No, don’t go. He’ll get you.
I finished the masterful Murder House, with 100% achievements to boot, and I can say that Puppet Combo created a bloody brilliant game that I had to share. But there are a few caveats I’ve sprinkled throughout this review for people who are not blind retro horror fans like myself. 🙂
I like the control and sense of responsibility over your own fate or the fate of the other characters you get from a horror game. And if you’ve ever played a horror game, you’ve at least likely heard of Resident Evil, Alone in the Dark, o, the best of them all, Silent Hill.
As an aside, this is just a call out to the world, please, someone make a good new Silent Hill. I wish IP laws allowed for indie developers to have lots of different cracks at cool IPs that are going criminally underused, to allow for fresh life and new spins to be put onto them. But that’s another story for a different day.
Murder House is one of the few modern games I’ve seen replicate the feeling of these classic horror games. Admittedly, I haven’t played any of Puppet Combo’s other games (I’d love to try Glass Staircase next) but Murder House feels like a superb continuation of the PSX horror era all on its own. It has the murky graphics, the distorted sounds, and most of all, the passion for telling a compelling and clearly horrifying story.
You can also mess around with graphics styles in the pause menu, meaning you could play it in PSX-style graphics with the sound of a ye olde projector running, and many other cool graphical combinations. Obviously, it also has tank controls.
I was fine with that since I’ve played so many games with tank controls, but if you aren’t a fan, you can either A) play with a controller, or B) wait for the first-person update that will remove tank controls but also give you a close up of the Easter Bunny just before he slams your face into the floor over and over again.
They went to the house to get a story. Then the story came after them!
So, yes. Murder House pits you, as a camera crew, against a vicious slasher-type serial killer who dresses as the Easter Bunny. This is even more terrifying than it sounds. The distorted PSX graphics give the killer a weirdly dreamy appearance, and the game definitely feels like one of those awful childhood nightmares. The death animations are also singularly horrifying and I want to avoid them as much as possible. So, bravo to the animator!
The confining and claustrophobic setting is also a great decision. Setting it in a single house allows you to become intimately familiar with the surroundings, and the developers could construct a house that has a personality of its own.
Quite a few horror games like to make big sprawling mansions or other places, and while the right team can do wonders even with a huge area (again, Resident Evil or Silent Hill games, I’m applauding you), quite a few teams lose sight of how to make games scary in larger, more sprawling areas (Outlast 2, this is you).
The one large immersion issue that Murder House had was graphical glitching. Some walls and floors liked to clip in and out of existence. But other than that, and one slightly annoying puzzle that required more speed than I thought (the piano one), Murder House is depraved, creepy, and masterful.
The final boss is tricky, but I think the level of difficulty was good throughout the entirety of the game. One thing I would have appreciated, however, was a save spot before the final boss, as to reach the boss you have to do a decent amount of trekking back through the house. This isn’t engaging and serves to irritate the player more than anything.
But in the end, Murder House is the classic retro horror game you’ve been waiting for: chase sequences, a slow and delicious buildup, weighing up whether you fight-or-flight, and classic puzzles. Probably the scariest new game you’ll encounter this Halloween.
Play it, dammit. Support this kind of game.
Even if we never get a new Silent Hill, I’m comforted by the fact Puppet Combo is making spiritual successors to that era of video games, or at the very least, aesthetic successors. I hope they get the respect and recognition they deserve. Bravo.
Links
Get Murder House on Steam
Chat with MGN on Discord
Check out our Monster Prom 2: Monster Camp Review