This is an ongoing list where I attempt to do the following: Play, Complete, and Rank every video game in the known universe in order to finally answer the age old question "What is the greatest game of all time?" For previous entries find the links on the attached spreadsheet.

How did I do?

It’s the start of Fall and we are fast approaching my favorite holiday (Halloween). Despite being a big Halloween fan, got married on the holiday, I don’t find myself playing a lot of “spooky” games in general. It’s not because I am scared of the horror aspects, but rather scary games *usually* fall into two categories: Survival horror games and 1^st person horror puzzle (Layers of Fear, Bequest, Sonic, etc.) and neither of those genres I find particularly enjoyable to play. Survival-horror games are mainly about resource management and doing “more with less,” which is literally one of the mottos I have to deal with at work. I don’t find it spooky or enjoyable to wonder if I have enough health or ammo to get through the next phase, and its not “spooky” to replay sections where I guessed wrong about having enough ammo or health. As for the other genre, jump scares don’t really work on me, especially not in video game form, so a whole collection of games whose only means of “scaring” you is to have a picture frame fall behind you doesn’t work to well on me

I want to be scared though, I like scary things, so I have tasked myself with playing 4 “spooky” games for the month of October (one a week), that we will then rank on our big board. Now I refuse to break my own rules of spinning my roulette wheel and playing games randomly, so I will preface ahead of time that I didn’t go through and pick the cream of the crop for spooky season, some of these games might even be bad, but I added all of my owned “spooky” games into my roulette wheel and spun. What classified a game as “spooky” was up to me and my distinctions, but I think I will be able to justify all 4 games to you, the dear reader, as to why they count as “spooky.”

I am also going to do you all a favor, and talk about the absolute worst of the 4 games first. I would not normally call my shots without finishing all games first, but I don’t see a lot of possibilities for other games to overtake this one as the worst of the worst. So, while the subject line already told you the name of this game, let’s talk about Theatre of Sorrows. Theatre of Sorrows is a little indie game that tries its best to be a Lovecraftian mystery-horror game. You start the game playing as one half of a set of twins, who received a mysterious letter saying your long lost other half is captured and being held captive on a mysterious island. When you arrive at the island you are then tasked with performing rituals and dealing with shady stuff in an effort to find and rescue your sister.

You start each day (think of each day as a chapter) tasked with 2 different objectives. One objective is to craft a talisman that will allow you to perform said ritual, and you will have to scour locations for the right ingredients to be able to craft the talisman. The other object can usually be boiled down to going to a specific place on the map, talking to someone or picking something up, and then going to the ritual location on the map. We will get into the nitty gritty about what all of that entails in a little bit, but a couple clarifying points here. The day timeframe doesn’t actually mean anything, time doesn’t pass no matter how long you take going from one location to the other. Also backgrounds or events or anything you can interact with do not signify day or night. On this island, it would appear it is always dusk. Also, there are about 8 days total in the entire game, and you do roughly the same thing on day 1 as you do on day 8. You are always tasked with crafting a different talisman, and always going here and there in order to complete the 2^nd objective.

Now lets talk what you are ACTUALLY doing in the game. This is a…. resource management game, but unlike say Resident Evil where one of the resources is ammo and you get to shoot zombies, instead you are trying to balance three different stats and do no shooting. You have a Health stat, a Sanity stat, and an Energy stat. If any of these fall to 0, you lose the game and have to start the day over again. You start every day at the hotel and after receiving your instructions you are then free to do as you see fit. On a world map screen you can move to anything that is within your characters movement radius. This radius can be improved by either certain outfits you wear or talisman’s you equip (more on these later). Every move on the world map drains some of your resources, its usually your sanity and your energy for traversal on the world map, and the farther you are going the bigger a drain.

At EVERY location on the map, you can stop and explore it. From there you are shown images of the location, usually it’s a spooky house with boarded up windows and mysterious blood on the walls, or the woods where there are glowing eyes in the background. Ultimately upon exploring a new location any combination of 3 different things can happen to you. You may stumble upon an event, stumble upon a monster, or there is nothing there and you can search the location for items. Some locations you might encounter all 3 things happen at various points, and others only 1 or 2. If you stumble upon an event (the rarest of the three), a small scene will play out that is supposed to be creepy, for instance you stumble across a little girl who is counting dead animals. You make a choice or two, could be a dialogue choice or something else, and then the scene ends and you are either rewarded or punished accordingly. In the scene with the littler girl, perhaps you ask her where her parents are, and then she smiles and runs away which “unnerves you” (at least that’s what the game says), and then you lose 10 sanity and 5 health. The good news is, that these events repeat very frequently, and the answers will always net the same negative/positive, so if you stumble across this event again, you can choose the other answer and see if that re-fills your stats instead.

You might also stumble across a monster that has taken up residence at that spot. I’m no lovecraft expert, but I think the monsters are probably all established, but I don’t really care. These monsters will block your path and force you to engage with them. Since this game has no actual combat there are only three things you can do. If you have stumbled across the spell/ward for that particular monster you can cast it to make the monster run away (this costs 20 sanity). These wards and spells can be found while investigating locations, rewards for events, or randomly pop up sometimes. If you have a talisman you can destroy it in order to fend off the monster (loss of Talisman), or you can run away. Running away costs energy, and it’s a dice roll if you actually get away or if the monster continues to block your path and attack you. Obviously if the odds aren’t in your favor, not only are you wasting energy attempting to run away, but also health as the monster attacks you each turn you don’t escape. It seems completely random whether you can run away from an enemy at any time. There were instances where I lost all 100 health in a single encounter because I just kept failing to run away, and then times where I escaped with minimum energy lost, perhaps there is some stats behind the scenes depending on what monster you are facing, but you are never privy to that information.

Finally if you survive the event and/or the monster you can explore the location. Each location is broken up into different screens you can travel between (careful, those costs resources just to go from the bedroom to the kitchen) and in each sub-screen you can “search” for valuable items. Even searching for items requires spending sanity and health (apparently to open a drawer), but every search always comes up with 3 random items with 3 random quantities assigned to them. Until you find or craft a specific talisman, you can only take one of your three findings, without having to search again. You will be doing this a lot, because the items you are going to find serve either 1 of 2 main purposes. They are either the items you need to craft your talisman, or they are items that can be used to re-fill certain stats. A bottle of Wine will re-fill 5 sanity, and some water will refill 4 energy, etc. Of course you only have so much inventory space, so you will also be balancing what you are going to carry along with you. Each location has a limit to how many times it can be searched, so you can’t stuff your pockets all from the first house you visit, but I will tell you that it behooves you to max out searching at each location, because the cost of searching is almost always less than the value of what you found.

In almost every location there is also a super-cool event you can trigger that drains a lot of your stats but offers a bigger reward should you make it through (complete all of the reading) of such a spooky tale. For instance there is one room that you stumble upon that looks like a casino of the damned, with cards made out of skin, and holes in people’s heads (or something).. and if you keep moving forward and sacrificing 30 or 40 sanity, you will be rewarded with a random talisman, a ward for defeating a random enemy, and maybe a new outfit. You can equip one outfit at a time, and it has a set amount of inventory space, as well as talisman spaces for you to equip. Some clothes even come with boosts like 20% less enemy encounter rate, or 10% less energy cost for travel. Early on I found one outfit that allowed me to carry like 4 extra items, and I never changed off of it. However, much like the random events these repeat at an incredibly alarming rate, and the rewards are always the same, so if you already have the outfit for doing the hinter story, you don’t ever need to do it again. The Talismans you can equip are all-over the place from increasing the cap you have for sanity or health, to bigger travel radius, to less enemy damage. The best talisman, should you ever get it, would be that your searches allow you to take two items instead of just one, so you can actually get a stockpile of re-fillable items without worrying about your numbers.

So ultimately you go from place to place, searching drawers and using items when your stats get too low, so you can keep moving forward. Items, clothes, and talismans all carry over from day to day, so if you stockpile on day three and have a bounty before finishing the mission, you start off day four in great shape. The game is supposed to keep you on edge by being a game where you are spinning multiple plates and don’t know how much longer you have left, but in turn ends up being a slog of stocking up on items, moving three or four spaces on the map, using items to refill, and starting again. The one thing the game is supposed to have going for it (tone and writing), it doesn’t have nearly enough to support even a small game of this size. Each event or descriptive is trying its best to invoke some sort of horror, trying to get you to think “What monsters could do such a thing,” but it comes off as the writings of a goth high-schooler in creative writing class. The mentions of blood and guts, disfigured bodies, mutants, etc. is done to a point where it’s not comical and needed an editor to find what could be scary about the prose in front of you. The writer(s) of this game, never heard of the adage “Less is more.” However the more damning piece is that there just isn’t enough to sustain the needs of the game. I played through the game once, only having to repeat a day twice, but I must have stumbled upon some stories 10 or more times during the course of a single playthrough. If the results were randomized, maybe it wouldn’t be so bad, but once I learned its always the same, then I could blast through the prose and select the answer that gave me the best loot every time it came up, or avoid it altogether. The main story writing is slightly better, but there is no sustenance to the meat. Most day’s end with you not really understanding why you did what you did, except that you were told to do it. Perhaps most egregious is that there isn’t enough content for one playthrough, but the game has multiple endings based on subtle choices you make throughout the game. So if there isn’t enough content for one playthrough, I don’t know how you encourage someone to give it more than one playthrough to see other endings.

I was so intrigued by this idea, because I clearly got the bad ending ( I think), that I tried to pull up a video on youtube of other endings. Wouldn’t you know it, there isn’t a single person who posted a video outside of 20 minutes playing this game? No ending compilation, no descriptions of what other endings look like, not even someone who got to the end of the game that I could just see if they got the same ending as me. In a world where there is seemingly a deep dive and lovely community about the smallest game and/or company that exists in our world, and we as a society have all agreed that this game is not worth the time investment. I was able to find a walkthrough of every single level of Army birds or whatever the lowest ranked game on my list is, but I couldn’t find anyone who made it to day 5 in Theatre of Sorrows.

Is this the greatest game of all time?: No

Where does it rank: I won't lie to you, there isn't a lot of redeeming qualities to this game. The atmosphere is initially interesting, but the game doesn't do anything with that atmosphere. Some of the enemies are visually interesting, but every "fight" is treated the same, and whether you are dueling a giant spider or a flaming skeleton, the options available and what they cost are identical. However, the main problem is the writing, and lack of it. For every scene that feels like it stretches too long, there are countless repeats and empty hallways that meet you on the other side. I can dumb myself down to appreciate some cheesy, over-the-top writing, but not when it acts like my Mom and tells me the same story verbatim 4 times within an hour. IF this had more variable writing, and IF the overarching story made any sense or had any payoff, this could be an "o.k" game to seek out on a budget, but it does none of those things and instead should be steered clear of. I have this ranked as the 168th greatest game of all time out of 172. It is just barely better than a game with a game-breaking (unfinishable) bug, Buildings have Feelings Too (169th) , but doesn't measure up to the M.S. Paint made, Revenge of the Bird King (167th).

Anyone looking for it: here is the link to the list and more if you are interested in following along with me (this is not a self promotion).Here. I added links on the spreadsheet for quick navigation. Now if you missed a blog of a game you want to read about, you can get to it quickly, rather than having to scroll through my previous blogs wondering when it came up.

Thanks for listening

Future games coming up 1) Alone in the Dark: New Nightmare 2) Operation Darkness 3) Vampire Survivors