Clive Barker's Undying

Undying is maybe the first FPS horror game that really got me in my life. I still remember the way it scared me every room I entered in the mansión and even today with its 2001 graphics is still a great game.

This game has a special place in my heart as my second step into the horror genre for gaming, the very first of being Phantasmagoria. While Phantasmagoria was fun, it was still very simplistic with it's point and click FMV nature. The leap from that to FPS action adventure with the talented writings of Clive Barker himself was astounding for a young gamer such as myself. I was hooked! I loved being able to explore the maps and collect journals that told the story of the Covenant family piece by piece. I even still have the journal that came with the original copy of the game and read it from time to time. That being said, for all the things I love about this game, it has its flaws. Actions can sometimes be a little buggy with crashes and certain things like mana regen might break if you are weilding the scythe(swap to any other weapon to fix this btw). Most of the problems have been fixed by GoG and I very much recommend picking up a copy of this if you're into old school spoops. Thumbs up!

- game looks old, but also means it is easy to run on low end hardware - it is creepy but not really scary - on Normal, enemies can easily beat me so resorted to cheat codes (to literlly make me Undying heh). Better FPS players should have no problem though. - there is no map, location markers or arrows showing you where to go. So I got lost a lot, especially in the mansion - the voice acting put me off at first but then got used to it - last big level leading up to the last boss felt too long - no native widescreen support. So either play in 4:3 ratio or get a patch to stretch it out to widescreen. If the old graphics don't turn you off, then I can recommend this to fans of classic FPS like Blood, Quake 1 or Unreal 1.

+++

This game scared the crap out of me back in the day. The first half or so of the game was outstanding, it got a bit ridiculous towards the end unfortunately. It's always worth a good replay, especially if you toss in the updated opengl renderer for it.