School of SHOCK THE COMA 2: VICIOUS SISTERS
BEING A STUDENT AT SEHWA HIGH IS THE STUFF OF NIGHTMARES – IN A GOOD WAY IN THIS KOREAN SURVIVAL HORROR
THE start of a new school year is always fraught with difficulties. Getting back into routine after weeks of being able to go to bed and wake up when you felt like it. Homework, PE, maths lessons and, in the case of one Sehwa High School student, a store cupboard that’s a portal to a warped reality.
The Coma 2 is, unsurprisingly, the follow up to 2015’s The Coma, a Korean survival horror that sees you take on the role of a pupil at a school with some very serious problems.
While this is a continuation of The Comas series, you don’t have to have played the first game to pick up (PEGI 16), XBox One, PS4, PC, Switch on what’s happening here, as this story plays out through the eyes of a new character, Mina Park.
Heading home after class, Mina sees a friend disappearing into a storage cupboard which is usually locked, and decides to follow him.
Inside she discovers a makeshift shrine and text alluding to the rising blood moon. Suddenly feeling strange, she passes out – waking up to find the once-familiar school building turned into something dark and sinister, and her teacher, Ms
Song, transformed into the evil Dark Song, a twisted parody of her waking self.
The side-scrolling action is fairly basic, interacting with the environments via a context-sensitive screen prompt.
Action is not just confined to the school, but over the whole district – with six levels based in places like the local hospital and police station, an underground station, a marketplace and in a gymnasium.
The thing I really liked about the levels were that you could explore them as much as you wanted, spending time having a good walk around and familiarising yourself with the locale.
If time is of the essence, you can scrape through a level with the bare minimum of effort, but you really miss fleshing out the background to the plot.
While at first glance it looks quite basic, if you properly look at the game you can see the work that’s gone into the manga-esque graphics. The animation is smart, the level of detail on the backgrounds really quite beautiful.
The switch from everyday school, to hell high is also subtle – the clinical white walls are suddenly adorned with tentacle-like vines that wouldn’t be out of place in a
Lovecraftian nightmare.
One of the big problems you’ll find with moving through the game are the limited cash drops, and the fact that once an item has been collected it doesn’t respawn.
Running low on money severely hampers your ability to buy the items you need to help you survive levels. One way around this is to complete crafting missions, which run parallel to the main story and help to boost your health capacity.
A nice little touch is the fact you get out of breath when you run, forcing you to slow the pace of your exploration – unless of course Dark Song or her evil companions are breathing down your neck.
The soundtrack is quite jarring to begin with, tinny and overly cheery, but settling down nicely as the game progresses to add tension and drama as you make your way through the shadows with only your lighter to keep the dark at bay.
There’s a decent length campaign here – clocking in around 10 hours of play, which for just over 15 quid is not bad at all. The only problem is once you’ve played it, there’s nothing that would really want to make you to go back and play it again.
Buy it: xbox.com/en-GB/games £15.74.