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.
