Clive Barker's Undying

One of my first horror games and one that still holds up fairly well years later; shame that there never was a sequel.

The death animations are fun, I could see it becoming annoying on the harder difficulties, if you're dying frequently, but for the handful of times I've died I thought they were fun consolation prize

The game didn't work for me for a while until I upgraded to an SSD, now it works properly!

Clive Barker’s Undying is a game that still manages to send chills down your spine, even after all these years. The sound effects, dark atmosphere, and unique horror vibe make it a true classic. I would love to see a remastered version — this masterpiece deserves a second life.

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.