Reviews
[Review] High School Never Ends in Creepy Adventure Game ‘Worse Than Death’
It’s surprising that more stories aren’t centered around high school reunions. There’s so much drama inherent to the concept: awkward reunions, possibly painful memories, differing perspectives on the past and things left unsaid all are par for the course. With all the anxiety these events bring forth in most people, it’s easy to see how the setting can be utilized within the horror genre.
Worse Than Death, the new game from Benjamin Rivers Inc, takes this idea and runs with it. A woman named Holly returns to her hometown for her 10-year reunion and quickly finds herself thrust into a horrorshow steeped in personal tragedy and small-town drama. After meeting up with her best friend, who recently lost his fiance in an accident most of the town blames him for, they end up chasing a mystery around town as the body count rises.
The story provides a good hook for the game, but I wish they would have spent a bit more time with some of the other friends at the reunion before things started getting spooky. The dialog has a little bit of trouble feeling natural, coming off slightly stilted, but there’s a lot to be mined with the relationships between Holly and her former classmates. Still, the story goes in some satisfying directions in its three-to-four hour runtime, exploring the dark secrets of the small town in ways that are compelling, even if not entirely surprising.
Like Benjamin Rivers earlier game Home, Worse Than Death is a 2D side-scroller with pixel-art graphics and comic panel style cutscenes to help accentuate important parts of the plot. Both art styles look sharp, but there’s something about the juxtaposition of the two that never really blended well for me. I thought the pixel art portions worked better, leaning on the vagueness to allow the player to fill in the grisly scenes with their own imagination. The comic sections of the game had a bit too cartoony of a feel for my taste, undermining some of the spookiness.
Worse Than Death was originally designed with mobile touch screens in mind, which means the gameplay isn’t quite as deep as it could be. Much of it feels like an old school adventure game, trying to find items and solve puzzles to progress through the game’s eight chapters. While exploring, you will have to run and hide from a strange creature that’s stalking you through the town. Most of the running and hiding is pretty rote and easy to do, making the tension not land as hard as it should. There’s a great audiovisual component to these sequences: the screen fogs up as the world gets cold, everything starts to shake and you hear sinister voices coming from the almost-invisible monster, but it never really unsettles. Hiding always felt more like a time tax on the player than actual tension, only posing any sort of challenge in the final chapter.
The game’s puzzles are what worked the best for me, even if they were slightly clumsy to navigate. Since it was built for a mobile device, the interaction with the puzzles was designed around a touch screen, which doesn’t translate well to a controller. Many puzzles ask the player to drag things around, shuffling items to reveal what’s underneath or simply moving a key to a lock. I played on the Switch, and these tasks were easier when using the touch screen in handheld mode, but were rather clunky with a joystick.
Aside from the interaction, the puzzles are mostly well designed. They usually involve figuring out sequences for elaborate lock systems on cabinets or obtuse directions for starting the machine. While they don’t always fit completely into the narrative, Holly will usually react with a comment like “someone must not have wanted anyone to get into this,” they still manage to be compelling. They require brainpower rather than simply collecting items, so I played with a pen and paper to keep track of information, reminding me of the puzzles in early Silent Hill games. A couple were pretty obtuse, but most of them were just difficult enough to make you feel satisfied when solving them.
The experience of the game is aptly kind of like going to your high school reunion. It’s a little bit awkward and you have to go talk to the people you’re less thrilled to see in order to find the ones you’re really interested in catching up with, but it’s got some high points that make it worthwhile, even if it’s not quite as memorable as you thought it would be. And much like the reunion, the runtime feels just long enough that it doesn’t overstay its welcome significantly, allowing you to move on with your life afterward. If you miss the days of horror game having adventure game-style puzzles, then give Worse Than Death a try, just don’t be expecting anything overly substantial in the scare department.
Worse Than Death review code for Nintendo Switch provided by the publisher.
Worse Than Death is out now on PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PC, and the App Store.
Reviews
‘Cape Fear’ Redefines A Cutthroat Classic & Turns The American Dream Into A Psychological Nightmare [Review]
Hollywood has been stuck in a trend where a recognizable property — any recognizable property — holds more value than an original idea. This has led to a trend where a slew of acclaimed films have transitioned over to television and become limited series, because why not?
Which has led to a very mixed bag of results that’s usually viewed as a hollow exercise in IP renewal that’s become a growing cliche that’s something to mock. Dead Ringers, Fatal Attraction, Presumed Innocent, and even The Birds are just some of the most recent titles in the movie-to-limited series pipeline. Admittedly, this formula can still work. It just needs to actually have not only a point of view, but a point, otherwise it’s destined to disappear into the vast streaming abyss.
Cape Fear definitely has a point of view and is well aware that it’s the fourth proper adaptation of this story — fifth if The Simpsons’ masterful “Cape Feare” parody is included. It’s an adaptation that’s not only aware of its past’s baggage, but intentionally embraces it and uses it to its advantage. Nick Antosca’s Cape Fear is so exciting because it functions as a remix of every version of this story — the ’60s film, Martin Scorsese’s ’90s remake, and John D. MacDonald’s original novel, The Executioners — to create this glorious amalgamation of the narrative. It’s not unlike what was done with Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal series and how it remixed the breadth of Thomas Harris’ works and their cinematic adaptations.
This approach is most effective when certain iconic scenes from the ’90s film are recontextualized and given to different characters in order to make grander thematic statements. It’s a really striking approach that reflects the generational ripples and overlap between these adaptations, yet it’s never distracting or ostentatious to anyone who is experiencing this story for the first time. It helps this series feel different from the deluge of forgettable adaptations that are flooding the market.
On paper, Antosca is the perfect showrunner to tell this story. He has an impressive body of work to pull from that includes horror series like Channel Zero, Hannibal, and Brand New Cherry Flavor, but also lots of true-crime titles like The Act, A Friend of the Family, and Candy. This series falls squarely within these two extremes as it blurs the lines between these genres and styles of horror storytelling. It’s Big Little Lies on bath salts. Cape Fear perhaps doesn’t need to exist, but it’s still a hell of a terrifying experience that has something timely to say.
Horror is full of stories in which one bad day is all it takes to break someone and turn them into a completely different person. Cape Fear isn’t doing exactly this. It’s more of a psychological waterboarding until the target’s sense of self is eroded to rubble. However, it takes the kernel of this idea and expands it onto the pristine ideal of the picturesque American family. It plays with the self-aware realization that the stories we tell are not necessarily what we think they are.
It’s a story about forgiveness, salvation, and revenge that blows up the Bowden family when a violent offender, Max Cady (Javier Bardem), is released from prison and systematically sets his sights on the people he holds accountable. Anna and Tom Bowden (Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson), the married couple who represented his case in court, receive a rude awakening when Cady’s psychological torture tour begins. Cape Fear, as a property, is most famously known for being the ultimate cat-and-mouse psychological thriller. This rendition culminates in such an explosive climax that’s right out of a slasher film.
Antosca was involved with an unproduced Friday the 13th reboot draft back in 2015, and there are certainly moments in which Max Cady moves with the hulking intensity of Jason Voorhees. So much of what makes all this work rests on Bardem’s complex performance. He’s very careful not to just copy Robert Mitchum or Robert De Niro’s versions of Cady, while he also taps into a terrifying intensity that feels completely different from what he brought forward with No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh.
Apple TV’s new series also introduces a mental injury to Cady that adds psychological fractures that pull him between different versions of events as he struggles to grasp the truth. It’s an element that’s not exactly necessary and often feels like a convenient obstacle that can be activated whenever necessary. However, it allows for some creative visual flourishes and more opportunities for Bardem to get lost in Cady’s complexities.
Opposite Bardem’s Cady, Adams and Wilson do some of their best work as Anna and Tom. Anna is much more front and center than Tom, and Cape Fear is really Adams and Bardem’s time to shine. Wilson still does amazing, understated work, especially whenever the rug gets pulled out from under him regarding someone in his family. The visceral, brutal violence that Cady introduces to the Bowden family hits hard and highlights the anger and intensity that’s fundamental to this story.
What Cape Fear does best is its enlightening deconstruction of the ideal American family, how much work it takes to preserve such a pure thing, and the lengths that people go when they feel like the sanctity of this union is under fire. All it takes is for one of these foundational pillars to weaken before the whole unit becomes compromised. It moves the damage and pressure from one family member to the next as everyone struggles, and it’s unclear what will be left of this family when all is said and done.
This dynamic makes Cape Fear’s story so much more layered and interesting than if the series were just focused on Cady, Anna, and Tom, rather than making their children as much of a priority. Each member of the Bowden family experiences their own obstacles and arcs, although Natalie (Lily Collias) and Zack’s (Joe Anders) storylines are often the most grating. It all boils down to forgiveness, identity, and wanting to be perceived as the person we think we are, versus how we’re viewed by the public, and the dangerous dissonance that can exist between these separate selves.
These ideas are at their most potent when Cape Fear taps into the growing paranoia that bubbles up to the surface and becomes unbearable, so that even the littlest action is triggering. These moments are usually captured through a more erratic filming style that ramps up the tension for both the characters and the audience, unsure of what will strike and when.
Cape Fear never struggles to create uncomfortable setpieces where the anxiety just crescendos and hangs over the scene. On this note, the series’ musical score really captures the perfect aesthetic. It immediately evokes the suspenseful power of the previous Cape Fear films whenever Bernard Herrmann’s virtuosic original theme kicks in. It’s magic every single time.
Antosca delivers an exhilarating update to a classic thriller that pushes its source material to exciting, new places that justify its existence. It’s an exciting story that’s full of terrifying performances and cataclysmic consequences. Admittedly, Cape Fear could have been shortened to eight episodes rather than ten. There are a few plot threads that feel unnecessary and artificially expanded upon, but every episode is still an adrenaline-pumping experience.
If nothing else, it reminds audiences why Cape Fear is such an evergreen story that’s lasted the test of time and will continue to unnerve and get under the skin of whole new generations.
The 10-episode series will make its global debut on June 5 with a two-episode premiere on Apple TV, followed by new episodes every Friday through July 31, 2026.
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