Lies Beneath feels like a throwback to the early 2000s, and I absolutely mean that as a compliment. It’s a lot like the slightly janky horror games of that period, just brought forward into virtual reality. Its pacing is strange and it’s occasionally content to settle for cheap scares, but it’s effectively creepy.
Developed by the Seattle-based studio Drifter VR (Gunheart, Robo Recall) for the Oculus Quest and Rift, Lies Beneath is styled as if it’s a three-issue story in an interactive horror comic.
You play as Mae, a college student who grew up in an isolated fishing village called Slumber in Alaska. Your father is driving you back home one night when someone suddenly darts in front of your car. He loses control, and after the crash Mae’s father is nowhere to be found. The only sign of him is a trail of blood leading away from the wreck.
Mae follows it, hoping to find her father, but instead discovers that Slumber has gone straight to hell while she was away at school. The forest outside town is a hunting ground for a serial killer, the town itself looks like it’s been abandoned for decades, and Mae herself is being stalked by unknown forces.
There’s a lot about Lies Beneath that feels weirdly retro, even beyond its setting. Mae is largely unvoiced, with her inner monologue conveyed via comic-style caption boxes that show up as objects in the environment, complete with a font that wouldn’t have been out of place in an issue of Tales From the Crypt from 1953. The graphics make heavy use of cel-shading to further the theme; interactive objects have a heavy black edge around them, which makes the game’s models seem less rendered than hand-drawn. The whole game, at its highest points, looks like a lost issue of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy.
To nail down its genre, Lies Beneath is a shooter, but it owes a lot to Resident Evil and other survival horror games. Slumber is infested with a particularly bizarre assortment of monsters, ranging from simple zombies and tentacles to bigger things that look like they’ve been stapled together from spare human parts. I’m particularly unnerved by the “spiders,” bug-like monsters that are clearly made from someone’s severed head and hands. They’re weak, but there’s never just one of them, and they’re one of the most freakish monsters I’ve seen in a horror game for a while.
As you explore each environment in search of Mae’s father, you can defend yourself with an assortment of guns and improvised melee weapons, which range from a broken stick to a machete. Ammunition is always at a premium, and even when you’re armed to the teeth, it only takes one bad encounter before you’re once again scraping for supplies. You end up doing a lot of New York reloads in Lies Beneath, where you’ve got to pull out another gun rather than slap more bullets into the one you’ve got.
The melee combat might be one of the best parts of the game, though. I have often said that I can forgive a lot in even a bad game if it’s got some well-executed throwing knives, and Lies Beneath is well up there on that scale. The hatchets in particular have a real sense of impact behind them, and it’s a great feeling to dispose of a zombie in your path by cleaving its head clean off with one swing of your virtual machete. I got an inordinate kick out of stowing my melee weapons in the nearest wooden object or wall whenever I needed to free up a hand, by simply bringing them down or throwing them so they’d stick in with a solid thunk.
The real star of Lies Beneath, however, is its environmental design, which is also its primary drawback. Part of its impact as a horror game comes from Slumber itself; it often feels like you’ve stepped off the map entirely, into a hostile place that’s directly controlled by entities that do not want you there. Lies Beneath has the same sense of intimidation as the better Silent Hill games, where the combat isn’t actually that difficult, but the level design and general atmosphere still make you feel as if you won’t be able to handle whatever happens next.
You do spend the first two-thirds or so of Lies Beneath in a forest at night in winter, though, which undercuts some of its atmosphere. It’s an aggressively gray, dark game; its first couple of hours are a series of gruesome shootouts in a woodsy winter set designed by Eli Roth. While it does eventually start to vary up its environments, and the last couple of levels are a baroque run through sheer madness, it’s got a rough first half.
Lies Beneath is also largely linear, which is a little disappointing considering its inspirations. There are a couple of more exploratory chapters, but you spend much of the game being chased or hunted down a straight path. A lot of VR games like this still feel like they’re barely one step up from an arcade shooter like Time Crisis or House of the Dead, and Lies Beneath is at its strongest when you’re not being funneled down a simple, linear sequence of scares.
Lies Beneath is still well worth a trip, though it’s got its rough edges. What I found myself appreciating more than anything else was its peculiar “version 1.0” feel, like the more experimental games on the Dreamcast and first Xbox. Beneath its only-in-VR trappings, like storing weapons on your hip or having to manually rack the slide on your shotgun, Lies Beneath feels loose and weird in a way that even a lot of modern indie games don’t. Like the old horror comics it’s based off of, it’s a lot more interested in scaring you than in anything else, to the point where I’m actually not sure how much sense its plot makes in the end. The result is a game that feels new and nostalgic at the same time, somehow, like a time capsule from 2004.
I’d be interested in seeing another trip into Drifter’s weird horror universe, one that really dials up the strengths of Lies Beneath. With some more varied environment design throughout, and more chances to explore its environments, this could be the first in a great series of VR horror games.
"Review" - Google News
May 11, 2020 at 02:31AM
https://ift.tt/2Wi0Hcs
Review: ‘Lies Beneath’ virtual reality horror game from Drifter feels both new and nostalgic - GeekWire
"Review" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2YqLwiz
https://ift.tt/3c9nRHD
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Review: ‘Lies Beneath’ virtual reality horror game from Drifter feels both new and nostalgic - GeekWire"
Post a Comment