Tag: DreadXP

  • Review: Heartworm (PC)

    Review: Heartworm (PC)

    If you critique Heartworm for what it is – a mostly one-dev passion project brought to fruition with the help of a niche indie publisher – it’s excellent with only a few forgivable flaws. It’s a compact homage to survival- and psychological-horror games of the PlayStation 1-era, notably Resident Evil and Silent Hill, with a story that ruminates on our fears and anxieties around the meaning of life and death.

    Despite a ranking system and achievements related to completion times, Heartworm has an intriguing but once-and-done story I won’t discuss in much detail. You play as Sam, a young woman with a debilitating fixation on mortality, who sets off for an abandoned house that urban legends say has a doorway to the afterlife. No one who enters the house has ever returned, but Sam – haunted by past traumas – thinks she has little to lose.

    With three major areas to explore and a casual playthrough lasting 4-5 hours, Heartworm moves at a brisk pace with mostly logical puzzles and only a handful of mandatory battles. The narrative is driven by stylish retro-inspired cutscenes, Sam’s frequent monologues, and no shortage of flavour text and notes that reveal her thoughts and those of others who have taken the journey before her.

    Heartworm Block Puzzles

    The surreal and sometimes nightmarish environments she explores are clearly manifestations of her own memories and fears, full of opportunities for Sam to comment on her life and experiences up to that point, but there are lingering threats that seem connected to earlier travellers. It makes for a setting that’s more unsettling than horrifying, so that Heartworm is more a journey of discovery like the original Silent Hill 2 and not some gruelling feat of survival.

    If you are a fan of classic or retro-inspired survival-horror, Heartworm will feel familiar and, at times, a little generic – most notably when it comes to the boss fights that feel more “gamey” than something essential to the narrative themes. Each area is sprawling and interconnected, with the way forward blocked by both conventional and bizarre locks that force you to hunt for actual keys, key-like objects, or clues to solve puzzles you might recognise from three decades of survival-horror games.

    Heartworm Inventory Management

    The opening abandoned house and a hub-like cathedral hanging above a void set the tone and test your basic puzzling abilities. A gloom-shrouded neighbourhood has Silent Hill vibes and introduces roaming enemies – teleporting static ghosts and a giant spider – that you put down using Sam’s camera. The woodlands section feels eerily serene, aside from the rabid dogs, deer, and terrifying statues. The final multi-level clocktower mansion leans heavily into Resident Evil – sometimes literally – with elaborate key hunts that, in turn, lead to Silent Hill-esque environments, such as an abandoned hospital, school, and subway, filled with leaping chained creatures and twitchy mannequins.

    The combat and boss fights in Heartworm rarely challenge you, as there is plentiful film for Sam’s camera, the ability to snap the camera behind her shoulder for easy third-person aiming, and no shortage of basic healing items that you can combine to form stronger medpacks. It’s all familiar fare and most enemies are easily avoided if you just keep moving. The combat is engaging enough but the focus is clearly on solving puzzles and hitting frequent story beats.

    Heartworm Third-Person Combat

    That said, Heartworm has the potential to frustrate if you’re not paying attention or when using the default pixelated and dithered visual style. If you’re a fan of semi-fixed camera angles and “authenticity”, Heartworm can provide that chunky, upscaled 240p look. If you disable the pixelation and dithering effects, you instead get a good approximation of what modern emulators can produce running early 3D games. Either choice looks great, and the visuals are complemented by unsettling ambient audio and haunting music loops that generate a ton of atmosphere. However, as much I loved the pixellated look, the extreme aliasing makes spotting pick-ups and environmental clues difficult.

    Another issue is that the size of many areas can make backtracking tedious if you’ve missed environmental clues that feature in later puzzles. This applies to a handful of optional puzzles to gain a camera upgrade and secret memory photos – at least one of which is required for the good ending that feels most consistent with Sam’s evolving attitude. There is a file system for documents and a modern map system that highlights both doorways and rooms with remaining items, but I’d recommend you treat Heartworm like a classic survival-horror game and take notes as you go.

    Heartworm Retro Visuals

    Looping back to my opening line, Heartworm gets so much right as a compact indie game that a few flaws did little to detract from what is otherwise an exceptionally well-made homage to both survival-horror and psychological-horror classics – just one with a more pertinent story that anyone could relate to. The good ending variations are perhaps a little too simplistic given the complexities of mental health issues, but Heartworm – much like Crow Country, My Happy Neighborhood, and Sorry We’re Closed – is another game in the genre that could broaden the audience by tempering the horror with more heart.

    Pros:

    • A compact homage to survival- and psychological-horror classics
    • A brisk and intriguing story that deals with anxieties and fears around the meaning of life and death
    • Plenty of excellent puzzles and competent survival-horror combat
    • A stunningly “authentic” retro-aesthetic

    Cons:

    • Backtracking can be tedious if you miss something
    • Optional secrets determine the ending scene
    • Sam’s evolving attitude and the positive endings might feel too simplistic given the content matter

    Score: 8/10

    Heartworm was reviewed on PC using a code provided by the publisher.

  • Editorial: My Friendly Neighborhood left me convinced cosy-horror is the way to grow the genre (Xbox Series)

    Editorial: My Friendly Neighborhood left me convinced cosy-horror is the way to grow the genre (Xbox Series)

    It has taken two years for My Friendly Neighborhood to arrive on consoles, but it still deserves a top spot on the short list of survival-horror games that go beyond simple body-horror monstrosities and laboratory experiments gone wrong. There is no shortage of tension and a few jump scares to be had, but it also demonstrates a surprising amount of charm and heart that you find in rare cosy-horror titles like Crow Country or Sorry We’re Closed.

    Terror and heart in equal measure

    The cartoonish aesthetics, the focus on a failed children’s puppet show, and the post-war-not-quite-USA setting make for a weird and unsettling experience that plays on established horror tropes while weaving in real-world societal problems. The result is a game that you could breeze through and appreciate the mechanics, while paying little attention to the plot and cast. However, if you read all the lore documents, listen to the puppets’ rambling, and spend some time solving puzzles and backtracking to help the puppets that originally stalk you, it makes the narrative so much more rewarding.

    My Friendly Neighborhood Getting A Gun

    A big part of the charm is how the protagonist Gordon is portrayed – equal parts brooding, determined, and unexpectedly compassionate – and the quality of the voice work and animations for the puppets you’ll encounter. Aside from Ricky, a sock puppet that aids and taunts Gordon in equal measure, you’ll encounter named puppets that serve as common enemy types, while each location is home to a boss-style puppet that stalks you through certain areas. All the puppets are unhinged and violent, reflecting the slow decline of their show, the character flaws of their former puppeteers, and the decline of society as a whole.

    Gordon’s attempt to shut down the broadcasting antenna goes awry, and he ends up on a journey that takes him through each part of the production studio and back again. Initial terror and confusion give way to dogged determination as he uncovers past events, discovers more about the puppets and the events that led to their growing insanity, and even gets the opportunity to bring peace to its inhabitants while revealing more of his past to the player. It has been a long time since I’ve played a survival-horror game where the narrative and cast have been as much of a draw as the gameplay mechanics – especially one with something to say about how entertainment both influences and is influenced by reality.

    My Friendly Neighborhood Pearl Boss Best Outcome

    Old-school survival-horror gameplay refined

    Talking of gameplay mechanics, My Friendly Neighborhood is one of those derivative games that show reverence to the source material, but also understand what elements stand the test of time and what anachronistic elements need tweaking or discarding. It keeps the classic haunted mansion design that you explore room by room, searching for keys, puzzle items, and clues to bypass contrived locks or obstacles. In your path are hordes of deranged puppets that can only be subdued permanently with limited duct tape, so you need to manage your routing and resources carefully.

    Despite the first-person perspective, it’s no action game like we’ve come to expect from the modern Resident Evils. Movement, combat, and progression feel far closer in design and pacing to classic survival horror games – right down to the ability to exit rooms to lose pursuers and reset their position. On lower difficulties you have enough resources to be reckless, but My Friendly Neighborhood clearly wants you to manage your inventory and storage box, only attack or subdue enemies you can’t avoid, check the map to plan a path or identify locked rooms with remaining items, and manually save between bouts of progress using limited tokens. It is classic and methodical in the best possible way.

    My Friendly Neighborhood Basement Map

    The combat feels good thanks to great audiovisual feedback from an alphabet-powered rolodex-spewing pistol, rolled up notes used as shells and blasted from a shotgun, and room-clearing grenades with letter shrapnel. That said, the focus is on picking the right tool for the situation and conserving supplies when you can – especially on higher difficulties. As you get a feel for the map layout and identify rooms you’ll return to later, combat becomes more about optimisation than skill, and there’s also incentive to help the boss-type puppets so you can explore with less risk later.

    To do that though, you will tackle increasingly elaborate, nonsensical, but entertaining puzzles. These range from simple key hunts to multi-step memory, logic, and sequence-based puzzles, but a modern map highlights specific key doors and rooms with items, so you’ll never end up aimlessly wandering the compact but dense studio grounds. There is a particularly tough puzzle to unlock a secret area and ultimate weapon – which had me taking notes and screenshots – but finding the items needed to save all the puppets and unlock the “best” ending will come naturally to those who systematically explore.

    My Friendly Neighborhood Stage Curtain Boss Fight

    Cosy-horror could be the way to keep growing the survival-horror audience

    If you’ve enjoyed the resurgence of survival-horror in both the “AAA” and indie space, My Friendly Neighborhood is easy to recommend – particularly for fans of the emerging cosy-horror trend. It’s only 5-6 hours long and that might put off once-and-done players, but like the classic games that inspired it, you can cruise through it a second time to unlock a different ending and ranking; hunt for secret tapes that enable useful or goofy abilities; mess around with the Speedrun and “Neighborhorde” modes; or just crank up the difficulty and shift the experience closer to true horror.

    My Friendly Neighborhood was played on Xbox Series S|X using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PC, Xbox One, and PS4/5.