Then in act 2, the stuff gets stolen and you have to find it again – after a stupid chase scene where Linda is disarmed and can get killed a dozen times if you don’t know exactly what to do, and the game is especially bad at communicating the goal at that point. There are three hidden items that allow her to pull the light closer, but at least one of them is easily missable. At first it seems like a neat idea, but after dying two or three times, it quickly stops being cute and gets terribly annoying.
The only problem – the more often she dies, the farther away the light gets. All she has to do is run towards a bright light at the end, and she will be resurrected again. Whenever Linda dies, she wakes up in a mysterious empty space – Limbo. The phone has a battery display which gradually gets lower, but it’s completely dictated by story progress. It’s all digital here, so unlike Fatal Frame, there is no resource management in the form of films. Later in the game, there are several interesting puzzles involving photographing angles, mirrors and invisible passages. Others are wicked fast and can only be captured when properly anticipating their moves, or require special treatment, like a ghost that can only be hurt by photographing the scar on its back. Some ghosts are invisible to the naked eye, which means Linda can only detect them by looking through her phone. In theory, the gameplay is as simple as switching to the first person camera mode, pointing at a ghost and pressing the shutter button, but of course there are various complications. Like Fatal Frame, ghosts in DreadOut really don’t like being photographed, so much so that they just leave this plane of existence after a certain amount of pictures have been taken. The Tuyul are little pests who like to steal your stuff. The place is creepy enough in daylight, but as the students dawdle around in the derelict school building, night falls and they find themselves surrounded by almost everything evil found in Indonesian folklore, led by a mysterious lady in red. The kids are eager to find a way around it and reach a completely abandoned village. Linda and a handful of her schoolmates are on the road with their teacher Miss Siska to some unexplained school trip, when they take a wrong turn and happen upon a broken-down bridge.
That’s also why the story begins with as many horror movie clichés as could be crammed into the first five minutes of a game. So Linda doesn’t carry an ancient and potentially magical camera, but simply uses the cam function on her smartphone. But while Fatal Frame is one of the most consistently dark and ghastly horror games around, DreadOut breathes Southeast Asian spooky kitsch. Therefore, it’s of no surprise that the protagonist Linda is a high school girl who is also equipped with a camera.
Since Valentine Day 2015 – an odd date for a horror game – the complete game is finally available, so a closer look at the result is in order.ĭreadOut is deeply inspired by the Fatal Frame series, in which young girls armed with nothing but an old magic camera make their way through haunted traditional Japanese environments. This should explain why DreadOut was off to a rough start – only the smaller of two acts was released in 2014, with loads of bugs and compatibility problems, followed by questionable updates that sometimes removed existing features. DreadOut practically would be the country’s first fully realized 3D adventure game for PCs, and also the first commercial game by Digital Happiness. Digital Happiness is from Indonesia, a land where the game industry is utterly dominated by thoroughly profit-oriented smartphone and Facebook type games. Back when Digital Happiness pitched DreadOut on Indiegogo in 2013, it felt like the ideal use of the crowd funding way, enabling voices we wouldn’t ever hear from otherwise, from places we rarely hear of in the context of video games, to realize their ideas.