The Haunted Hoard: Decay: The Mare (PC)

In the early 2000s, the rise of flash game sites like Newgrounds lead to many fledgling game creators trying to figure out how to make games in the genres they love. Platformers and puzzles games were relatively easy to create, but horror games required more than just a mechanical understanding of designing a game. Unfortunately, these early horror games often ended up cut from the same rather awful cloth, the experience often boiling down to clicking to move through still images of rooms to collect keys, pop scares appearing at parts for cheap horror. This was just part of the growing pains of flash games though, but the reason I bring this up is because Decay: The Mare almost feels like a spiritual successor to this style, continuing the unfortunate tradition despite being released in 2015 and having a better hang on visually executing the gameplay concept.

 

Decay: The Mare entices prospective players with a concept that sounds a bit intriguing. The game’s protagonist is a young man named Sam who is a recovering drug addict at a rehab center called Reaching Dreams. The game seems to portray this as the impetus for some psychological horror, the mind filling with possibilities on how quitting drugs might be represented in symbolic or possibly even psychedelic horror imagery. However, the drug angle is forgotten fairly early on and shoved out of the story in favor of a rather bland narrative that ends with a fairly weak explanation for the events that take place. Your exploration of Reaching Dreams, while supernatural at parts, reveals a narrative that boils things down to a rather weak story with a generic antagonist and little additional meaning to the plot beyond just trying to escape a bad place your character finds themselves in. It does nearly touch on some interesting ideas, the game randomly inserting another character and explaining their whole backstory suddenly to explain a mildly effective image of an empty chair and blood splatter following the sound of a gunshot, but the sudden narrative push doesn’t pay off much besides adding context to that singular scene.

The unsatisfying plot at least seems to be trying a bit harder than the game’s attempts at scares. It has a few jump scares that might hit you right, but that’s mostly because so much of the game is spent going between rooms to click on objects and solve dull puzzles so you start to forget the game you’re playing is actually meant to be scary. The closest thing to a regular reminder about this intended tone is that the areas you explore across the game’s three short episodes have paintings hanging on the walls depicting creepy things. An unsettling face framed off to the side is spooky in a generic way, but it seems to evoke unexpectedly coming across something uncanny during a Google search rather than the faces have a meaningful place in the game’s story and world. Decay: The Mare isn’t entirely without its moments, there’s a strange monstrous human who lurks around the first episodes and can be seen lingering outside windows briefly, a room filled with photographs and things like messages scrawled in blood hit familiar horror notes, and a segment where you move through the dark would be more effective if it wasn’t so easy to get to your destination during that portion. The bloody talking bag is perhaps the most interesting character and most effective image that delivers on horror without being a cheap pop scare, its unsettling breathing and single hand giving it a memorable appearance even if its feels like the game still can’t muster up a satisfying explanation for its unusual condition. Giving the game kudos for the moments where it can put together some decent if conceptually empty horror imagery would be much more deserved though if the horror wasn’t spaced out so much, and the moments it does crop up tend to be the cheap surges of fear caused by startling pop scares or whatever unsettling and unrelated images the creator managed to sketch for wall decor.

 

The failures in plot and scares could be easier to sweep aside if the gameplay itself wasn’t so lacking. This point and click adventure has you moving between sets of rooms to solve puzzles so you can move into new rooms, but one major problem immediately arises. Most rooms are made up of static images where you character stands in prescribed spots, not truly moving between areas as they are clicking on a door to teleport into a location in the middle of the next room. The big problem with this besides making things feel lifeless is that you’ll enter a new room and be facing a direction based not on how you entered it, but by where the game wants you to be facing. To put it simply, you might enter a doorway on the left side of the room, but instead of facing inward from the left wall, you’ll be standing in the middle of the room and be facing whatever direction the game finds most interesting. Sometimes you can look around these rooms by clicking arrows to turn and sometimes you can’t, and it’s fairly easy to enter a room and not realize which doorway would send you backwards. In fact, at one point the game tried to be scary by replacing the door you entered with with a wall, but since the room entry process is already so disorienting, it’s more likely you’ll think that you simply haven’t found the right angle to view the entry door yet.

Disorienting navigation is a key part to play because you’ll constantly be trekking from one room to another after you solve some small puzzle to grab a key needed elsewhere. Some are simple inventory puzzles or recognizing a relevant pattern, but Decay: The Mare does at least attempt to provide more than lock-and-key delivery puzzles. There are some puzzles where poems or notes contain clues, although their wording makes it rather blatant what they’re doing. There’s an interesting puzzle involving dice faces and a camera becomes a mildly interesting tool that lets you view areas in a different light to solve some puzzles that seemed straightforward until the obvious solution failed. If you’re having difficulty with a puzzle you can use hints that take a little bit to refresh, and these can also help you find out where you need to go if there’s no clear path for advancement. This is a relevant concern because there are points you are meant to wander around to trigger something, the main occurrence being when colored balls start appearing with no rhyme or reason in the episode’s contained area and you need to trigger them by being in the right rooms. Sometimes the hint system will just leave you high and dry though, but the puzzles are probably the one place Decay: The Mare manages a few hits and acceptable designs so being a little stumped when there’s a legit brainteaser to solve at least feels like a fairer time to pull away hints than when you’re wandering around hoping for something to click.

 

The game features some optional content that unsurprisingly doesn’t add much. Coins are hidden throughout the episodes, these helping to unlock things like concept art with more of the game’s creepy unrelated art. The game features two endings, but since both of them help demystify much of the experience and lead to unsatisfying endings, there’s not much to see, the bad ending pretty much just being a more truncated and negative version of the good one anyway. The game itself is short at least even though it feels much longer as you backtrack through the same sets of doors to ferry items to their destinations. Even with its relative briefness though, it’s hard to find much that makes playing Decay: The Mare worth even that tiny time investment.

THE VERDICT: Decay: The Mare squeaks out the odd authentic scare and some puzzles with a bit of thought put into them, but for the most part, this horror title is a dull trek through still images of rooms with the disorienting feature of resetting your camera’s perspective without notice as you move through them. Many puzzles are just about getting the right objects or information to the right areas, necessitating more of that bland and confusing backtracking as the story only gets less and less interesting as more of it is revealed. Cheap pop scares and random creepy art hanging on the walls tries to remind you that this game is meant to be scary, but playing through Decay: The Mare is mostly about tediously clicking on doors to move about a static game world with very little of substance to motivate you to see its underwhelming endings.

 

And so, I give Decay: The Mare for PC…

A TERRIBLE rating. It probably speaks more of the game’s rare successes that Decay: The Mare scrapes by with only my second most negative rating, but sometimes some genuine thought was put into puzzle concepts and the horror isn’t without a few interesting symbols and scares, even if the ultimate payoff for all that effort ends up being a plot that dispenses with the premise and goes for something without much purpose or deeper meaning. The room navigation is definitely the most agonizing part of the experience, traveling through rooms that mess with your perspective isn’t done to add to this game’s very poorly executed psychological horror, but just a technological conceit to overcome the fact you’re viewing still shots of rooms that often don’t even have four walls to show. The fact the game leans back on making you take an obvious puzzle solution or inventory item from one place to another makes these uninspired environments more egregious, but at least the hint system can alleviate some moments where it might not be clear that a chunk of wood to the side is meant to be carried despite many areas in the game featuring rundown old furniture and generic litter. The balls just appearing is certainly the worst case of the game’s problem solving taking a back seat to things just happening, but Decay: The Mare can at least whip up some puzzles that briefly ask for some critical thinking.

 

The old Newgrounds horror games didn’t choose their particular type of point and click adventuring because it was effective. It was easy to program, pop scares could be thrown in for cheap horror, and taking a key from one room to another at least qualified as interactive gameplay. It is an idea that could be done well with imagination and effort of course, but it wasn’t very good when it was budding artists struggling to come to grips with new game tools and it’s not much better when a developer like Shining Gate Software repeats it but with some better backgrounds and a few puzzles that involve a little thought. Horror is more than uncanny pictures on a wall, puzzles are more than taking an obvious solution from one room to another, and moving around an environment is more than placing a new image in front of the player’s face with no regard for how a place’s layout should look. Decay: The Mare definitely wants to be famously scary like big name games such as Silent Hill and Resident Evil, it even bills itself as an homage to them despite note really hitting similar notes, but its reliance on thoughtless shortcuts and a story that weakens over time unfortunately make it instead a contemporary with the forgotten dregs of early Newgrounds horror.