Clive Barker's Undying

Worked out the box on windows 10, just make sure you don't tinker with display drivers. I was hoping it'd be a bit more of an exploratory FPS game in the vein of deus ex but set in a lovecraft story. It starts off almost like that but quickly devolves into a standard gothic FPS horror game. It's got pretty decent atmosphere and I love the early 3D map and furniture design where everything is slightly to big and all the open spaces are desolate, also the jank AI and how every human is just okay and has no reaction whatsoever to seeing inter-dimensional demons kill their co-workers right in-front of them. 6.5 / 10, it's good if you have that early 3D fps itch.

Good Game but unplayable buggy

Average

Though the game was released in 2001 and is based on the original Unreal engine, it somehow looks more primitive than Unreal. It tries to create atmosphere and tell a story, but I think Unreal had more story and atmosphere. The story in Unreal was clear and simple. Undying is vague--something about a family curse changing each person into a monster, and it has something to do with bringing back some demon king, but what does that have to do with the curse and this family changing into demonic monsters? Why did each member of the family transform in the first place?! Even after reading the journal entries, I have no clue how it all fits together. It ambitiously uses human sprites in cutscenes, and this is something the first Unreal didn’t try. For good reason; polygon count is too low to make even stylized humans believable. Only the cutscene before the final boss feels cinematic and engaging, and that’s because it doesn’t focus on the human faces all the time. My biggest complaint is the level design. Loading screen every third door! Unreal’s levels were huge, so why are the maps in this game so small? In Unreal, it’s always clear where you need to go, why you need to go there, or pull that lever, or flip that switch. In Undying, it’s almost never clear why you’re going this direction or doing that. Each level is confusing, not intuitive. Ditto for the controls and the boss fights. The art looks primitive in a way the original Unreal does not. This is not a limit of the engine. I think it’s just the development team not knowing how to use the engine to its fullest potential. And the final boss... The all-powerful demon king is an immobile bug who is defeated by explosives? What a lame finale. (Brownie points: the mirrors in this game actually work! Even Doom 2016 doesn’t do that!)

It went really well, 10 out of 10.