Reviews
‘Underdread’ Review: Underdeveloped, Underwritten, and Underwhelming
In Underdread, you’ll play as a man searching for his missing daughter, Lisa, in an ancient castle, using clues left behind by both a detective and a madman to solve torturous puzzles as you traverse a variety of vaguely Victorian environments, like dungeons and elaborate underground caves. There are monsters and other supernatural elements in your path, and you must not only solve the puzzles but also uncover the mystery of the castle, as well.
It isn’t an Amnesia clone, a charge the developers at Bigzur thoroughly deny, but if you play the game, you can see where people would get off saying such things. In the end, if you play Underdread for an extended amount of time, you’ll kind of wonder how anyone could draw any sort of equivalence between the breakout title for Frictional Games andUnderdread, which is oddly designed, painfully unfun, and, worst of all, incomplete.
Narrative quality is not necessarily the high watermark of horror storytelling, but creating a distinct (or at least distinctly horrific) sense of place is necessary in allowing the audience to experience the trepidation that the developers foresee. Outlast, for its narrative and pacing problems, manages to set up the experience of exploring an abusive asylum very well.
Underdread, on the other hand, does not. The game’s epistolary storytelling function doesn’t work in the slightest. Through picking up the various notes and communiques, the devs mostly attempt to convey a facsimile of whatever you’re experiencing precisely at that moment. As a result, the diary entries attempt to tell you a story and freak you out, and they end up accomplishing neither.
It is horror by proxy, an attempt to show parallels between your own current experience and the experience detailed by the . It isn’t that they are poorly written — though they are; they feel like an afterthought. Unnecessary substitutes for storytelling littered throughout the landscape as an attempt to give the game a feeling of weight.
Never does the game feel quite creepy enough to shadow its purpose. Sure, there are horrific elements, but they serve to make the game feel more like a haunted house ride than a legit haunted house. The frequent change of scenery makes it feel as though maybe the devs had more puzzle ideas than scares, and the lopsided nature of the game’s dynamics make it less than compelling.
Underdread’s main problem, however, is also the game’s main function: The puzzles. They are usually quite simple and don’t require a lot of action or intellect to solve. However, the game isn’t designed in such a way to provide players with solid inferences as to how to solve them.
Sometimes, the diary entries help. Sometimes, they don’t. Sometimes, you’ll be forced to wander the environment, looking for a clue as to what to do. I can’t highlight this problem enough. If you finish a puzzle, the game doesn’t indicate where to go next or, more importantly, what the next puzzle actually is. Underdread is a game virtually without context, and the disconnect between the visuals, the gameplay, and the story is utterly maddening.
An in-game mechanic supplies players with clues; however, the clues themselves are a scarce commodity that, when gone, can only be restocked by finding more in the environment. Imagine playing a game where map objectives can only be uncovered through a finite resource on the map, and whenever you’ve accomplished that objective, the next objective is completely unknown to you until you find another somewhere else. It is frustrating beyond frustrating, and it blurs the line between narrative and game design in a perfectly flawed way.
The quality of the tips reveals the utterly perfunctory nature of the puzzles. “Place more coins in [blank]” is an example, and it only goes to show how little care went into designing the puzzles themselves, as though the devs themselves did not have much confidence in the strength of their game mechanics. As a result, the puzzles feel haphazard and arbitrary, merely gates to be bested to continue on to the next section of the game.
Also, there is no guarantee that you’ll solve a puzzle in this new area. Sometimes, progression will require you to backtrack to solve parts of puzzles in previous sections of the game, all without letting you know that. It wouldn’t be a problem, if the game somehow indicated naturally what the next objective or obstacle was, but since it doesn’t, these new puzzles come off as cheap or thoughtless.
The game looks fine, in that it has a stable framerate throughout, but the design itself is completely uninspired. It has a very 90s feel, and everything appears as a series of corridors instead of a cohesive worldmap. The game is laid out in such a way to service the next puzzle — and sometimes not even then — rather than to make the player feel as though they are part of a fully realized world that includes puzzles.
The few “enemies” that appear are basically the same gimmick presented in different forms: whatever it is, be it skeleton cluster or noxious gas, you are supposed to run away until the threat passes and then go about your business. They’re not terrifying in any meaningful way, unlike the games to whichUnderdread will most likely be compared. They’re more like mild annoyances that have to be avoided in order to progress.
And, not to include spoilers, but the ending of the game is highly disappointing. You solve a series of puzzles in an underground area, and then unlock a door, and the game just sort of…ends. And sure, a scroll afterward tells you that the game is over, but nothing about the game’s pacing, puzzles, or narrative leading up to that moment make it feel special in any way.
This is perhaps the most egregious knock againstUnderdread. It isn’t clear if the game is incomplete and will be patched later to include more content, or if a sequel is in the works, or if this will be episodic in some way. Even if it is episodic, it doesn’t come to a satisfying conclusion, the way that a TellTale game does. There is no arc for either the character or the story, leaving you with a disappointed feeling of, “Well, I guess the game’s over.”
To step on a soapbox for a moment, this is a trend that has to stop. Updates are fine. Patches are fine. Bug fixes are fine. But releasing a game that is ostensibly missing the ending is unacceptable. Nothing about the wayUnderdread is set up makes it feel like an episodic adventure game. It is a 3-4 hour experience, with a variety of areas.
The Final Word: Underdread is a drab, uninspired, incomplete game, and it is not surprise to me that it originated as mobile game called Slender Man Origins 2 Saga. Save yourself the time and frustration by playing a more complete horror game.
Books
‘Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep’ Book Review: Paul Tremblay’s Primal Scream Against the AI Push
Read enough Paul Tremblay novels and one word comes to dominate your thinking around his fiction: “Daring.”
Whether he’s playing with traditional novelistic forms, holding conversations with characters across time, or pushing his stories to their bleakest and strangest possible conclusions (if they have concrete conclusions at all, Tremblay is a daring novelist, never playing it safe for his audience or himself. The author of A Head Full of Ghosts, Horror Movie, and more is always pushing for something in his fiction, digging into the core of an issue until he finds its bloody, beating heart.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep, Tremblay’s latest novel, is no different. From the title alone you might surmise certain things about the narrative, from its Philip K. Dick influence to its sci-fi-horror premise, and you’d be right. But Tremblay always pushes beyond those initial assumptions, and here we get not just a gripping sci-fi-horror showcase, but something much stranger and more profound: An exploration of what it means to be human, fragile bodies and all, in the age of AI.
Julia, Tremblay’s protagonist, is in a strange place when the novel begins. A former gaming streamer who’s retreated from her digital spotlight, she’s in search of a new direction in life, and she finds one in the last place she might expect. Julia’s mother, who runs a California tech behemoth, has a job offer for her daughter, an unprecedented one. It seems that the company has introduced proprietary new technology into the body of a brain-dead man, and now they need to see what this tech can do. Julia’s job? Using her gaming skills to take this human vegetable (Julia calls him “Bernie” because of Weekend at Bernie’s) from one side of the country to another, using a stealthy controller purpose-built for the experience.
This is a wonderfully ghoulish premise on which to build a novel, and Tremblay makes full use of its nightmare fuel. As Julia comes to grips with the implications of what she’s about to do, and what she might discover while doing it, the author punctuates her journey with trips into the mad mindscape of Bernie himself, a dark reflection of our own world populated with half-remembered moments and images and hallucinations. As simple exercises in writing craft, they recall Philip K. Dick at his best, building the same sense of overwhelm and wonder so present in his work, but Tremblay’s after something else as well, and it’s purpose-built for this moment.
The novel builds deliberate juxtapositions with Bernie’s half-remembered life and Julia’s ongoing one, sending them barreling at each other from opposite ends of consciousness. Julia’s brain functions as only her brain can, a mass of pop culture references and dreams and memories she both cherishes and would rather forget. Bernie’s world is one of shadows, but also one of constantly shifting perspective, as the tech in his head remakes him. He’s not just a passenger in his own body, but an unwilling participant in a Frankenstein-ing of human and machine. It’s not the first time an author has attempted such a thing, but through Tremblay’s evocative, visceral prose, it’s one of the most effective, and it hits on something vital that Tremblay says in a way that only he can.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep is a thumping sci-fi yarn, a journey into new frontiers through untested technology with vast implications for the future of the world, and if Tremblay had only explored that genre, he’d have done well. When the horror elements creep in, though, Tremblay’s work raises endless questions over what exactly we are sacrificing when we let machines get so close not just to our flesh, but to our consciousness, even when, medically speaking, that consciousness is gone.
Tremblay breaks this sacrifice down in terrifying detail, sometimes quite literally breaking down the basic flow of prose in Bernie’s head until he’s been hijacked by words and phrases and shapes that he doesn’t understand. Along the way, Tremblay gets almost metafictional with his probing of this hybrid consciousness, asking us to question not just where the story will go, but who gets to be in control when the narrative becomes a runaway train.
All of this makes Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep the most ambitious book of Paul Tremblay’s career, which is really saying something. His daring, his boldness, and his ability to mine the unspeakable are on full display, and they work together to deliver one of the year’s most unnerving genre books.
Tremblay’s at the peak of his powers with this one.
Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep hits shelves on June 30.
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