The Haunted Hoard: Calling (Wii)
While the Nintendo Wii is best known for its motion control gimmick, it was a system with quite a few more unique little features, from a speaker in the controller to a message board games could send you letters through. If there is one thing horror loves, it’s a fresh new gimmick, a new opportunity to terrify in ways previously unavailable. However, much like 3D movie schlock, sometimes that added angle ends up emphasized to the point that the work as a whole suffers, and with Calling trying to pretty much integrate every Wii gimmick it can, it ends up a game defined foremost by its gimmickry instead of its horror.
Calling is played through a first person perspective, the player needing to explore different locations like a hospital and school while avoiding the ghosts who haunt the place. Our first encounter with the Wii Remote’s influence on the gameplay is how the player looks around, the player needing to point at the screen not just to click on objects of interest, but to adjust their view in an unnatural way. The control stick on the nunchuck is focused on forward, backward, and side to side movement, meaning to turn in Calling you need to move your cursor to the edge of the screen and slowly spin around. You can do an instant turn around by double tapping the Z button, but if your destination isn’t right behind you, the slow turn during a ghost encounter can make things needlessly complicated, and with a few time sensitive moments in the game, fiddling with the odd turning mechanics makes these a bit more aggravating. Another annoyance related to the Wii Remote cursor is identifying which objects can be picked up. Many areas are dark and require a flashlight to view properly, but before you can grab a light, there are still often interactive objects you need to find. Things are still fairly easy to view without the light, meaning that you’re often going to click on something you see clearly only to be told it’s too dark to make it out and use whatever it is. This makes finding the specific item of importance even harder since it’s no more visible than the rest, but the game in general is pretty bad at communicating what you are meant to be doing or where you are meant to be going, and since the school and hospital both have multiple near identical floors with a lot of wasted space, these searches can drag on for quite a while.
Ghosts aren’t always present in Calling, but when they are, fighting them off is incredibly boring. You are meant to outrun most of them, but there are many moments designed so that you will be attacked by one no matter how fast you’re moving. When a ghost grabs onto you, they wildly shake you around, and to their credit, some of the ghosts make strange, creepy sounds and can look and sound appropriately scary. However, any effort towards the audio and visual design here is wasted since the way you fight off a ghost is not just tedious, but it can be hard on the wrist as well. When a ghost has you in its grip, all you do is shake the Wii Remote wildly to force it off, and while there is a special moment indicated by a flash where you can press a button and force them off early, the ghosts still require a lot of remote waggling prior to that opportunity. Late game spirits become especially demanding, almost as if they hope your arm will get too tired to keep up the shaking near the end to make a ghost have a chance of actually killing you. Rather than these ghost encounters being scary because you’re encountering a vengeful spirit, the true terror of these moments comes from the toll it will take on your arm.
Two gimmicks are thankfully far less bothersome in their execution. The game gets its name from its dependence on telephones, the otherworldly locations of the game connected in a place known as the Mnemonic Abyss. Here, phones are often the only way to travel to areas otherwise separated by a shadowy emptiness, the means of travel as simple as calling wherever a phone is to instantly travel there. The phone that made the call will be left behind, and the game uses this for a few puzzles on trying to get phones to the right areas for teleportation or finding the right phone numbers to reach different locations, but the Wii Remote’s speaker makes this focus on phones a bit more interesting. When they ring or people speak to you through them, the controller is the one playing the audio, although you can enable the T.V. to do so if need be. Ghosts can even be heard at times through the speaker, helping with the creepy soundscape of the game, but it is sadly held back immensely by the gameplay. Just like other puzzles, finding the right areas for phone puzzles can be a slog as you receive little clue which random doors in large buildings will open and there are quite a few things that are pointless but can be opened. There are a lot of secrets and special documents to find that flesh out the Mnemonic Abyss and the game’s characters, with one side quest actually having you search for a Woman in Red who will send messages to your Wii Message Board any time she’s found, but sadly the plot isn’t the best either.
Calling’s story is a jumbled mess by design initially. Your first playthrough of the game presents events out of order to try and hook you with some early scares only to require you to then replay the entire game after to not only see scenes that better contextualize the plot that were restricted from you before but also present things chronologically before the true ending. You can skip chapters you have played previously, but the game places more secrets around such as the Woman in Red subquest that can only be engaged with in this second unnecessary run through a game that will already wear out its welcome with a design that was already too repetitive on the first run. The story wouldn’t have been hurt by presenting it first in its chronological order or it could have just flashed back to some of the early moments as they became relevant, but instead it drags out a tale that isn’t really enhanced by what you learn the second time.
Calling is at first about The Black Page, a chatroom that seems to curse and kill people who visit it. The focus then shifts to characters impacted by it while leaving the premise behind, the player playing from a few different perspectives but the primary one being Rin, a girl who was in the chatroom and is now encountering the ghosts of other people who found it in the past. Most of the game explores the tragic tale of the ghost girl on the game’s cover, and unfortunately the game not only seems to fall into quite a few Japanese horror tropes that make the plot feel less unique, but it presents a lot of easily understood plot details by way of an early montage of scenes that are meant to pique curiosity for what looks like a mostly straightforward event. You do get to learn more about the motivations of some characters that do add a few extra layers to the course of events, but at other times it can feel unfocused and meandering as it briefly takes you to a location like an internet cafe or hair salon just for a change of scenery that doesn’t add much gameplay or storywise. Deviations from the plot don’t really strengthen the intrigue of the Mnemonic Abyss nor do they add a lot to the tale of the main spirit, and considering the main story was already on somewhat shaky ground, the plot ends up not providing much of a motivator for one playthrough, let alone the required two for the full story.
THE VERDICT: Calling gets so lost in Wii gimmickry that it forgot to create an interesting central narrative for its fairly cliche Japanese ghost story. While there are some interesting details to be found and the Wii Remote speaker is used to decent effect, the need to navigate with the cursor and the constant shaking of the controller during the repetitive ghost encounters wear on a player, especially when so much of the game is focused on traversing large locations with little guidance. The horror doesn’t pack its intended punch when it’s easily overcome but wears on the wrists, and the puzzles are often too simple or dependent on area scouring to make the core play interesting. And since this game requires two tedious runs through for the true ending, it’s hard to justify picking up Calling.
And so, I give Calling for the Wii…
A TERRIBLE rating. In a more focused horror game, the ghosts did have the potential to be scary and the plot, while plain, could have served as a framework for encountering them. The Wii Remote speaker providing ghostly voices wasn’t a bad idea either, but it seems like as soon as Hudson had a taste for one gimmick, the developer wanted to see if they could use all of the Wii’s weird features. Some are inoffensive, but the reliance on shaking for fights and scouring areas with the cursor means most of your experience is spent with poor executions of pointer controls and controller waggle. Calling both shows some interesting ideas for gimmicks like the Woman in Red messages and then shows how poorly others can be executed like turning dependent on cursor location on the screen, not to mention the mindless controller shaking that weakens any effectiveness of even the best designed ghosts since all you have to do is shake the controller wildly to win. All of that on top of the poorly organized story structure and some moments where you find untranslated Japanese text that was meant to add an air of horror but now only can to those who know the language and you find a horror game that really needed a decent gameplay backbone to survive but instead found itself harmed by the misguided design choices made.
Gimmicks aren’t bad inherently, and often something that becomes standard later began as a gimmick. Gimmicks can add an interesting new layer to an experience, something that helps it both stand out and provide a unique new way of playing a game. Unfortunately, Calling saw that the Wii Remote speaker had potential and then stretched itself thin trying to incorporate everything on the table, only to forget to make sure the game these gimmicks were integrated in could make good use of them. Even stripped down to a gimmick-free game it would have lingering issues like the poor environmental design and basic plot, so having awful execution with these added elements just make Calling much harder to enjoy. While I don’t use the word gimmick in a negative way often, this is truly the kind of game that shows why the term can carry a less than favorable connotation.