The Haunted Hoard: Uncanny Valley (PS Vita)
The Uncanny Valley is a theoretical phenomenon in design relating to how people perceive an object that is trying to appear to be human. On a supposed graph of reactions to an appearance ranging from barely any resemblance to a perfect facsimile, there seems to be an oddly steep dip in perception at a point between recognizably separate from a human and an accurate copy where the line plummets. Here, these poor imitations of humanity tend to put people on edge or make them feel uncomfortable, and when working in fields like robotics or 3D animation, it’s important for designers to avoid this unsettling phenomenon or, alternatively, know how to invoke it intentionally for horror. Unfortunately, while the themes of the game Uncanny Valley do touch on this idea, its choice to use pixelated graphics means it completely avoids evoking it, the game seeming to choose many angles that don’t ultimately benefit it in the end.
Uncanny Valley begins with a man named Tom trying to escape his past by moving to an isolated area and taking a job as a night guard at a facility that has been all but abandoned. Immediately two mysteries are presented to the player, that being what past Tom is trying to escape from and what is so unusual about the building he now works in to lead to its abandonment. Tom’s history is mostly revealed through nightmares he has after each work night, shadowy images of people and strange horrific sights tinting the true locations and situations of his remembered life. At first the player would likely to be inclined to try and interpret the strange dream world in search of greater meaning, as this is a trope often used to tell the audience indirectly some details about a person’s mindset or past, but the pertinent details of Tom’s previous life are given to the player straight and the images in these dreams don’t offer any unique insights. You can ascribe some very basic meaning to them all, but what little is divulged about Tom leaves barely any wiggle room for more interesting ideas about who he is or what these night terrors could mean for the character, leaving the player with little meaning to attach to these mandatory sections.
The facility certainly has the better history even though the secret also spills out in an almost lazy and unremarkable manner. The reaction the player will likely have is more “Oh, so that’s what they were doing” rather than making them want to plunge in deeper to discover more about it. There are some complications and more interesting details about it, but not so much that it truly escapes the initial underwhelming realization, especially since the means of learning the tale is mostly tied up in dry e-mail records that are almost structured too believably. You find the same mass e-mails across computers, the inbox of one computer will have the same e-mail in someone else’s sent folder, and it can make sussing out which computer will actually give you interesting new details to latch onto a difficult task. It’s got a few files not buried in this odd adherence to realism, but nothing that really helps it emerge as anything incredibly exciting.
Uncanny Valley does try to salvage it’s story’s weak mysteries by touting many different ways to complete the game. There are indeed many endings to the title, but hardly any of them meaningfully wrap up the events of the game. There are some endings that are meant to serve as early endings before the full breadth of the plot can be revealed, but even the more complete ones seem to end with very little resolved. In fact, even the better endings can be equivalent to the adventure having never happened, with no real growth or change occurring because of your actions. Besides the inherent dissatisfaction from having multiple shallow endings rather than at least having one cohesive and complete plot, Uncanny Valley does not make pursuing the alternate endings worth the effort, primarily because many of them just involve pointlessly burning time. Uncanny Valley takes place over a couple of days as you work the night shift, each of them following a structure you can’t really break from until you hit a certain progression point that isn’t available until a few days in. This means you’ll have to serve your shifts on each pursuit of an alternate ending, and while at first this is an excuse to explore the building and learn about it, there’s only a finite amount of things to look at, and they can be investigated for the most part on your first run. Days may have special events you can attend, but most unique outcomes to the plot often involve sitting for seven real life minutes and waiting out a clock to progress to the next day. You can sleep through some days if you like, but staying up seems necessary for certain endings regardless. It seems like common sense that a game that wants the player to play through it multiple times would either try to make it engaging each time or give reliable ways to skip the monotony, but Uncanny Valley fails in this regard as well.
If you do want to just have the one single adventure in this game and accept it as if no other ends existed, there are still some hurdles to overcome. Your game will likely move at a quicker pace as the time limit for a shift instead becomes a way of barring some exploration and activity rather than a timer to wait out, and despite the pixelated graphics, the game uses darkness well to establish its tone. You’ll need a flashlight quite often to see in the night and in dark rooms, and even though the graphics limit the effectiveness of the visuals, blood and death are still sold well in this visual context. Things feel wrong or upsetting when they are meant to be, even if you don’t feel it too strongly because of the stylistic choice to look retro. Interacting with this world just throws an unfortunate wrench into these efforts though. This is mostly a horror adventure game, meaning that a lot of what you do is moving about and using items to solve puzzles. There are threats to your life and quite interestingly there is a damage system that can take your character’s limbs out of commission, but at times these can be instant kills if you didn’t somehow predict trouble waiting in a certain area. Most threats are fair and you are given a gun to deal with them, but the encounters are mostly about hiding and sneaking by rather than engaging in combat. Many of these encounters can be cheesed though by going in and out of doors until the enemy is elsewhere, weakening some of the tenseness the conflicts could have had.
The more unfortunate issue with the gameplay is how puzzles are executed. Very few of them feel like natural ideas a player would have, especially considering how Uncanny Valley thinks a fire extinguisher is the ultimate tool for many situations that don’t involve fires at all. There is a rare moment of inspiration here or there, but to progress usually involves hopefully having an item you found earlier. A puzzle’s solution should make a player feel clever for figuring out how to overcome the challenge, but most of them here involve unintuitive experimentation that’s more likely to make the player feel like they stumbled into an answer than overcame it due to their personal input. There are plenty of other odd small things hindering puzzle solving as well, as so many aspects of the game are oddly controlled. You can walk about easily enough, but using an item on something in the environment involves opening the inventory and then using the Vita’s touch screen to drag it onto the exact right point or it will pop back into your now closed inventory. Dialogue from characters appears on screen without prompting and is only visible if you are standing in the right spot, disappearing if you get too far away. Sprinting in the game is also very odd, with Tom getting winded extremely quickly, especially in his dreams, and I thought my Vita was broken at first since he seemed to achieve only small bursts despite my efforts, his panting sound to indicate he’s used up his sprint not always playing after you’ve exhausted him. Even one of the better puzzles is tied to a baffling control scheme involving pushing your control stick to stretch strings in an odd manner, taking an already flawed title and turning it into a flawed port as well.
THE VERDICT: So much of Uncanny Valley is ruined by poor implementation. The game has multiple endings but none of them are really meaningful, the mysteries you uncover are basic and unexciting, the process of getting the multiple endings is tedious, and the puzzles tied to progression involve odd leaps in logic. It chooses a visual style that benefits it in no meaningful way but it can at least achieve atmosphere and effective imagery with it. Sadly, most of the game is about pursuing abrupt conclusions to weak set-ups. The technical issues only make it harder to tolerate this meager experience that thinks it’s more interesting than it actually is.
And so, I give Uncanny Valley for the PlayStation Vita…
A TERRIBLE rating. This game is in dire need of a major overhaul. Besides having effective visuals within a self-imposed graphical limitation, most everything else Uncanny Valley attempts harms the experience. There doesn’t seem to be a compelling idea for a core narrative, so the attempts to split it into multiple outcomes instead leads to many uninspired and incomplete story lines that say very little and have almost no impact on the player. Limitations like the timer and odd puzzle designs make a first run feel too constricted and obtuse but only make follow-up runs a drag due to their poor design, and even if you do go for only one playthrough of the title, progression is blocked by those constraints and you’ll likely be funneled into one of the many anticlimaxes.
Uncanny Valley succeeds at very little because it doesn’t follow through on developing many of its ideas. Concepts are implemented without any regard to their effectiveness, all while they are being draped over a weak core. The reason to try for another ending in Uncanny Valley comes more from the hope that something more satisfying can be found than the first ending you get, but it can’t deliver on that expectation as the implementation of its ideas neither makes the game enjoyable to replay or fulfilling to complete.