At PAX East last month, I played a meaty chunk of Reveil, a new first-person horror game that launched in February. It's one of the rare first-person horror games that actually seems to understand how to make this type of gameplay entertaining and atmospheric.
Over the years, I've wondered if first-person horror games are always better in theory than in practice. For every effectively scary game like Resident Evil 7 or Amnesia: The Bunker, there are a dozen that wouldn't raise your heart rate even if you chugged several bottles of the Mountain Dew I saw prominently advertised at PAX while you were playing. Those two games I mentioned have something in common that separates them from the rest, though: they actually give you something to do.
No Combat? No Problem (At Least In Reveil)
Because the genre came to prominence in the indie space, first-person horror games have historically skimped on action-packed gameplay so they can devote their budget to surprisingly impressive graphics. The upside is they tend to punch above their weight graphically. The downside is they often simply have you run away from monsters, failing to understand that if you don't have a way to fight back, you stop being afraid. If you're completely powerless, there's no tension. You need to believe you might be able to succeed for the prospect of failure to be anything but a foregone conclusion.
I'm a big fan of walking sims like Gone Home, but once you attempt to build a straight-up horror game with the same minimal mechanics, the scares tend to evaporate. Gone Home was effective because it evoked horror, made you wonder if something terrible was going to happen, then ultimately revealed itself to be a love story.
Reveil doesn’t follow those rules, but it does what it does well enough to make up for it. Outside of a brief stealth sequence, I wasn't afraid that I would fail in Reveil, which eschews combat just like all those bad games I've played over the years have. But unlike those bad games, this indie from developer Pixelsplit fills the void with enough interesting mechanics and creatively rendered environments that I didn't mind.
Finding Dorie In Reveil
The demo I played at PAX East began with a father, Walter, poking around his daughter’s bedroom. Young Dorie is nowhere to be found, but a map she drew in crayon suggests that solving a number of colorful puzzles will lead him to her. Her diary is locked and he needs to find the key, which leads to him replacing a clown toy's teeth, figuring out how to get marbles out of an antique wooden toy, and playing a round of labyrinth (with gamepad controls that impressively replicate the feeling of the physical game).
Multiple Environments From Reveil
CloseFirst-person horror games have you look around empty houses fairly often, but Reveil has enough bizarre interactive objects that it's actually interesting. Soon, though, you're out of the house and on the path to the circus where most of the demo took place.
There's some cool exploration inside a funhouse, where Walter pursues Dorie through a house of mirrors and one of those rooms with a bunch of big padded cylinders. Reveil still has the hallmarks I've grown tired of in similar games, like Dorie laughing and running away from Walter, leading him deeper into an unfriendly dreamscape as he mumbles inane stuff along the lines of, "I wish she'd stop running away from me," but the set dressing and activities more than pull their weight.
I haven’t finished Reveil, but after 50 minutes, I’m eager to see if the full game continues to deliver at the same level.
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