Reviews
‘Lake Haven – Chrysalis’ Review – Throwback Video Game Channels ‘Silent Hill’ and Early PS1 Survival Horror
Until recently, Konami had left the Silent Hill franchise dormant, leaving a huge hole in the survival horror genre. Since then, many indie developers have taken up the mantle. Games like Lone Survivor and Signalis each took the ethos of the series and put their own spin on it, creating personal works that reflected what made the original titles great to begin with. The latest attempt at capturing the glory days of the series is Lake Haven – Chrysalis, a brief prologue to an upcoming full game. While developer Encrypt Games does a good job of emulating the look and feel, it does so often at the cost of its own identity.
Lake Haven – Chrysalis starts with a very Twin Peaks set up. You are a detective who has been assigned to what seems like a basic case investigating a missing woman at an isolated farmhouse. Of course, nothing is as simple as it seems, leading the player down a mysterious and menacing journey to uncover some truly strange happenings. All the action takes place in a fairly tight area, but there’s enough variety within the environment that keeps the areas distinct for the purposes of backtracking. Notes are scattered throughout, filling in the story of the people who lived here while also building a dread-filled mythology. None of it feels super revelatory, and is sometimes undercut by an off-tone jokey attitude that never quite lands for me, but there are some late game moments that show bursts of creativity, demonstrating the potential this game has for expansion in the future.
Puzzles in the game mostly come in the form of collecting items and figuring out where they will be useful. This is mostly intuitive, but can sometimes become frustrating, as items can be difficult to associate with what they unlock. It’s easy to understand which door the “Crescent Moon Key” will unlock, but less so with the “Heavy Iron Key.” There are some inspired moments where notes you find will help you figure out how to use particular things you’ve found, but for the most part there’s a lot of testing keys as you go. I also ended up picking up a lot of keys before running into the actual locks they are associated with, which makes the puzzle aspect of it slightly less satisfying. The inventory screen is fairly close to the one in Silent Hill, but you can inspect and interact with the items a la Resident Evil, making for some neat little moments of discovery while solving the puzzles.
One thing that I generally appreciate about old survival horror games is the way the level design creates small but dense areas through use of shortcuts and slowly unlocking areas. This helps alleviate the tedium of backtracking, because you’re finding new paths through the more doors you unlock. This is something that Lake Haven doesn’t do quite as effectively as the classics. None of the areas feel particularly interconnected, forcing you to continuously retread sections of the level. There’s only one brief, cinematic combat moment in the game, so it can’t even rely on enemies to keep the backtracking interesting. I understand that this is a small-scale prologue, so hopefully this is something that Encrypt focuses on when they are designing more expansive levels for the full release.
The presentation in Lake Haven is really well done and achieves exactly what it sets out to do. The PS1 aesthetic is one that I always love for horror, and this manages to pull it off with style. Fixed camera angles do a great job of setting a mood, occasionally giving me an eerie feeling of being watched by an unseen sinister force. While some may not like the return of tank controls, the way they interact with the stylish viewpoints makes them feel about as smooth as any game that adopts that control style. Occasionally I found spots in the level where either the camera won’t change and you’ll wander off screen or the camera will pop between two different angles very quickly, breaking the intended effect of the carefully controlled cinematic perspective.
Lake Haven proudly displays its Silent Hill influences, for better or worse. They do a good job at capturing the lonely, melancholy mood of the classic Konami series, but don’t seem to really carve out their own identity until the final stretch. The music, camera and sound effects all feel evocative of Silent Hill, and there’s even a hidden easter egg containing references to the series. Late game imagery eventually strikes out on its own path, with strange twisting vines and seemingly endless eerie spaces, but the majority of the 90 minute runtime feels a bit like a Silent Hill cover band, albeit a very good one.
Last year’s Signalis did such a great job at taking inspiration from Silent Hill while making something wholly unique and beautiful, so it’s my hope that the full Lake Haven game will find its own path to doing the same. Chrysalis is a great start, but seems more interested in replaying the past than forging its own future.
Level design nitpicks aside, there are some clever moments in this that demonstrate they’re capable of crafting their own identity going forward. There’s a fine line between homage and mimicry, and hopefully Encrypt finds a way to balance that with their full release. All that being said, this is a fun little package for the reasonable price of $3, but it may leave you reflecting more on the glory days of Silent Hill than the future of Lake Haven.
Movies
‘Recluse’ Review – Harrowing Haunted House Horror With Lots Of Skeletons In Its Closet [Tribeca 2026]
A haunted house story is tense, terrifying storytelling when it’s properly executed. There’s been a growing tendency in horror to blend together harrowing haunted house stories with traumatic homecomings. A family member’s illness or death triggers a return to something dark that was intentionally left behind. Recluse hits all the tropes that one expects to find in this type of horror film, yet it manages to push this story in a daring, disturbing new direction that uses sound as a superpower.
It’s a unique lens to experience a familiar story about family secrets, generational trauma, unresolved grief, and the importance of not just legacy, but preservation. It’s a hell of a directorial debut from Henry Chaisson that’s guaranteed to get under the audience’s skin as they’re dragged through this painful, toxic tale.
Recluse is a gothic haunted house story where an isolated audio engineer, Joan (Sasha Frolova), returns to her family’s estate to check in on her father after he suffers a terrible accident. Joan suddenly discovers something much more sinister that paints her family’s tragedies in a very different light. Chaisson’s debut functions as a fascinating companion piece to this year’s undertone, which does a lot of the same things.
These two films make for a fascinating case of parallel thinking that tackles comparable subject matter through a similar lens, albeit in a bigger, less claustrophobic story in Recluse’s case. In fact, it’s the perfect horror film for anyone who was let down by undertone and didn’t feel like it brought enough to the table. It’s a considerably more conventional horror film, but this isn’t meant to denigrate its high quality. Recluse may hit some familiar notes, but it’s a scary, well-crafted haunted house horror story that goes for the jugular.
A gripping mystery that involves the tragic, unresolved circumstances that surround Joan’s mother teases a chilling connection to the recent horrors that have afflicted her father. Joan desperately tries to put these pieces together and give her family some sense of grander peace before she’s pulled under and becomes another victim of this festering curse that’s systematically worked its way through the Wyatt family. By doing so, Recluse digs into some deeper commentary on collective trauma, a very literal look at the “sins of the father” adage, and how one selfish decision can ripple through generations and fracture off into different dilemmas. By the end, Recluse has brilliantly flipped the powerful concept of legacy on its head by illustrating the horrors and sense of entitlement that can be born out of this idea.
A legacy is just another name for a curse under the right context.
”Listen” is a simple but powerful command from Joan’s father that she briefly obsesses over. In a way, it becomes Recluse’s grander mission statement, whether it’s in response to Joan listening to the people in her life, the signals that her body and mind are telling her, or the world’s greater whims. It’s important to reconnect with these grounding pillars, especially when it feels like control is slipping away.
Recluse excels with how audio and soundscapes can create entire universes that are full of rich details that transport individuals to these environments. There’s also a level of objectivity when it comes to audio recordings and the evergreen permanence that they’re able to provide. Joan’s career as an audio engineer makes sense for someone who wants to cling to hard evidence and proof of existence. It provides great insight into Joan without ever getting lost in contrived exposition.
Joan’s entire life is built around audio engineering, and so it makes sense that Recluse features excellent sound design that really goes above and beyond with its production elements. All of the sound design is expertly handled and turns the film into something special. These auditory elements intuitively keep the audience on edge so that they’re more susceptible to the actual scares that eventually strike. The smallest sound effect gets turned into a crushing, cacophonous assault. It’s a really effective way to build terror. Writer/Director Chaisson also handles the film’s music, which achieves a sublime, unnerving dissonance that further heightens the free-floating anxiety.
The story at the center of Recluse is slightly generic in some respects, but the film’s visual language and tone make it feel distinctly memorable. It also doesn’t hurt that the home that Joan returns to is basically an eerie art studio that’s full of contorted paintings. Recluse never struggles to generate mounting dread and terror that pump through every scene. Powerful, thoughtful cinematography consistently reinforces the film’s themes. Joan is constantly reflected in different surfaces or viewed through mirrors. She’s also often confined to tight, constricting framing that all speaks to her refracted identity during this moment of loss and her attempts to regain agency and control by making sense of something that’s seemingly unexplainable.
Recluse is full of truly disturbing visuals that make it seem like Joan is lost in a dream that turns out to be an extended nightmare. It’s a surreal journey reminiscent of invasive psychological horror like Silent Hill, with a touch of Sinister and Hereditary thrown in for good measure. There are so many individual frames that could endlessly fuel urban legends and creepypastas.
It does a great job with how it presents Joan’s fragile state of mind, where chilling flashes of the past sneak up on her and unresolved trauma manifests into unsettling imagery. There are endless shots that are obscured in darkness, or shadow is creeping in from the corners of frames like a suffocating force of nature. It’s very rare that a scene is fully lit. It leads to a very lonely, isolating atmosphere that’s easy to get lost in.
Chaisson’s debut stands out from the many other high-minded haunted house horror films without succumbing to the same pretensions that often drag down these stories. It’s a grief-stricken character study that’s full of upsetting visuals that scratch at something visceral and raw. The horror elements connect, and the answers to its grander mystery provide an appropriate and believable sense of closure. Those who are looking for an atmospheric horror film that isn’t afraid to be different while still channeling something real will appreciate Recluse.
Recluse made its world premiere at Tribeca; release info TBD.
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