In any game drought, horror games are always coming. I hadn't heard of this work until I qualified for the test of "The Trick Door". After that, I seemed to have discovered the secret through a few screenshots: it seemed to be a combination of two styles, regardless of the gameplay and subject matter. It also made me very curious about it.
Unholy Developer: Duality Games Publisher: HOOK Release Date: Coming Soon Platform: PC/Steam Attributes: Adventure, Puzzle, Horror
To be clear, the content of the "Trick Door" demo I experienced is limited to some fragments of the first three chapters, and the process is about 40 minutes in total. But even though it was presented in fragmentary form, I was still very impressed.
It's like the opening and the introduction to the story. "The Trick" does not seem to intend to do any trickery and cover-up in this regard. You play as a mother who has lost her child and has to return to her former apartment, a place of sadness, to find some traces of the past. This is clearly a place that is about to unfold: you know that the lost child will be the medium of some kind of horror plot,—— and it is.
Soon, when you return to your former room and rummage through some items, the scene changes. The quiet room became frizzy, and the sound of crackling began to appear. You realize that this is a longing emotion aroused by some kind of power, so soon the child's shadow appears in front of you and transforms into a crazy chase in the dark.
I like the way the game creates a sense of horror, it doesn't follow JumpScare, it takes a serious flow of atmosphere. From the beginning downstairs, everything was so quiet: the garden in front of the tall building was calm, only a few children playing and a mess of signs, reflecting the mother's state of mind. By the way, based on the Soviet setting, the architectural style of this game is so intimate that it is almost exactly the same as the neighborhood next door to my house.
After entering the building, the empty corridors and rooms once made me think that there would be frightened ghosts, but in fact there were none. Even after the lights go out, the process of chasing the child in the darkness is quiet, and it is always a feeling that people are expecting something to happen but it has not happened.
It is precisely because of this cleverly designed silence that the slightest sound and some inconspicuous corners become sensitive. When I was searching for keys at home, the occasional slight sound of the door opening would make me shiver. And the apartment window seemed to have some kind of imagery that forced me to stop for a long time to study it. Even if the graphics of this work cannot be called excellent, this sense of detail design is addictive.
So far, I can say that this game gives me the impression of a typical and ingenious horror game. But then it took a turn in the process that I didn't expect. As I said in the foreword, the game is sharply divided into two parts, one part is the horror I mentioned, and the other part - it may be different from what you might think - is stealth and puzzle solving, with some action elements.
After chasing the child's phantom to reach the basement, the heroine meets a witch-like character, who confesses the truth to her and tells her that her child is trapped in a world called Infinity City. When I played this, I frankly speculated that this world was a fantasy world in the heroine's heart, not a real one. And the next scene is not as I expected: the heroine puts on a mask, everything changes in front of her, and she seems to have traveled to a medieval fantasy town, and she vows to destroy the priest who gave the speech.
The gameplay also takes a big turn here: from simple walking simulator-like exploration to stealth puzzle with certain action elements. The heroine has an additional weapon in her hand: a slingshot, which can use a bead-like bullet to shoot at the target.
The puzzles are not difficult. For example, using a slingshot to strike a searchlight to create a path for yourself, or to avoid the view of patrolling enemies; The hardest thing to do is to follow the trail of the line to find the switch and turn it on after obtaining the password. During this process, the protagonist can change the mask at any time to activate the eagle-eye effect: recognize the people and objects around him that can be interacted with. In my opinion, this is obviously a somewhat out-of-the-box setting, like those orthodox near-future genre games.
But looking back, I don't really seem to understand what the game's routine is. On the surface, it tells the story of hallucinations or avoidance attitudes that occur after the loss of a mother's child, and thus has a basis for continuing horror stories and reversals. But from the perspective of the game, this game seems to want to transform this setting into the form of "mother saves her child by playing a hero in the spirit world". Of course, I only played for 40 minutes, and I wasn't sure if it would really be designed that way, but this can explain why the action scenes were added immediately after the psychological horror bridge at the beginning, and there must be a reversal trick behind such a sense of contrast.
The same is true of the witch's line: she directly singles out that everyone is trapped in the heroine's spiritual world, and she must also enter the "endless city" behind the mask to find the child. Using masks as a means to switch between the two worlds gave me some sense of déjà vu like "Ready Player One". But I'm not sure if that's the case, but the wobbly suspense got me more interested in its next test, or the full game. I will continue to follow the trend of the game and wait for the next opportunity to share it.