For my money, the Doorways franchise is kind of like Hellraiser: The Game (and not the unreleased 1990 NES title, either.) Holy Mountains of Flesh is the fourth chapter but the third game in the series, each volume of which explores the themes and the consequences of evil in a pseudo-religious context. The newest game revolves around a guy named Juan Torres and rumors of kidnapping, cannibalism, and black magic in a rural region of Argentina, which happens to be the home of the studio itself.

Like with the other games, the narrative unfolds around the main character seeking out and sort of ‘ghostbusting’ the subject, at hand. Notes and diary entries lay scattered around the environments, revealing backstory to lead exploration through the world. You will encounter puzzles, platforming, and jump scares.

The basic point is this: the new Doorways is flawed in some similar ways as the previous chapters, but Holy Mountains of Flesh shows a huge amount of potential for the future of both this series and the developer. It looks like Saibot Studios heeded the criticism of the other games and forged ahead with renewed vision, striving to make a game that was functional, entertaining and creepy.

Technically, Holy Mountains of Flesh is still in early access, since only the first Act of the game has been released, but it’s enough of a vision into what the devs have planned to be able to review. Even though the playthrough will only take a few hours, at most, the puzzles are less arcane than in Doorways 1 & 2 and propel the action taking place, rather than hindering it in some fundamentally frustrating way. Therefore, Doorways rises above the chaff of the surfeit of horror games being released on Steam right now.

First of all, the graphical fidelity in Holy Mountains of Flesh shows marked improvement from previous chapters, and not merely because they’ve upgraded to Unity 5. The art style is more distinct, less plagued by the sometimes generic look of indie Unity-developed horror games.

The textures are richer and pronounced, character movement and environmental animations are natural in a way they weren’t before, and the world is more fully realized than plenty of other games in the genre, at this point.

While the second chapter improved mightily on the first, this game reaches a new height for the series, in terms of art direction. The school just looks really good. The environments make more logistical sense, and the art style caters to them to make a mood which strikes closest to the game’s main thematic aims. The school is dark and abandoned but also carries with it an otherworldliness that is both intriguing and existentially unsettling.

The impressive visuals are ameliorated by a witty, if not novel, approach to the use of light and dark. Rather than merely use darkness as a means for creeping out the audience, Holy Mountains of Flesh incorporates it subtly into the puzzles, forcing players to think about how to progress through certain parts of the schoolhouse.

Granted, there are still places where the design is flawed. At one point, the world shifts, creating artificial barriers to player exploration that feel sort of half-assed, conceptually. Those kinds of decisions, whether budgetary in nature or intentionally designed, are what give me pause about games like Doorways.

It’s sometimes not clear whether the configuration of levels ends up the way they do because the development team made a conscious choice, or if the limitations forced them into that direction. Still, there are far fewer middling design choices here than in most indie horror games I’ve played in the past year.

Game performance is another plus for this iteration of the Doorways series. While the framerate was never a major issue in past versions, it is particularly smooth here. Also, the frame rate is markedly improved over the other games of this type, even if it still has the weird save function that causes the screen to blink to black before fading back in. I didn’t experience any major hitching or dropped frames, and the game ran smoothly throughout, which definitely sets it apart.

The mechanics remain simple. Opening doors is still the major function of gameplay, but the game introduces some new mechanics that can be used to solve puzzles and travel from section to section. Also, I have to say this: I’ve always, always hated first-person platforming in games of this type, but the jumping in Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh — or at least how they use it here — completely works. The platforming, rather than being an awkward means of hopping on impossible surfaces, relates to minor puzzles and actually gives the game some interesting depth.

It also isn’t a tedious pixel-hunt for hidden items, either, which made parts of the early games nearly impossible to enjoy. Perhaps that can be blamed on the popularity of Slenderman-style games at the time of the first chapter’s release, but whatever the cause, this time around, interactions with the world are more satisfying. The puzzles are well-designed, even if they are largely logistically simple, and you don’t have to fight with the mechanics in order to be able to complete them.

I’ve spent a lot of space in this review comparing Holy Mountains of Flesh to Prelude and The Underworld, so in a sense it doesn’t stand on its own as well as it probably should, as a review. I recognize that. However, what should be taken from it is the fact that these games always had potential; they just didn’t have the follow-through to make them what the devs probably had in mind. Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh is easily one of the best horror games I played in 2015, and the best part about it is that there will be more.

The Final Word: Even though the game is in Early Access, let’s hope that Saibot Studios will be able to continue evolving in a positive way on its original idea.

The post ‘Doorways: Holy Mountains of Flesh’ Early Access Review appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

As we continue our wait for me to finally get caught up, here’s a recap of this year’s series!

Day 1 — Five Nights at Freddy’s

Day 2 — Monstrum

Day 3 — Contagion

Day 4 — Left 4 Dead 2 – Silent Fear mod

Day 5 — Grave

Day 6 — Doorways: The Underworld

Day 7 — Slender: The Arrival

Day 8 — F.E.A.R. 3

Day 9 — Saw: The Video Game

Day 10 — Damned

Day 11 — Neverending Nightmares

Day 12 — The Evil Within

Day 13 — Alien: Isolation

The post Watch Every 13 Days of Horror Video Right Here! appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Now sit back and let my mildly commentary wash over you. It’s for your health.

If you’d like to play this game, you can grab it on Steam for $9.99.

Don’t forget to subscribe to our YouTube channel so you don’t miss a video!

The post [13 Days of Horror] ‘Doorways: The Underworld’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

While a few developers have manage to find an audience for their games, a great many of the games in this popular new subgenre stumble when it comes to their narrative, atmosphere, or mechanics. The openness of the Steam Marketplace certainly doesn’t help, as it only enables more aspiring game makers to put in the minimum effort in order to make the next The Eight Pages.

It’s no one’s fault, really, but the deluge of too-similar-looking horror games shows that many indie devs don’t understand what it takes to make a “the next big hit.”

I was prepared to be disappointed in Doorways: The Underworld. The first two episodes were largely unremarkable, so reviewing the third and final chapter in this trilogy, which follows a private eye who’s tasked with tracking down a sadistic killer, didn’t immediately capture my interest.

The first two chapters weren’t aggressively bad; they just didn’t have much to offer the player or the genre. Collecting notes as an plot device has become trite, and puzzles that revolve around scouring every pixel of the environment to put together devices felt like work and wasn’t especially scary. The second chapter improved on the first, but it was still plagued by tedious puzzles.

As a follow-up to two moderately frustrating games, The Underworld is pleasantly surprising.

Not only does it fix some of the glaring issues that made the first two chapters a difficult slog, it introduces new features that improve on the atmosphere and gameplay. Though it now more closely resembles a few other benchmarks in the genre — most notably Outlast — it is a convincing testament to what the team at Saibot Studios is capable of.

In Doorways, players step into the shoes of Thomas Foster, tracking down a deranged and vicious killer through a series of abandoned, morbid-looking environments, just like before. The game begins in a labyrinthine underground dungeon, of sorts, with a series of lock-and-key puzzles preventing you from being able to proceed.

This is the predominant aspect of the series, and though I came in expecting the same monotonous trek through darkened hallways, I was happy to discover the puzzles less tedious and intentionally difficult, so the game seemed to move along at a more generous pace.

The element of the macabre scavenger hunt still exists, but they’re less challenging this time around now that the items are hidden in locations that actually fit their purpose. For example, in the first chapters, a brightly lit room may be bereft of any items, while the pitch black room next to it will have exactly what you need. No one wants to spend twenty minutes searching for the last item in a puzzle, only to find it in the corner of a room you thought you had searched a dozen times before.

Similarly, the puzzles are tiered in a way to boost the player’s sense of how to solve them, a total departure from the past. A more complex variation of an earlier puzzle may present itself later on, so the player has an idea of how to solve it, without the game doing all the work. This cohesion, puzzle-wise, makes Underworld feel more complete and satisfying experience.

Overall, Underworld looks better, and not just because of the textures. The overall level design is better, and the world is more populated with items, creating a more authentic space. Not only that, but each room or area appears to serve more of a purpose. There are fewer dead-end places that exist just because, and the game is far more effectively horrifying for it. For God’s sake, there’s even a map at one point.

In other words, in terms of how it’s been designed, Underworld is a significant improvement.

It seems like the team listened to criticisms of the first release and improved upon the design to make the game simpler, more straightforward, and dramatically more tense and frightening. Even though the same sort of item hunt exists, the team has employed some neat tricks in order to heighten tension.

Environments have an added threat — which I won’t spoil — that makes the game infinitely more unnerving. It isn’t just about walking around in the dark, collecting items, which was what scuttled the first two chapters. It doesn’t rely solely on dark rooms and jump scares for a horror effect, and the result is something that rivals other, similar entries into this particular subgenre.

Underworld doesn’t compare unfavorably to Outlast, at certain points, even if it is a much less high-profile release. Some of the gameplay elements, like the monster encounters, are much closer to that game than they are not, which is so bizarre considering how little like Outlast the first two chapters were.

While the first chapters were primarily about puzzle solving under the auspices of exploration, this game is really, truly a horror title first. The sense of space feels decidedly more authentic, and then on top of that is the layer of the outside threat, the monster. I don’t know if the team was simply trying something new this time around, but it definitely works a hell of a lot better.

There aren’t many monsters, but they make up for their lack of numbers by being vicious. I won’t talk in specifics, but the game approaches its scares from multiple different perspectives, and it’s really quite effective. There are chase sequences, jump scares, environmental scares, and just general dread. I’m not even a jump-and-shriek kind of person, but one moment in particular made me yelp louder than I have in a really long time.

There are some clunky elements to Underworld, but a great many of them (like the platforming) are holdovers from previous entries in the series. The biggest problem I had still relates to the tedium the game engenders with overlong puzzle sequences. The idea that solving the same kind of puzzle several times in a row is not appealing, especially when the game should be trimming the fat to make the climax more suspenseful.

It has a very strong second act, and though the third act puzzles are probably the most clever of the series, the back end suffers due to an uneven sense of pacing. It’s as though the three parts were completed separately and then spliced together to create a whole game.

Even worse, some of the design decisions actually feel like they are meant to prolong the experience rather than enhance it, which becomes very problematic. Sometimes the game mistakes tedium for tension, and that is a dramatic miscalculation as to why people play horror games.

Ultimately, I’m interested to see what this developer does next. Underworld is an interesting concept that could be expanded to continue the series or be rolled up into a much larger game. There are still some lacking elements, but this chapter of the game shows the series’ potential. The team learned to use the limited mechanics at their disposal to great effect, resulting in a game that delivers a steady stream of quality scares.

I may be awarding some bonus points here due to the comparison to the first two chapters, but the game I played this time around is way more interesting, tense, and game-like than the previous entries. If you’re looking for something to scratch the Outlast / Amnesia itch, then you won’t be disappointed with Doorways: Underworld

The Final Word: It’s clear developer Saibot learned a lot while making the first two episodes in this trilogy, and because of this, Doorways: The Underworld is far superior to its predecessors.

The post ‘Doorways: The Underworld’ Review: New Tricks appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

Doorways: The Underworld can be found on Steam for $8.99 (10% off). On Sept 24 it’s price will return to normal ($9.99).

The post Track Down a Psychopath in ‘Doorways: The Underworld’ appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.

David and I played through the game’s first chapter back in September — you can watch us endure its traps and miscellaneous other horrors in the video below. Just forgive the audio quality, this was recorded with my old equipment.

The post ‘Doorways’ Takes Us to ‘The Underworld’ in August appeared first on Bloody Disgusting!.