This may have been one of the biggest disappointments for me, personally, because I’m an avid fan of Clive Barker and a longtime lover of the cult hit, Undying. Finally, Clive was being given both time and resources and an extremely capable developer — MercurySteam, which would later bring us the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow series. It could have been unforgettable. It should have been at the very least a solid horror game.
It was not. Instead, Jericho was tedious, imbalanced, had laughable AI, a ridiculous difficulty curve and unforgivably clunky shooting. It looked great, the story was unique and the monsters were all delightfully twisted, so in the end, at least Clive Barker delivered (again). It’s too bad everything else fell apart.
As the only horror game to be designed around the Kinect, Rise of Nightmares was the horror genre’s first and only real attempt to use the Kinect in an interesting way. And by real attempt, I mean something more than what we’ve seen from games like Dead Space 3, which used the Kinect to deliver an “innovative” feature that lets you yell at the device to get your character to do things like dodge or reload.
I like the monsters, which remind me of some of the creatures from Silent Hill, and the creepy atmosphere was top notch. That’s all weighed down by the controls, which absolutely tear this game apart, transforming it into something that’s horrifying for all the wrong reasons. The fact that you have to hold your foot out in front of you to walk sounds like a bad joke. The real joke is its developer seriously thought that was a good design choice.
The late 80’s and 90’s hold a very special place in many horror fans’ hearts. They were often excessive and over-the-top, without pesky rules and brimming with unhindered creativity. One of the more memorable horror games from that generation was the arcade game Splatterhouse. Released in 1988, it was an excessively gory love letter to classic horror films like Friday the 13th and Evil Dead. Its warning label read “The horrifying theme of this game may be inappropriate for young children… and cowards.”
Namco Bandai didn’t need to do much to please fans of the original. They actually did a decent job in some aspects. The gore is stellar, everywhere, and delivered in vats, because there’s not enough buckets in the world to hold that much. The cel-shaded art style was a nice touch because it carried that fun, late 80’s vibe while at the same time making sure it looked good.
Then there’s everything else. The clumsy controls were anything but fluid — not a small problem in a game where you’re spending a majority of your time fighting waves of enemies — and this flaw became even more apparent during the (many) platforming segments. The wonky camera, incredibly long load times and myriad bugs, including a handful of game-breaking issues, all brought it down even further. It’s also roughly 4-5 hours long, has little variety in the enemies and offers really no reason to return after completion, leaving many who purchased it, including myself, wondering why we just spent $60 on it.