result is that each location makes a different impression each time you cross the threshold. Sadly, neither the writing nor the B-movie voice-acting are quite sharp enough to do this concept justice. But the effect, nonetheless, is to turn the repetition inherent in a game with permadeath into another kind of exploration.
If the characterisation gives Song Of Horror flavour, the meat of the game is its sprawling architecture and varied puzzles. Experimental horror game anthologies have been all the rage among indie designers lately, and something of that ethos appears in how Protocol riffs on well-worn scenarios, never quite shattering expectations but always keeping you guessing. The manor house is a hushed expanse of mahogany panelling, thick carpets and long corridors. The second episode’s Silent Hill- ian antique shop gives out onto a clutch of apartments and a tunnel network you navigate using a UV lamp. The abbey, which channels Amnesia: The Dark Descent, is a labyrinth of ruined chambers, extending from graveyards to workshops where articles of faith lie among rusted medieval implements.
The fourth episode’s university is a comparative disappointment. It’s actually three smaller areas that may be tackled with different characters, which robs it of grandeur. But it does contain a terrific brain-teaser involving a slide projector with supernatural properties. The puzzles vary in terms of both difficulty and satisfaction but are carefully woven into the setting, with only a handful of conundrums that suggest a designer goofing around. Some are rather obtuse even by the arcane standards of ’90s horror games, asking you to do very particular things with very particular objects. But whether you love them or loathe them, the puzzles are worthwhile for how they lead you on, obliging you to trot back and forth for clues as the Presence’s attentions grow more and more insistent.
If only your adversary’s various manifestations were quite so fiendish. Each of its forms is labelled within the tutorials, which underlines the fact that you’re essentially playing Russian roulette with a bunch of minigames. The first one you encounter, ‘The Darkness’, is also the most chilling: this sees you fleeing to one of the hiding spots that dot the levels, where you must tap on cue to steady your character’s heartbeat before their sanity gives way. The Presence also excels at turning doors into sources of dread, either trying to force them open or lying in ambush for any player who barges through without putting an ear to the woodwork. These categories of hazard succeed because they complement the level design, weighing on your mind as you roam. In later episodes, however, the Presence’s antics are more self-contained and gimmicky. Among other things, you use a magic mirror to aim cleansing beams at swirling phantoms, and squeeze controller triggers to breathe quietly while an eyeless monster searches for you.
Song Of Horror’s achievement as a homage is also its glass ceiling. Though a perfectly engrossing horror game (and a timely reminder that an over-the-shoulder view isn’t the only way of looking at an awful place) at times it can feel like a waste of promising concepts. As first releases go, however, they don’t come much smarter or classier than this. Protocol is a developer to keep an eye on – preferably from a distance.
The puzzles vary in terms of both difficulty and satisfaction, but are carefully woven into the setting