Maybe I'm just too culturally ignorant to appreciate the subtleties of DreadOut's monsters, but I'm afraid I'm a tad underwhelmed. Since we're making such a big deal of the enemies, close examination should probably be afforded to them. You could say it affords the story an extra air of mystery, even if the mystery in question is “what on earth were you doing while all this was happening, you pillock?” There's actually a fair bit of ambiguity as to what exactly happens to the group that fragments it and leaves Linda all alone, and although it leaves a lot of questions unanswered I actually kind of like it. It's hardly original, but it gets presented in a light that's just new and interesting enough to let it slip comfortably out of the way, leaving the game to knuckle down and get a nice tight grip on the bits of your brain associated with soiling one's pants. A combination of coincidences and supernatural happenings separates the various group members, leaving Linda alone in an abandoned school to save both herself and her friends from whatever it is that's out to make their lives hell. The whole place has clearly been vacated in a hurry and there might as well be a big tatty banner in the town square that reads “Congratulations from the Silent Hill Committee on your recent Town With A Troubled Past award”, but they nevertheless decide to explore. You play as Linda Meilinda, one of several high school students on a holiday trip that goes wrong when the group takes a wrong turn and ends up wandering into a deserted town. Of course, one has to always be wary that what appears to be a breath of fresh air isn't just the spittle-flecked yawn of somebody experiencing some cliché horror game exposition. Seriously though, you can't treat capital letters like that they've served us well for far too long to be roundly abused. If that doesn't sound like a breath of fresh air, I don't know what does. And now there's the first act of DreadOut, an indie survival horror game carrying the intriguing promise of having enemies based on creatures from Indonesian myths and folklore. Daylight? Alright, that was a congealed pile of soggy tissue paper and sadness, but did you read about anybody complaining that there were too many zombies? Didn't think so.
#DREADOUT GAME REVIEW FULL#
A Machine for Pigs? Full of pigs, love 'em. Outlast? Mutilated patients, great stuff. Strangely enough, the genre that seems to be bucking this trend right now is, of all things, survival horror. You can buff those gibs with your shiny new graphics engine until the player can smell the rotting meat, but it won't make zombies a remarkable enemy type ever again. Once you've done slow shambling zombies, fast marathon-running zombies and zombies with improbable projectile attacks, what else is left? Zombies don't have complex motivations or strategies the only time they ever do anything remarkable is the split second between being hit by a grenade and lying around on the ground in a hundred fleshy pieces. It's a disappointing state of affairs, frankly, because zombies are never really going to be fresh again.
#DREADOUT GAME REVIEW SIMULATOR#
They've been a stock enemy in games since the days of the punch-card, ubiquitous and as universally acknowledged as dust on the mantelpiece, but in recent times, largely due to the success of that 'act like a complete tosser to your fellow man' simulator DayZ and the outbreak – if you'll excuse the term – of open-world zombie games, they've enjoyed something of a resurgence. I think it's safe to say I'm officially sick of zombies.
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