Survival horror is a genre that’s extremely difficult to nail just right. From first person, third person, 2D and 3rd platformer, just about every gameplay style has been used at some point. We even have horror deck builders now. These pieces aren’t as important as the feel of the game.
While Resident Evil and, to a lesser extent, Silent Hill have moved a while a bit from survival horror to a more action-focused game, they still have elements that will get your anxiety up and get adrenaline pumping throughout your bloodstream. So the question for today is, does Deadcam, a game made by a single dev, do this?
Story Time
Story-wise, there isn’t a ton here, at least not yet. What is here is set in a Japanese school haunted by girls who are here to make you pay for what you’ve done. This story is labelled as file-01, and with the description of the game reading “play through multiple 80s and 90s inspired short stories,” this leads me to believe it will get more content than the few hours that are here and I look forward to that.
Atmosphere
Deadcam is a survival horror game with a bit of a unique twist. It’s played like you have found lost footage (think the original Blair Witch movie). Gameplay is fed to you through a first person perspective but you’re recording it through an old VHS camcorder, hence the name DeadCam.
The found footage look and feel gave this game great immersion and atmosphere, which really helped them nail this aspect of DeadCam, which I’d consider to be the most important of this style of game.
Gameplay
In most survival horror games (not named Resident Evil) combat is not the main draw, and this game is no exception. As far as weapons, the katana cuts and the guns shoot, but that’s kind of where that starts and stops. Survival horror is an outlier in gaming where the better the weapons feel, the more it takes away from the heart-racing atmosphere. This game definitely leans into the atmosphere more, which is great. There is a chainsaw as well, which might be there to make you feel badass as long as you have gas, but honestly, I kind of hated using it. I do think making this weapon feel badass but also keeping the available gas really low would add something to the game.
There are puzzles as any good horror game has them, and there is one or two that seem well thought out. As long as in the future, this sort of pace keeps up in the puzzles I think future content will be good in this department. Not all puzzles have any sort of brain teaser math elements to them. There’s a few of the basic “find this fuse and install it here” type puzzles as well, which any game like this has to have.
I’m less concerned about the combat in this game and more concerned about the enemy variety. This is to say, there basically isn’t any. The combat basically consists of Japanese girls running around trying to get you and you defending yourself with the aforementioned Katana and guns. Now, as more content is added and there’s new stories to play, I’d expect this to change, but honestly, that isn’t going to be a fix all. In this story alone, adding in one or two other versions of the Japanese girls would help keep the atmosphere doing its thing and keep the repetitive feelings at bay.
Conclusion
Much like this review, DeadCam in its current form is short, being able to be beaten in a few hours. That’s not to say it’s bad. Sure, since it’s early access, it does get a pass on some things, but that’s just the nature of early access. This game has nailed what is arguably one of the most important parts of survival horror, and that’s the atmosphere and the feel. There is a bit to be worked on with the enemy variety, and while I’m not concerned about the way the combat feels a couple more melee weapons could spice things up along with improving the chainsaw.
Would I recommend you give this a try? At the time of this writing, the game is $7.99 (no sale), and at that price, I would totally recommend you give it a shot and honestly when this comes out of early access I look forward to giving the full game a look.
Thanks to Joure Visser for the early access review code.
