Song of Horror: A Haunted House Adventure

So I’m playing horror games this Halloween. Unlike Amnesia Rebirth last week, which bored me so much that I didn’t even bother to write a proper review for it, Song of Horror has some interesting meat on the bone.

Song of Horror is an episodic survival horror game centered around the evil spirit inhabiting a music box. I say the game is about that but the plot is mostly an afterthought in this game that really just wants an excuse to make you roam around a haunted mansion and get scared silly.

Song of Horror has some interesting elements to it. First off, the game involves perma-death. You have a limited number of characters to get through an individual chapter with. If one character dies, you need to switch to another character and try to finish off the chapter. If you find the location your last character died, you’ll be able to pick up all of their items and information. If you lose all of your characters, you need to start the chapter over from scratch.

It’s an intriguing idea but not terribly well implemented. Where the different characters could have been interesting, especially if their personalities were leaned into a little harder and they responded to each other and the paranormal differently, here each character really just feels like an extra life. What’s worse is, if they die, they die: That means if a character was supposed to appear in both chapters one and four and you get him killed in one, congratulations, you start chapter four with one less life available than usual.

So what does the game do right? Atmosphere. Judging purely on atmosphere, this is one of the best horror games I’ve ever played. The scenery and the visual and sound design is superb and it really does feel like you’re wandering around a haunted house. The scenery reacts to the player: Doors slam, voices whisper, things move when you’re not expecting it. Freakish faces peek out at you and then slam the door shut. Photographs change appearance when you look at them. Turn around in a room and you may find the walls are suddenly covered in ominous pictures. The game does a fantastic job keeping the player on his toes. To be candid they’re almost all jump scares and they will age rapidly but on the first playthrough they hit all the right notes.

What does the game do badly? Its gameplay unfortunately.

The threat in the game is called The Presence, an anomalous dark entity that attempts to hunt your characters. It is capable of appearing at any time to ruin your plans, somewhat similar to the titular Alien from Alien:Isolation. One of its preferred tricks is to hide behind doors and wait for you to open them for an instant kill, this requires you to put your ear to any door you're going to open and listen carefully to avoid that instant kill. If you hear the Presence behind the door, you’ll have to go and do something else until the Presence moves on to haunt a different area.

I really liked the idea of the Presence however I think its execution is severely flawed. For one thing, it’s not nearly as aggressive or persistent as the Alien from Alien:Isolation. It can’t be: In a game that works off perma-death, the Presence catching you in an unwinnable position by dumb luck would be absolutely unfair. This results in the Presence being less a dynamic hunter and more of a scripted game mechanic.

What’s worse is each time you encounter the Presence you need to hide from it, or fend it off, using Quick Time events. In some cases you will need to find a hiding place and then use Quick time events to slow your heart beat before you go into panic mode and the creature hears you. Other times the creature is trying to get into the room and you need to use Quick Time events to keep slamming the door shut.

Quick Time Events are irritating and really a poor design decision. I like the Presence. It has a great visual aesthetic and it’s really frightening. The problem is due to the Quick Time event system I’m not looking at the Presence, I’m staring at the UI trying to win a timed mini game so I don’t need to start the chapter over. This really drags the game down in my opinion.

The “listening at the door” mechanic sounds interesting but it really gets thin quickly. After you go through a door once, the game stops giving you the option to listen at it again UNLESS the Presence or something else really is behind it. This kills a lot of tension because any time the game gives you the option to listen you know you should be on your toes, even if the monsters have moved on by then and the door is safe.

You spend most of the game solving puzzles and the puzzles are pretty tricky, actually it’s not so much that they’re tricky as non-intuitive. The game doesn’t always make it clear what you need to do to solve the puzzle or even how solving it advances your situation. I quickly gave into frustration and just went through the game with a walkthrough guide.

The worst element in the game by far is the instant kill mechanic. There are numerous places in the game where you can do something and die instantly in a scripted death scene, and the game gives you absolutely no warning or way of knowing this. In a game that’s more generous with its respawn mechanics, these instant death situations could have been fine but here it actually discourages people from exploring the world. In the first chapter you encounter a tub of dirty water and the game asks if you want to pull something you see on the bottom out of it. If you’re a Silent Hill veteran like me, you recognize this as a key item and you say ‘Yes.’ Well sucks to be me because if you say ‘Yes’ the Presence instantly appears and kills you. Similar events happen if you just happen to look out a pair of windows in the attic (as opposed to a 3rd window in the same attic which you MUST go through in order to advance the game), and in these cases the game gives you absolutely no clue that you’re about to die. This is the horror game equivalent of jump scares: They’re cheap and they’re frustrating.

Is the game worth playing? Well it depends on what you’re looking for. Last week, I called Amnesia Rebirth a Walking Simulator with Horror Elements. Song of Horror is thankfully not that. However I wouldn’t go after it as a real survival horror game either. Treat it as a visit to a “House of Horrors” or similar attraction and you may get a lot out of it. The game is dripping with scary atmosphere and lots of it are exceedingly well done. The game keeps you on edge and it keeps cranking the tension up. If the overall gameplay kept pace with the creepy atmosphere and solid scares, Song of Horror might have been kind of amazing. As it is I’d recommend playing through it with a walkthrough in hand and just getting through the mansion to enjoy the amazing atmosphere and visual design.

Final Score 6/10