Thankfully, for the majority of the experience, the game relies on atmosphere and ambient sounds to set its ominous, dreary mood. There’s nothing wrong with jump scares, even great psychological horror titles like Silent Hill and Fatal Frame have them, I just felt like some of them featured here felt cheap and lazy. One particular scare, which was entirely an audio gag, really raised my hair and got to me. The first third of the game doesn’t rely on jump scares to unsettle players after that, however, it starts piling them on pretty heavily. It seems like the designers couldn’t figure out which one they wanted to focus on, so they just used them both, muddling the impact and motivation of these enemy characters. As you get more info on the town and what’s happening, you learn the backstory of each of these enemies and why they’re after you. If either of them catches you, it’s instant death. One is a humanoid mass of flesh and traffic signs, and the other is a tall, lanky woman in a tattered dress. The game has two main, persistent enemies of this type. Knowing they’re waiting in the darkness, just a flick of a light switch away is the type of creepy kind of dread the game excels at.īesides the shadowy figures, the game also has larger, lumbering boss-type characters that hunt you in specific locations. The sight of these shadowy figures standing there, unmoving, with their glowing blue eyes, is never not scary and gave me chills every time I saw them. Cautiously leaning into a room just far enough to flick on a glowing red switch while the dark silhouetted figures just stand there is a tense experience, augmented by the fact that the closer you get to them, the louder this surreal, almost vocal “Whoooo” ambient sound effect gets. It’s a very interesting mechanic and effective at instilling a sense of constant dread in the player.
#THOSE WHO REMAIN GAME GENERATOR#
The gameplay is simply: stay in the light! You have no means of protecting yourself other than finding and turning on any light sources you come across, whether it be a standard light switch or something more substantial, like a generator or the headlights of a car. The biggest problem with the game’s story is that it fails to add up to any kind of satisfying conclusion. Plot threads are introduced and then later abandoned, and the vague, nebulous logic of the characters and their motivations seems to vary at random. While the story’s not necessarily simple, the way it plays out is very familiar, and the binary choices you’re given as you judge the town’s guilty parties (which affect the outcome of the game) do little to flesh out the narrative in any meaningful or substantial way. Without getting too much into the plot of the game, I will say the setup is definitely reminiscent of the original Silent Hill and other horror stories, where residents of a town suffer supernatural wrath as punishment for a hidden crime.
It’s up to Edward to make his way through the perpetual night of the town to find out what’s really going on, as well as confront his own personal demons the journey has dredged up within him. In their place is a horde of static, shadowy figures with glowing blue eyes holding axes and pitchforks, standing just beyond the reach of the few remaining light sources of the town.
Once he arrives, however, his friend is missing and all the townspeople have vanished. The story starts off simply enough with our main character Edward driving to the small town of Dormont in the middle of the night to meet a friend. While well-intentioned, Those Who Remain falls short of being a memorable horror title and ends up being just an OK one. But unfortunately, the story and gameplay don’t fare quite as well. As a horror game, it successfully achieves what it sets out to do on a purely spooky, often visceral level, and its scares are undeniably effective, so I can’t fault it for that.
After anticipating Those Who Remain for what seems like forever, the game is finally out, and well, I’m sorry to say it isn’t exactly what I’d hoped it would be.
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