It takes some patience to enjoy the few things that Those Who Remain does well.
Camel 101’s horror game, out now, is well below the graphical standards set by genre mates released five years ago. Its environmental art is unremarkable. Its character models are off-putting. And I never managed to find a gamma setting that was both bright enough to let me actually see anything and dark enough to preserve any sense of horror.
Its checkpointing system is infuriating, chucking you back a half-hour, at times, for taking one wrong step. Its load screens are amateurishly tryhard, with culty symbols that look like they belong on an early-aughts metal album cover and quotes about devils from Neil Gaiman and Shakespeare that read like a freshman English major’s idea of how to improve a Call of Duty death screen. Its menus are frustrating to navigate, disallowing the use of the D-pad and ignoring presses of the “go back buttons.” In short, it makes a really, really bad first impression.
But, if you stick with it, Those Who Remain has some interesting ideas. As Edward, a man with some kind of mysterious family tragedy in his past and a drinking problem in his present, you begin the game traveling to a seedy motel to break up with your mistress. When you arrive, her bags are in the room and the shower is running, but she’s nowhere to be found.
From there, Edward begins a journey, on foot, to the nearby town of Dormont. As he goes, he encounters strange, humanoid creatures lurking in the shadows. They’re afraid of the light, though, so as long Edward stays near fire or phosphorescent bulbs, he’s okay. Puzzles frequently play with this dynamic to interesting effect. One of my personal favorites had me — from well-lit safety — making use of the game’s physics engine to throw an object at a stack of boxes, dispelling a shadow and opening a path.
Edward spends most of the time on his trip to and through Dormont rooting through abandoned buildings, searching for some clue as to what is going on. The shadow creatures follow him wherever he goes, though, so progress often requires finding a light switch, or flipping the power back on. Step into the shadows and it’s instant death, as the creatures punch holes in you with long knives.
These one-hit kills cause Those Who Remain’s most persistent frustrations. While the joy of a first-person exploration game is often in the process of piecing together a story through objects in the environment, Those Who Remain makes exploration ridiculously punitive. For example, light switches can be placed inside or outside a room. When you flip one, it’s difficult to know if you’ll be turning a light on and opening a path forward, or turning a light off, and inviting an instant death. This would be a minor inconvenience if Those Who Remain made use of a better checkpointing system. But, death often means getting kicked back to the beginning of the current section. And going back to the beginning of the section means finding everything you found all over again.
As a result, I spent a lot of my time with Those Who Remain speedrunning through areas I had already thoroughly searched, going through the motions of grabbing key objects. And, even setting instadeath and bad checkpointing aside, you will spend a lot of time in this game opening drawers, running your cursor over every object, trudging back-and-forth through rooms you’ve already gone over with a fine-tooth comb in search of the items needed to advance the plot. In one of the game’s largest areas, I was tasked with searching a half-dozen buildings to find one tiny key whose location had, as far as I could tell, not been signposted in any way and whose color matched the surface it was resting on.
The point of all this pixel-hunting is to piece together the story surrounding a young girl’s murder in Dormont. In most areas, you’ll discover documents that paint a picture of one of the people involved in causing or covering up her death. After you have discovered all the evidence, a masked figure shows up, and, in order to continue, you must pass judgment on the person. Forgiveness or condemnation is in your hands.
This mechanic — an import from the world of Telltale adventures and Obsidian RPGs — is by far the most interesting thing about Those Who Remain. Its story, which deals with the way people deal with guilt, is nothing new for a horror game. Its chase sequences, which task you with wrangling the physics engine to move objects out of the way as a monster bears down on you, are infuriating. And, its puzzles, outside of the ones focused on redirecting light, are often either inscrutable or bog-standard. But, giving the player moral choices is a smart move, and one that manages to deepen your connection to your character where the game’s given backstory falters.
In the end, though, even this is compromised by Those Who Remain’s many weaknesses. At one point, after I had searched for about an hour for the aforementioned key, I was given a moral choice. Move a light, and doom a man to death in the hands of the shadow creatures, or find another way around. I moved the light and he was torn to bits. I didn’t do it because I thought it was the right thing to do. I did it because I couldn’t take being in that area any longer. In Those Who Remain, the easy choice is the best one, because either way, you probably won’t be having much fun.
Those Who Remain review code for PS4 provided by the publisher.
Those Who Remain is out now for PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, and PC.