To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 24th

• Game: Immure
• Developer: Wither Studios
• Release Year: 2019
• Available: Itch.io, Steam

I'm glad I started with Immure, because in a lot of ways it's the archetypal Indie survival horror game: it uses a 2D perspective with sprites, but has aspirations closer to Konami's Silent Hill franchise or perhaps Monolith's Condemned in that the player is expected to do more than simply elude unkillable ghoulies and instead spend their time exploring the current area top to bottom, gathering clues and key items, piecing together the context of what happened and how you might permanently escape or defeat your pursuer, and figuring out how best to proceed in the moment without running afoul of an early grisly demise. Immure definitely has that level of ambition in mind, though it might take a while longer for the developers to execute upon it.

Immure tells the story of Will: a frazzled man who, in his desperation, reaches a haunted manor to figure out what happened to his lost love Danielle. It's not clear from early hints if Danielle died prematurely or simply vanished without a trace, but a man looking in the most dangerous of places for his spouse is, I'd argue, the prevailing trend of this genre and an adequate place to start. Immure first gives you a little tutorial of how the game works: explaining how the "Shining Trapezohedron" operates (a possibly cursed object that reveals hints), that monsters exist and must be evaded either by running or hiding or stunning them somehow or a combination thereof, and that many of the game's puzzles are the inventory-based kind where you only have a limited amount of room and must prioritize what seems important (one of the more annoying limitations found in Resident Evil).

After that tutorial, it becomes evident that the game is built to be modular: the mansion is full of distinctive doors that link to other dimensions, each of which is a self-contained scenario where Will has to find the tormented soul trapped within and either help release it or destroy it. The former seems to be the harder path, requiring a bit more sussing out, but may prove to be the more preferable solution in the long-run. The latter still requires some guesswork however, as a trapped soul can only be destroyed in the same manner it originally died. In what turns out to be "Immure Part 1," you get to see just one of these scenarios play out, set in a burned down apartment building haunted by the phantom of a monstrous firefighter swinging around a deadly fire axe. After each of these scenarios, you get a brief snippet of Will's backstory before you're once again given the keys to a new door and a new spook to overcome.

I generally find that the type of horror adventure game with lots of puzzles and reading that also includes monster attacks and combat mechanics tends to get dogged down with the uninteresting (and repetitive) second aspect while you're more invested in the first, and nothing takes you out of the moment like dropping the investigation of a scene partway through to run halfway across the zone to escape your would-be spectral killer. On the other hand, a horror survival game without danger has a much harder job to do putting the player in a state of unease and terror, so I can appreciate the inherent design dilemma. Immure does as fine a job as it can with its stalking terrors, though they can be absurdly fast sometimes. I ran into a lot of problems trying to get the hiding interactions to work, so my usual strategy was to instead run to one of the "safe rooms" (there's an enigmatic being in here that provides a small amount of levity as well as hints and the ability to make hard saves, though is still unsettling enough to not extinguish the eerie mood entirely) and wait them out.

As I stated earlier, Immure is built to be modular and this "Part 1" was relatively short, having only the tutorial and that first scenario in the apartment building. With the gameplay structure and much of the art assets already in place, the studio will have an easier time putting out subsequent chapters as DLC to fill out the story: a financially beneficial format that a lot of Indie devs have taken a shine to, especially with more narrative-focused games. I'm sure the evasion mechanics and minor issues like typos and visual glitches will continue to improve and be fixed as the studio works on these new episodes, all of which have some hints to their future content by the type of doors you can see while exploring the central manor (one looks to be the door to a child's bedroom, so I'm sure that'll be a laugh riot). This might be a series to watch, but for now there's only a skeleton of what may one day be. (Then again, what's scarier than a skeleton?)

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 3 S.T.A.R.S.