Picture this: you’re trapped inside your old high school, alone. All of the lights are out and the doors are sealed shut. It’s nighttime, so you can’t really see out any of the windows, and although you know there’s no one in the school with you, you keep hearing sounds like rustling feet. No matter where you turn, they seem to be just behind you. You whip around and pull out your camera; a ghastly visage fills the screen as it screams and rushes towards you.
Welcome to DreadOut, you’re dead.
(Would you rather watch a video than read this? Click here to check out our video review of DreadOut)
Yes, it is true: the Indonesian indie horror game DreadOut, developed by Digital Happiness, is finally coming out this Thursday (May 15). I got a chance to play through the full game over the weekend, and I’m happy to say the news is mostly good.
Gameplay: scare me, confuse me
DreadOut is a puzzle/action horror game in the style of the Fatal Frame series. Players are dropped into the shoes of Indonesian schoolgirl Linda Melinda, and tasked with solving puzzles and fighting ghosts using only a camera phone. Generally, Linda moves around in the third person, but the only way to fight or sometimes even see ghosts, generally, is by switching to the first-person camera mode, and you’ll switch between them often. You’ll also make frequent use of your phone’s flashlight function to search through dark corners for clues.
Combat in DreadOut is pretty similar to Fatal Frame. When ghosts get close enough, the image on your camera will distort, and snapping pictures at that moment damages them. Some can be taken out by repeatedly snapping, but others are a bit tougher, requiring you to snap a shot of their weak spot or to find and use a particular tool before they can be destroyed.
If you fail to deal with a ghost, it will generally kill you, and you’ll end up in limbo. Once there, you’ve got to run into the light, Carol Ann style. The more you die, the further away this light gets. And unfortunately, while Linda Melinda is an excellent ghost photographer, she’s not exactly an Olympic sprinter, so if you die a lot, you’ll end up spending several minutes between actually playing the game where you’re just holding the Shift+W and waiting to make it back into the game. I understand the developer’s impulse behind this—to give death in the game some meaning and make players try to avoid it—but as someone who dies a lot in games, I found it to be frustrating pretty quickly.
Go into the light!
In between encountering ghosts, you’ll run into puzzles. For example, when you come across a locked closet, you’ll need to figure out how to find a key to get inside it. Some of these puzzles are pretty damn difficult even though the screen will vignette in blue when you’re near something important. With a little help from my colleague Iain, I was able to figure them all out eventually, but they are not easy, and I spent a lot of time in the game frustrated at not being able to progress. I even emailed the developers for help, but they were just as cryptic in their responses as many of the game’s clues. I’ll admit, there were a few times when I even yelled at my computer monitor in anger, but when I did eventually figure a puzzle out, I felt pretty good about it.
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