Clive Barker's Undying

Back when the game came out I didn't have a PC, and I hoped in vain for a console port. Alas, that never materialized. Years later, when I finally got a PC (and one that could run the game at that), I bought it, played it...and abandoned it after around four hours. Fast forward a few more years to today, and I didn't remember why I had dropped the game. The game was still kinda vivid in my mind, and I didn't remember anything bad, so it being Halloween and all I decided to boot it back up. Only to abandon it not even an hour later. Yeah, I remembered. Let's quickly start with the good: The visuals are great. You get that colorful lighting and striking vistas you know from Unreal (the game, I mean). Sound design is also quite nice and atmospheric. The game's definitely a looker, and it's no wonder I still had visuals of it floating around in my mind. However, any atmosphere is killed rather quickly by two things: The story and the gameplay. The story can't seem to settle on a consistent tone. The protagonist, a sceptic that is "starting to believe that there might be paranormal things out there" starts off the game with a magic rock and a magic spell. A magic spell that lets you see ghostly apparitions of dead people. "Starting to believe", huh? My dude, you literally know magic! Oh yeah, he can also light torches with his fingers. And not a single eyebrow is ever raised. Then our protagonist meets his old war buddy who thinks his mansion the size of a town might be haunted. Well, we saw a ghost floating around before we entered the room (and a ghostly corpse before we even entered the mansion) so it's not like that's gonna be a mystery. Oh, and when, just a minute later, it is revealed that the mansion is indeed infested with not only ghosts but living, bleeding, and deadly monsters, protagonist man and his scared war buddy decide on the only logical course of action: Sleep on it. Yeah. Nobody runs away, nobody bolts any doors. No panic, no worries. The whole thing is just ignored. And that's the issue I have with the story: It doesn't take itself seriously, but not in a funny way. It's just...badly told and lacks any kind of tension. They show us ghosts before they tell us there might be ghosts, and the threat of monsters is nothing that can't wait until the morning. It's like the game doesn't want you to be scared. Why should I be scared of the monsters if nobody in the game gives a crap? The gameplay is just as inconsistent. With the game taking place in a mansion, you might think of something like Resident Evil, where you explore the environment somewhat at your leisure, slowly getting to know your way around, until by the end you know shortcuts and the placement of all enemies and items. But Undying goes a weird hybrid route: The mansion is huge, and it has a lot of doors, but usually only one of them is unlocked at a time. So basically, the game is linear, and there's only one path... but you'll have to find that path yourself by running into any door you see until one of them opens. And on the way back from whatever quest you were just sent on, the game might force a different route on you, so you don't even have a chance to get your bearings or develop any kind of familiarity with the place. Finally, combat is another aspect where the game just doesn't seem sure what it wants to do. You have both weapons and magic spells (which you can shoot in parallel), and there are lots of spots in the game where enemies will just spawn endlessly. So it wants to be an action game then, huh? Well, weapons lack any kind of impact, aiming is clunky, enemies are hard to hit, and they also seem to take random damage. Sometimes one blast of the Tibetan War Cannon is enough to kill a skeleton, sometimes you need two blasts + a handful of magic balls. And when you get hit, the camera goes crazy, making it seem like they wanted to go the clunky-combat route made popular by classic survival horror games. What you end up with is a frustrating mix: You get clunky combat with endless waves of enemies. So yeah, Undying's problem is that it doesn't know what it wants to be. It gives you an intriguing story told through letters and conversations but it doesn't care about it. It gives you huge areas and doesn't let you explore them. It gives you waves of enemies but unreliable combat, so it's not fun to fight them. This is one of those games that could really benefit from a remake that tightens up all these screws and goes in with a clearer vision of what it wants to be. I wanted to like the game back when I couldn't play it, I wanted to like it when I first played it, and I wanted to like it now...but I just can't. It just ends up being too much of a muddled, confusing and frustrating experience. And that's a damn shame.

As a GREAT fan of horror adventure and RPG games, a friend of mine recommended this game. Maybe it was the hype or supposedly Lovecraft mentioning, I installed the game and waited for nirvana. The menus were poor, but it had some eerie feeling so I said let's play this. Intro was OK and the mansion itself is maybe one of the few great things in this game (I remember many of those paintings on the wall), but as the game progressed that eerie feeling started to slip away and the "Lovecraft horror game" showed it's real face. This is a mediocre shooter with no real spooky scenes and it gets boring along the way. So for all of you shooter lovers, stick with "Clive Barker : Jericho" or "Return to Castle Wolfenstein" and if you're a fan of REAL horror adventure games, you have to try out "Phantasmagoria", "Gabriel Knight : The beast within" or a classic like "Dark seed". Anyway, play games and enjoy !

One of my all time favorite games.

There isn't too much to say about Undying if you're already in the FPS and Horror game circles, but if you are somehow not, then you owe it to yourself to try this game out in its entirety. With a focused narrative, solid gameplay and shooting mechanics, loads of secrets and optional areas and great example of cosmic horror story, Undying has become a regular of my annually played games and still gets me hours of solid fun. Even if the pacing issues of the last level are apparent and can be slightly confusing and the final boss can be spongy and time-consuming, it makes up for it by a solid overall experience. Visually, the graphical fidelity of the Unreal Engine can be jarring, but after getting immersed, you'd find that it's very easy to look passed or even enjoy the stylised visuals. I always found the art style overall to be charming and adds character to the game and its atmosphere.

Clive Barker spins a great tale. This comes out solidly in the game itself (it's one from the age when games used to have a story, then built a game around that story to tell a tale, instead of saying "Ooo, look at what shiny things we can put on a screen. What's a story by the way?"). I got this originally at release, when the graphics were state of the art, and was absolutely blown away by the atmosphere; there are well crafted story points that draw you in, not so much by what they show you, as by what's intimated and you don't see. At the price listed, if you want good, horror entertainment, this is a must have. If you're not sure I'm right in my estimation, for the price of a coffee at the local coffee shop (well, less actually) you can have hours of amusement. If I'm wrong, then it'll still last longer than that coffee..