The pitch for The Blackout Club is “Dishonored + Stranger Things + co-op” and much of the time, dear reader, it’s nearly as great as that equation would suggest.
This is the second game from Question, the indie developer behind 2015’s The Magic Circle, that boasts a roster of developers with credits on revered immersive sims like Thief: Deadly Shadows, Dishonored and the BioShock games. Their sophomore outing, which emerged from early access last week, casts players as teenagers in a sleepy Virginia town where kids black out for hours, sometimes days, at a time, before waking up covered in mud and scratches. Some of these kids form the titular club and band together to attempt to find enough evidence to uncover the mystery.
At night, adults fall under the sway of a mysterious song, reverberating from a secret network of caves beneath the town. These adults become your enemies, shambling through the neighborhood’s empty streets in silk pajamas and sleep masks like dutiful sleepwalkers. Some of the adults have access to their sense of sight as well, and these “Lucids” prowl the streets with flashlights, responding to the slightest movement or sound.
As a member of The Blackout Club, you’ll need to avoid them all, crouching through houses and descending into the maze to record or recover evidence. Sometimes you’ll sneak around in search of glowing red chests that might hide a fellow member’s phone. Other times, you’ll need to take pictures of evidence that the adults have left lying around — a door busted off its hinges; a laptop glowing with incriminating information. You and up to three co-op pals are on an almost journalistic mission; to find evidence, bring it to the light and cross your fingers that it makes a difference.
On your quest you’ll use a variety of pretty cool tools. There are three main items that you’ll choose from, like Pokémon starters, before a match. A grappling hook for scaling rooftops and spelunking for evidence is particularly useful. A crossbow with only one bolt? Not so much. A stun gun splits the difference; helpful for escaping enemies, but more likely to draw the attention of the Shape, a mysterious figure who’s basically a pulsing orange cop. With free rein of the map — he warps through the dozens of red doors marked with an all-seeing eye littered across the neighborhood and cave network — the Shape emerges whenever the players’ “sins” (like kicking in a door or leaving stunned enemies lying out in the open) surpass an invisible threshold. The Shape is like the police in GTA, but much less predictable.
By yourself, The Blackout Club is supremely tense (and occasionally frustrating), especially as you’re learning the game. You’ll chuck foam grenades to gum up traps and soften your landing when. You’ll use trip wires to knock out enemies. Tranquilizer darts do the same. It’s a solid roster of tools that lead to some creative problem solving as you attempt to retain your cover while accomplishing objectives.
In this pursuit, players are greatly aided by some fantastic design. A large eye-shaped icon at the bottom of the screen takes all of the guesswork out of stealth. The eye is open when you’re standing, lidded when you’re crouched; blank when you’re in shadow, filled in with a pupil when you’re visible. When enemies are suspicious, the pupil is ringed with yellow. When an enemy spots you, it glows red.
This icon also measures sound. When you’re slinking along a tile floor, sound waves drift from the icon. When you run on a hard surface, the sound waves pour out. And, when you’re sneaking along grass or carpet, the waves recede. I know I’m giving you a lot of information about what is, essentially, a HUD element. That’s because the eye is brilliant UI. It allows for a robust stealth system, but with none of the confusion that has attended complex sound- and vision-based systems in the past. You always know exactly how visible you are; never question how much noise you’re making. Brilliant.
But, this makes the issues with the Shape in single-player all the more frustrating. The Shape’s unpredictability is fine when playing with other players. You can rez each other and banish the burnt orange bastard. But, in solo, the Shape is a one-hit kill and doggedly relentless in his pursuit of the player. And, he can appear out of any door, meaning that occasionally you’ll hear the voice line announcing his appearance and then immediately get grabbed. Given that solo matches can take upwards of 45 minutes to an hour, this is infuriating when it happens (especially when it happens in the final minutes of a game).
Additionally, progress is incredibly slow while going it alone. I’ve spent 31 hours with the game — mostly solo — and just reached level 12, the amount of progress necessary to unlock Old Growth, a daycare-set expansion included with the 1.0 release that doubles the size of The Blackout Club’s map. You get an XP bonus at the end of each round for each additional player. So, round up three buddies or dip into the pool of randos if you don’t want to feel like your progress is being throttled.
And, genuinely, playing with randos is not a bad experience. Your progress ticks up extremely quickly and you have to do very little of the work. In the four-player games I played, I looked around for bonus XP-granting evidence while a pair of ambitious players sprinted off to accomplish most of the objectives. This isn’t the best way to play The Blackout Club, but it is a very quick way to level up.
Leveling up is rewarding in a way that I suspect immersive sim fans will enjoy. Each level gained grants new areas of the maze to explore. Question seem to understand a key part of the appeal of the immersive sim: exploring a hand-crafted world in whatever way you see fit. And, while the houses along the street begin to blend together after a while — the absence of audiologs or diary pick-ups ensures that the distinctions are merely aesthetic — the maze is beautifully and weirdly distinct.
The Sleepers and Lucids are controlled by the song that emanates from this underground labyrinth. As such, the maze is crafted to resemble a giant instrument, with pipes, frets and reverberating metal strings. Each room is different and dreamily strange. While The Blackout Club doesn’t offer much with each level gained, the promise of new maze sections is enough to keep me playing.
The mission objectives, though? Not so much. While each is hand-crafted, they’re strung together procedurally. So, while Question created a scenario that tasks the player with seizing a noise-making relic and spiriting it away to a waypoint in the maze as every sleeper pursues, an algorithm determines where this objective will begin and end, and what it will be preceded or followed by. The problem isn’t so much the objectives. They’re fine. It’s that there aren’t enough of them, and/or enough systemic wrinkles to keep them fresh after a few dozen hours.
The mission objectives may become bland, but much of the writing is excellent. As the Sleepers somnambulate, they speak the darkest memories of their host bodies. These eerie monologues do wonders for establishing a creepy mood. At this point, I’ve heard them all, so my only complaint is that I wish there were more.
The Blackout Club isn’t perfect. As a fan of immersive sims, I want more lore and more tools to play with. But, it is a unique and compelling mash-up of genre horror and systems-driven gameplay. I can’t wait to get back to the maze.
The Blackout Club review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
The Blackout Club is out now on PS4, Xbox One, and PC.