Recent reviews by TENGU

I wouldn't categorize this game as survival horror, more like a horror adventure game as the gameplay loop is composed of exploration and puzzle solving, while the danger situations will all be decided by QTEs. Fail one, and your character is dead.

Permadeath + instakills, now that's a doozy. Lose the main character and you have to restart the WHOLE chapter; now that's another doozy. Controls can get pretty clunky (specially on stairs or sharp turns). I encountered performance issues on the last two chapters of the game and some random freeze ups that forced me to restart 2-3 times until the game decided to work again (these always happened with a "whispers" random event). I found the plot pretty so-so: characters are kinda shallow and the story jerks around going mostly nowhere, and when it starts to get somewhere, the game just ends. Some gameplay mechanics could've been explained better, most puzzles are good but some can get hard just because they are presented in a nebulous manner or explained unclearly. Plus character expressions and animations are pretty uncanny valley (I know the studio behind this game is small, but everything looks pretty good graphics wise, it's just the character animations that are hilariously bad for how modern this game is).

Song of Horror has some really good spooks that utilize their level design pretty nicely but these will happen every once in a blue moon and have an RNG element to them, so you'll likely miss most. The rest of the scares that do happen regularly? Cheap jumpscare stuff such as loud, unexpected noises. This baffles me to no end.

This game also trains you to avoid all situations that seem like death trap bait, but every now and then you will need to interact with some of these elements in order to progress. This kind of design philosophy seems to be trying to pull as many fast ones as it can over the player and make it a trial and error affair with stakes that are kinda high (character's lives). Can't say I'm a fan. It's not even horror worthy, as the deaths in this game are mostly unremarkable, some are even funny.

Know what's a real pity? Environment design is top of the shelf, old school, fixed-camera opressive scenarios with a great horror ambiance. There is a lot of variety to them too. Really makes me wish they were part of a game with less badly conjoined mechanics. The game also has some really good songs as part of its OST (including the titular "song of horror").

All in all, I'd say Song of Horror does a pretty good job in some areas, but as a whole it sadly falls short, the good is severely brought down by the bad.

Salim & Jason the duo of gigachads.

"Capital has the ability to subsume all critiques into itself. Even those who would *critique* capital end up *reinforcing* it instead."

No matter what happens with this IP in future, I humbly thank everyone who worked on Disco Elysium. They brought something unique to the world that will always endure within me.