Video games, saturated with surrealism, always stood apart against the background of their neighbors in the shop. They are born not so often to distinguish them in a special genre, but they always attract the attention of players who are tired of the mainstream. It is with great pleasure that I tell our readers about such projects as Virginia or Bound, because they are strikingly different from everything that the modern gaming industry offers. But the game Here They Lie ("What Hides the Darkness" - the Russian name), about which I would like to tell you today, is unique in that it offers the player to go on a surreal journey using the virtual reality helmet PlayStation VR.
Despite the fact that the game was released in October last year, and I went somewhere in early November, I did not dare to start this review for several months. First, the game is very difficult to perceive, so it took time to digest all that was seen and heard. Secondly, the game is quite difficult in terms of physiology. Yes, you can safely enter such a parameter when it comes to some VR-projects. You pass it, practically overcoming yourself and feeling real physical suffering. Here They Lie became a real test for my vestibular apparatus and psyche. But I will tell you all about this later. Honestly, deep down I hoped that I would never have to write this review. But then my own VR helmet from Germany finally flew, and for the mentioned game came another patch, so I had to group and sit down for writing the material.
Developed the game in the walls of the studio Tangentlemen. These guys position themselves as like-minded people, united in order to realize terrible surrealistic visions, something reminiscent of nightmares. What can I say? They did it, because Here They Lie can really be confused with someone's nightmare, in which reality and illusion are intertwined in a crazy dance, sweeping a powerful stream on the heads of unprepared players. The famous interior studio Sony - Santa Monica also took part in the development of the game. These guys are not accustomed to putting promising indie bands on their feet, so the developers from Tangentlemen fell into good hands.
Now the most difficult. How would I tell you about the plot of the game, if only the admirers of the art house and the spiritually enlightened gurus can understand it? Plot Here They Lie in my head firmly associated with films like "Donnie Darko" and "Enemy" with Jake Gyllenhaal in the title role. In them, too, it is almost impossible to figure out independently without first reading the thick instructions. Even if it seems to you that you have understood something in history, after explaining the plot by knowing people, it turns out that in fact you did not even come close to understanding it by an iota. Personally, it seems to me that the developers themselves did not fully understand what their game was about, but they tried their best to create a sense of multi-layeredness and depth of the plot. However, it can not be said that the project has benefited from this. It turned out, rather, vice versa. Players will constantly feel the fact that the script writers of the game are naturally mocked.
The protagonist of Here They Lie is a man who fell into a dark alternative reality, where he tries to meet a dark-skinned girl in a bright yellow dress, constantly escaping from him for another turn of twisting streets of a black and white city. Throughout the game you will find various documents, pictures and hear someone's voice from the tubes of street phones, but it is almost impossible to link these materials together in a single story. From time to time the main character is pursued by a giant man in an old-fashioned jacket, hat and with a briefcase in his hands. Around him flames burn, burning all life. But who is this and what did not the protagonist of the game please him? Nobody will explain to us, of course. Somewhere after a couple of hours of play I stopped trying to figure out a heap of incomprehensible symbolism, metaphors, images and decided to just enjoy the gameplay.
As you pass, you will visit several locations, including a dark city, an abandoned metro, a red light district inhabited by people with animal heads, a suburb, and other interesting places, which I will not specifically mention. Monochrome locations, though depicted in sufficient detail and beautifully, suffer from a lack of interactivity. Yes, in the boxes you can find batteries for flashlights, you can stumble upon a couple of pages with unclearly written texts, faded photos, but otherwise - there is practically nothing to do here. You can only go forward and try not to get lost in the labyrinth of narrow corridors and alleys. In general, the gameplay resembles such projects as Dear Esther, Gone Home and Everybody's Gone To Rapture. In gamers circles, they are jokingly called "walking simulators" because the main character is only able to move around, look around and read or listen to any recordings.
From time to time, the game invites you to stealth a mechanic, when you have to hide in the shadows, so you do not notice the eerie creatures with deer horns on their heads. They appear very suddenly, so you can not always have time to respond adequately to this. And given that the main character does not have any weapons at all, in the event of a collision with the enemy, you will most likely die. After death, the protagonist discovers himself standing on the surface of the bloody red sea against the backdrop of the sunset, and around him from the water the clones of that most mysterious man with a briefcase rise silently. You need to go a little further and the sea is transformed into a corridor, ending with a door to the location where you just died. In fact, irrevocably die in Here They Lie can not. This is somewhat frustrating, since the meaning of the death of the main character is sharply depreciated.
A couple of times the game will try to create the illusion of interactivity by inviting the player to make a difficult moral choice. For example, to kill or spare the creature he met. But in fact, no matter what you do, in the end it will have virtually no effect on the future developments. Why this choice was needed at all and what is the point in it - it's extremely difficult to say. Endings for the game, too, two, and choose one of them Here They Lie will offer you in the final. I would not say that the final scenes at least somehow clarify all the sur that happened to the protagonist for several hours, but lovers of the art-house decoupling surely like it. Nevertheless, after the final credits, the player has a huge number of questions, answers to which he simply can not be determined.
In what game is incomparably good, so it in ability to project on the player an atmosphere of loneliness, helplessness and a hopelessness. There is in Here They Lie an impressive scene when a player tries to save from the deaths of several residents of this dull surreal world. All this is unfolding on the stage of a small theater, under the hooting and screams of raging spectators. At that moment I even thought that the developers managed to create a small masterpiece inside their game. But the pleasure does not last long, and after the end of the scene, we again return to the dull "walk simulator". In general, in places the atmosphere really envelops the spectator-player. Surely you will be impressed by the group sex scenes with the TV, as well as elegant references to the games of the Bioshock series by Ken Levin. Strong emotions are provided to you even though the plot of Here They Lie in its entirety is almost impossible to comprehend.
Visually the game is quite contradictory. The work of artists deserves respect, since with a poor color palette they managed to create a truly colorful and diverse world. But only technically the game is absolutely not impressive. Vague textures are disappointing pretty quickly, and they occur literally at every step. The abundance of soap only exacerbates the already not so rosy situation with the VR-headset, whose display resolution leaves much to be desired. Among other things, the game is just disgusting antialiasing. Although after a while you get used to this picture and stop paying attention to its flaws, completely giving yourself to the all-consuming atmosphere. Particular mention deserves the final part of the game: this steep and bright trip I have never seen in his many years of practice as a game journalist. Developers certainly indulged in LSD or other drugs when they created "this."
As I told you above, it's very difficult to play from a purely physical point of view. This is perhaps the most rocking VR project of all those that I have come across. After about 10-20 minutes of the game, you feel like you are getting very sick. And the point here is not at all the shortcomings of virtual reality technology as such, but elementary in the inexperience of developers. It's now they released a patch that corrects the streaming of textures and smooths out traffic, and in October of last year, when I passed Here They Lie, I literally had to force myself to put the PlayStation VR on my head. Before that it was terrible to feel again the detrimental impact of this project. In the game there are several settings for moving the character: you can rotate the camera smoothly (with the appearance of a dark vignette around the edges of the screen), or unfold it with sharp turns for a certain number of degrees to minimize motion sickness. But I'll tell you this: none of the available modes guarantee that in half an hour you will not run strictly in the direction of the toilet. As one of my Western colleagues said: Here They Lie is a great game if you accidentally swallowed the poison and you urgently cause profuse vomiting. Here with what you can not argue.
Developers from Tangentlemen quickly realized that low scores of their project, as well as a small number of owners of the PlayStation VR headset will not allow their controversial game to bring them at least some profit. That's why it was decided to release an update that allows them to play in Here They Lie without any VR helmets, just on the TV screen. Although something tells me that even this move is no longer able to save the sinking ship. Too many players are very burned about the game at the stage of its VR debut, and the word of mouth among gamers works today just to cheer. If the developer released a frank tuft, it will quickly be buried under tons of negative reviews. Slow and monotonous gameplay, powerful rocking in VR, repulsive protagonist and the absence of any intelligible plot - all this can hardly be called a component of an excellent game.
Pros:
- A wonderful atmosphere, perfectly conveying fear, confusion and loneliness.
- The final part of the game will certainly please fans of psychedelic trips.
- More recently, the game can be played without having a PlayStation VR headset.
- The stage in the theater deserves a special praise from the developers.
- Very well-developed game locations.
Minuses:
- The plot of the game is so complicated that even the developers themselves do not understand it.
- Slow, monotonous, frankly boring gameplay.
- There is a catastrophic lack of interaction between the player and the environment.
- In the virtual reality mode, only masochists can play the game.
- Automatic storage points are very far apart.
- Creepy antialiasing, blurry textures, graphic glitches and clipping.
The game Here They Lie with their atmosphere for some reason reminded me of such films as "Stalker" by Andrei Tarkovsky and "Head eraser" by David Lynch. Its passage is a kind of walking through the agony, when you want to disrupt the VR helmet from your head, but you need to collect the will into a fist and find out what will eventually end this psychedelic story. Trying to curb nausea and motion sickness, you go to the finals, overcoming many difficulties and obstacles, but in the end you realize that it was not worth it. The attraction of unprecedented cruelty in a length of five to six hours will test your body for strength and, perhaps, a couple of times even will be able to scare or make you feel completely helpless. However, personally, I advise you to spend this time in another VR-horror called Until Dawn: Rush of Blood. And this game I put only 4 points out of 10 .
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