Hello and welcome back to dubious horror I swear I'm gonna try and put these out at a regular clip. If you'd like to follow along with the dumb internet streams these write-ups are based around, I'm on the Twitch under this dumb internet moniker. Or you can find the VODs on Youtube.

Deep Fear

Category: Residon’t Evil (also: Sega Graveyard and BANNED IN THE NTSC)

Developer: Sega AM7 R&D Division (Also known as “Team Shinobi” and “Overworks”)

Release Date: July 16, 1998

Time Played: like six hours?

Dubiosity: 3 out of 5

Would I go back and finish it? If you paid me

The Sega Saturn is a weird, fucked-up console with a weird, fucked-up trajectory whose fucked-up history is the kind of thing you can find multiple youtube essays about. For years it was something of an enigma to me. I never knew a human being in the real world who owned one, and until this year I’d mostly seen it from a distance as “the Dreamcast for even stranger Sega fans.” Thanks to the recent advances in Saturn emulation, this has changed. Much to my misfortune and distaste, I’m into what I’ve played on the console so far. Those Sega fans lurking in the dark corners of the internet who kept hyping up Panzer Dragoon Saga were mostly right! That game is cool! Burning Rangers? What a neat thing! The game I played for this feature? Ehhhhhhhhhhh… not so much.

By 1998 the Saturn was already half-dead in the US, helped in no short part by Sega of America’s refusal to put anything out. One of the casualties of this was Deep Fear, Sega’s first-party answer to Resident Evil. It’s one of those aberrant titles released in Europe and Japan but not the US, and after some time with it I guess I can see why it was passed up. This thing came out multiple months after Resident Evil 2, and to be frank the comparison is not a flattering one. There’s certainly some dubious merit to Deep Fear, especially in regards to its cutscenes (which have some untapped memetic material for the internet) but as a whole it feels like they missed the target. As a survival horror game, Deep Fear is weird, clumsy, and maybe one of the worst paced Resident Evil clones I’ve experienced in my surprisingly extensive run with them.

So, to back up a bit, Deep Fear is “A Resident Evil” taking place in an undersea research base. As John Actionman, a real American hero, it’s your job to fight horrible undersea mutant things, deal with dwindling oxygen supplies, and otherwise tank control down pre-rendered backgrounds. The oxygen part is the important bit, actually. While Deep Fear’s cinematic aspirations certainly seem like an attempt to differentiate the game narratively, the biggest concern mechanically is that rooms often have a set oxygen level ticking down. If there isn’t any oxygen, you have to put on your rebreather. Outside of a few intentionally stressful set-pieces, air management is never all that much of a concern... much like health management, ammo management, inventory management, or really any of the other managerial aspects of these sorts of games I want.

It’s unfortunate that the rest of the game seemingly took the wrong lessons from Resident Evil, especially in terms of environment design. This is something I hammer on a lot with “these sorts of games” but Deep Fear features a lot of running back and forth through linear corridors that don’t neatly loop back on each other. This is what I refer to as "The Code Veronica problem," but there's significantly less back and forth to grab key items in that game compared to Deep Fear. In fact, given that you can fully restock your ammo at any supply room, it feels like Sega fundamentally misunderstood the point of “survival horror.” Why avoid enemies when you can blast them? But of course, blasting comes with the unfortunate side-effect of having to deal with the game's sometimes bad targeting and hitbox bits. What ultimately results is tedium, as you’ll see in my increasing frustration during the stream VODs of this game. It’s a shame, because the storytelling and cutscenes are goofy and camp enough to be worth talking about.

…Iru!

Category: Cthulhu and Friends (also BANNED IN THE NTSC, High Quality Horror on my Sony Playstation)

Developer: Soft Machine

Release Date: March 26, 1998

Time Played: A little under four hours.

Dubiosity: 2 out of 5

Would I play again? No real need tbh

Ohoho, what’s this? Another game not released in North America? As if to really tank my personal relevance during this; the spookiest of months, here’s an even more obscure game. Iru (which roughly translates as "They're Here!") is essentially a pretty short, pretty straightforward narrative adventure game with some light dusting of Lovecraft for funsies. It’s the kind of game that would only have been made for the PSX, the kind of low-budget, fairly low-stakes release clearly made by a handful of people. In modern times I guess you’d compare it to smaller narrative indie games, but those things weren’t put on a disk and sold on shelves at like… a Super Potato. There’s not really much to say about it, other than it’s “neat” and “probably not dubious” and I’m glad I got to experience it. With a guide. Need to really hammer that second part home. If I didn’t use a guide this game probably would take another two hours to play and would’ve been far more frustrating.

The thing I will say about Iru is that, if nothing else, it has vibes. As a video game it mostly consists of walking back and forth between different rooms in an increasingly eldritch school talking to different characters and occasionally using an item on a thing. But as a vibes machine? It uses the limited draw distance and primitive polygonal capabilities of the PSX to great effect to tell a story whereupon kids get murdered in front of you and eldritch hijinks ensue. There are certainly more sophisticated horror stories set inside Japanese high schools and more sophisticated examples of Lovecraftian madness (followed by modern progressive disclaimers of “yo this dude was a turbo-racist even by 1920s standards”) but Iru has moxie. I don’t think it’s a “must-see” experience or any sort of amazing revelatory thing, but it’s much better than most of the stuff I’ve played for this feature by virtue of not trying to do all that much mechanically.

Oh right, so. Originally this was gonna be The Innsmouth Case, but after roughly 30 minutes of getting bored and annoyed by that game's writing, tone, and frequent typos, we switched to Iru. So skip ahead in the VOD if you don't want to hear me get increasingly gravelly doing bad dumb voices and reminding the audience at home that I "took some technical editing classes."

anyway the next blog is already half-written so you can expect more "good" video games of the terrifying variety before October ends. I'm not sorry.