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.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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