MAID OF SKER
You can hide but you can’t run – they’ll hear you
Far from being a carefree minstrel, you are a musician who has travelled to Sker in search of your captive loved one. The once-grand hotel there has fallen on hard times and its proprietor, the father of your beloved, has a sinister scheme to recapture its glory days. Your lover has locked herself in the attic and tasked you with thwarting his plan.
This isn’t an adaptation of the Blackmore novel of the same title, nor the Welsh ballad, and, most importantly, Sker Hotel is a legally distinct, fictitious location, but the story does lean on a fascinating mythology surrounding the real-world Sker House. This stealthy, spooky romp also owes a huge debt to classic survival horror.
SKERY STORY
Boasting beautiful, moody environments and lock-andkey conundrums that feel straight out of the Spencer mansion, it wears its influences on its sleeve. But rather than zombies, your foes are masked men under the influence of a haunting melody. While they’re sightless, their hearing is heightened – breathe too loudly in the wrong corner and they’ll come barrelling over to batter you. As you’re not Chris Redfield and his arsenal would be completely inappropriate to use against the transformed hotel staff, stealth is the name of the game.
We skulk around, alternately jumping at our own shadow and belting out Weezer’s Sweater Song to stave off the anxiety, tense even before the monsters turn up thanks to a creepy soundscape. Unfortunately, all the creaking makes the silence of the old house far too cacophonous to get a proper read on where enemies are in relation to us. Outside of a few set locations, it’s difficult to give them the runaround with sound due to their sometimes unpredictable behaviour and the absence of a throwing distraction mechanic.
The usual grunts aren’t especially scary in design or behaviour. On normal difficulty, getting stuck down the wrong end of a narrow corridor with one is a point of expletiveladen frustration. But on easy we run circles around them – until a late-game boss who’s ripping sheets straight out of Mr X’s playbook appears. We can’t give points for originality but we’ll always remember how one member of OPM baited this Big Bad only to squeal as they were punched through the doorway of a safe room.
VERDICT
Sker Hotel is a beautifully realised survival horror location to get lost in for an afternoon – it’s just a shame about the monstrous staff. Jess Kinghorn