Indie Game of the Week 443: Maid of Sker

I've been playing horror games all throughout October and, while I recognize it's the reason for the season and such, I'm starting to get a little burnt out. I'm not made of scares, after all. Maid of Sker, however, looked to be just the nerve tonic to see out Spooky Season on IGotW: a short but eventful stealthy first-person adventure game with the usual horror accoutrements of eerie dudes patrolling a dark and foreboding location of some considerable size while I go around solving inventory puzzles or hitting switches without being discovered. Maid of Sker is set in 1890s Wales (though given it's Wales, it might as well be the 1990s—sorry, I'm English, it's a requisite to be a dick about the other home nations) as the promising singer Elisabeth Williams is effectively kidnapped by her sketchy family to draw more clients (read: victims) to the dingy and failing Sker Hotel on the remote island of the same name; however, there's darker currents operating beneath the surface and by the time Liz's fiancé Thomas reaches the hotel in search of her it's in an advanced state of disarray and the corridors are filled with strange men shuffling around zombie-like while wearing vision-obscuring sacks over their heads. Elisabeth is able to communicate to Thomas through the hotel's phone network, but is currently trapped in the attic awaiting rescue.

Primarily, this is the sort of game like Amnesia where you're tasked with various objectives that send you far and wide across this interconnected location while simultaneously avoiding the enemies prowling around as you have very limited means of defending yourself. Since they cannot see but they can hear very well, most of the mechanics revolve around being as quiet as possible: crouching to mask your footsteps, holding your breath as enemies pass by or when you enter a particularly dusty area that sets off your coughing, and using noise-based distractions to direct your foes elsewhere. You also soon pick up a device that can produce an ear-shattering resonance that knocks these sound-sensitive goons out for a few moments—effectively a last-ditch desperation move to let you escape, as the charges for this device are finite. Since activating switches can often draw unwanted attention, some puzzles might involve hitting a switch to loudly open a gate then quickly escaping before all the alerted enemies hone on in your location (as opposed to the gate's location, which would make more sense).

Maid of Sker also has some clear influences from the new Resident Evil games, specifically the remake of Resident Evil 2 (which launched the previous year) in the way its map system is very accommodating, highlighting areas and doors where you might need a key you haven't found yet or some sort of puzzle you've yet to solve (indicated with a question mark, while puzzle elements you can find are exclamation points). It doesn't go as far as filling in the individual rooms when there's nothing left to be found—unlike RE, this isn't really a game that's big on scrounging up resources beyond a few healing tonics, achievement-bait collectibles, and the aforementioned device charges— but consulting the map and continually adding to it by finding new maps shortly after entering a location for the first time means it's a consistently helpful tool for navigating the Sker Hotel. On the whole, while I'm not the biggest fan of stealth in games at the best of times and less so still when it's all first-person and I'm missing crucial context (like, say, someone sneaking up behind me), I don't find the loop in this game too objectionable quite yet. The slow movement while crouching and having to wait around for goobers to hobble past me as I sit there with my hands over my mouth can be Dullsville but the level of tension makes up for that somewhat, as these guys are often more attentive than they seem and can surprise you with their behavior on occasion. One example is how the game gets you used to the idea that these things don't ever seem to leave their patrol areas and definitely don't open and pass through doors on their own, only to walk out into a room you were certain was closed off from where they were wandering to find a guy strutting around: it's the classic horror game manipulation of reality trick that occurs whenever you hit a flag by solving a puzzle and the game quietly shuffles things around to surprise you.

In terms of the presentation, developers Wales Interactive has a history of making some very pretty games with what I imagine to be some moderate budgets at their disposal, particularly FMV games like The Complex or Late Shift as well as several VR games (Maid of Sker being one that will soon be adapted for VR devices), and Maid of Sker does shine in this regard as well. That is, once you've turned off the oppressive TAA anti-aliasing and maybe some of the other advanced graphics settings so it resembles less of a blurry mess that makes your head hurt like you're working through a killer hangover. The hotel is dark and murky but still full of details to pick up on, with dust particles visible for the sake of a mechanic where you cough your lungs out whenever you go near them, and though your be-sackéd nemeses aren't all that scary to behold the skulking way they animate suggests something unholy changed them to their present stalker forms. Music is a major element in the game as Elisabeth was taken for her singing prowess, the protagonist is a musician capable of playing any instrument, there's definitely some business revolving around the mythical Greek sirens and their songs of death, and the plot-critical collectibles include music box cylinders and music sheets; that said, given silence is golden when there's sharp-eared monsters around, most of the game is musically bereft barring pivotal story moments and the main menu. The voice acting isn't bad though it seems only half the cast wants to attempt a Welsh accent: there are some subtle indications though that Elisabeth is hoping to join high society through her performances, and many Welsh people tried to lose their distinctive lyrical tongues because they felt it made them sound too provincial. Less an issue these days, of course, but probably more so in the more class-conscious Victorian era. The performances aren't bad either way: Wales Interactive's probably made enough in-roads with local acting communities through their FMV games to not want to half-ass that aspect.

From the chunk I've played of Maid of Sker it's a pretty decent first-person Indie horror game, preferring to take on a more truncated runtime rather than skimp on the presentation, though even with this length I am already feeling a little enervated from the molasses stealth sequences. One recent example involved passing through a large outdoors area where you're meant to hit two distant switches to open a gate heading back to the hotel: there's about four or five stooges wandering around in random directions that you have to be careful to avoid as you slowly crouch-walk to each switch, and I discovered due to some odd quirk of the hydraulics systems this hotel employs that you have to hit a switch then move back to the gate to hit the open button there to remove one of the locking bars before you can go back and hit the other switch, apparently just to maximize the amount of ground to glacially cover. The first time I ended up getting pounded to death because the gate opening alerted all these jerks to my exact location; the second time I fell through the world because of a glitch; the third time I managed to finally nail it but I was so done with that particular instance that I dreaded the several more similar ones the game no doubt had in store for me. Given I already have at least half of the necessary plot-critical items to reach the end and I'm enjoying the presentational aspects, I'm going to see this through into Halloween and beyond but I am running (or at least quietly tiptoeing) out of patience. Getting Sker-ce, you might even say. If you were a terrible human being. I am one of those. Hi.

Rating: 3 or 4 out of 5. (So far.)