Maid Of Sker PC, PS4, Xbox One
Déjà vu is an unsettling feeling, and one that’s perfectly at home in a horror game. Maid Of Sker doesn’t explicitly use it as a horror device, yet we can’t escape the feeling that in spite of its compelling narrative premise, which draws on Welsh folklore and presents music as a powerful force for both good and evil, we’ve played this game many times before.
Based loosely on the tale of a woman whose spirit is said to haunt the real-world location of Sker House, Maid Of Sker is less a ghost story than a rescue mission, with the player infiltrating a monstrous cult in a remote Victorian hotel. The game’s protagonist is summoned there by his love, Elisabeth, who has asked him to compose a piece of music that will help free her from her deranged family’s clutches, and the ghouls that roam the mansion’s Gothic halls. The game’s goosebump-inducing setting and gripping story, penned by Soma writer Ian Thomas, deserves better than its reliance on survival-horror tropes – not to mention puzzles so similar to those found in Resident Evil that we expect to find a Jill sandwich half-eaten in the hotel’s larder. Themed keys unlock matching doors; replacing missing fragments of crests unlocks an elevator; you backtrack repeatedly across the mansion’s sprawling grounds to access new areas; there are safe rooms where you manually save using a phonograph (next to a typewriter). There’s even a relentless boss who’s basically Mr X, were he to trade in his fedora for a bowler hat. We could forgive this as homage, if the source of Maid Of Sker’s horror – the monsters themselves – were actually scary.
Good horror is often more about what you don’t see than what you do; Maid Of Sker’s nasties are everpresent, and less frightening for it. The scarecrowmasked shamblers are attracted by sound, presenting you with an imperative to keep quiet – but always patrol set, reliable routes. They’re fast and deadly when alerted, requiring you to constantly crouch and move slowly, but while there’s tension in negotiating rooms filled with them, the fear becomes diluted by their predictability and drab, homogenous design. Eventually, their presence is simply banal.
A handful of cutscene scares and set-piece moments do give us chills, while Elisabeth’s plight, revealed through phonograph recordings and telephones, is just about engaging enough to urge us on to the game’s branching denouements. Ultimately, though, the derivative puzzling and repetitive grind of traversing Sker House at an absolute snail’s pace makes Maid Of Sker feel more like a crawling simulation than a game that truly makes our skin crawl.