The Haunted Hoard: Remothered: Broken Porcelain (PS4)

Remothered: Tormented Fathers was certainly an uneven horror game with its surprisingly suspenseful stealth not being helped by a plot that dumps a lot of important exposition at the end, but its cliffhanger still left me eager to play the sequel to see how it could build off of its mechanics and wrap up a plot that still had potential. However, Remothered: Broken Porcelain was apparently released as a buggy and rather frustrating mess of a game, but after waiting until some post-release patches could adjust things, I had thought I would be safe in experiencing what should have been the definitive form of the game. Unfortunately, it seems some of Remothered: Broken Porcelain’s problems go much deeper than technical issues.

 

Remothered: Broken Porcelain is primarily the tale of Celeste Felton, the young girl whose disappearance was the focus of Rosemary Reed’s investigation into the deeply disturbed Richard Felton from the first game. However, while that game concluded with the promise of finding out where she went, the majority of Broken Porcelain instead focuses on three points in time that don’t involve her current whereabouts. One is a framing device where an old woman recounts the past events in an interview, another is Rosemary’s own interview with the owner of the Ashmann Inn many years prior, and the biggest focus goes to Celeste’s time spent at that inn during her youth. Celeste’s tale aims to cover a lot of ground, not only trying to explain where she went but also establishing who she is as a character and exploring her unpleasant time at the Ashmann Inn as seemingly supernatural forces grip the adults who are meant to be taking care of her and her only close friend, another young girl named Linn.

While the adults at Ashmann Inn are rather deplorable human beings when their histories come to life, they are also tied to the moths who were sort of just present in the first game, Remothered: Broken Porcelain doing a good job explaining how they connect to the dissociative state where people can turn into murderous grey distortions of themselves under the right conditions or in the case of the unusual Porcelain figure with his baby doll mask, making him a near invincible killer. When they start mentioning concepts like a queen moth it certainly feels like the writer might have wished to lock himself into an insect that actually features communal minds, but actually taking the time to weave the moths into the plot also ties to one of the big issues with Remothered: Broken Porcelain. So much of the plot isn’t spent advancing things but instead backtracking to fill in the plentiful gaps in the first game’s story. The game does throw in a bunch of twists, Celeste starting the game with the name Jennifer and many other characters quickly revealing themselves to have alternate names and identities for cheap twists as well, but because so much of the game is set as a flashback to before Remothered: Tormented Fathers, it seems too preoccupied with being a prequel to focus on the sequel side of its story. Tying up loose ends isn’t necessarily a bad idea of course, but the game’s handling of new elements is rather poor as well such as a romance abruptly being established in the span of one cutscene after the previous one had been a rather hostile first meeting. Perhaps more disappointing though is once the game has told its story and has sealed up the flaws in the first game’s storytelling, it then aims to completely tie up the story of both Remothered games, rushing to a conclusion that is both unsatisfying and seems to be tacked on after a game that worked so much to get us to the point where Celeste and Rosemary could meet in a potential third title.

 

The plot was pretty much the main reason I was interested in playing Remothered: Broken Porcelain, and when it turned out to be mostly about filling in the gaps in the first game’s unexplored elements only to wrap up with something surprisingly conclusive for this small series, there wasn’t much else to latch onto. The stealth has been severely reduced in effectiveness and importance in Remothered: Broken Porcelain compared to its predecessor and nothing really seems to be added to replace it. As you slink about the Ashmann Inn looking for information, items, or puzzle solutions to make your way into new rooms and areas, you will be pursued by other characters looking to kill you. Most of the time it will be Andrea the housekeeper, but the Inn’s owner Stefano Ashmann, a maid, and a a red nun will appear at different points and turn different weapons against you like scissors, a gun, or a flamethrower. Porcelain can also pop up at different points, the hulking figure and his sharpened spine weapon intimidating enough in visual design but sharing one aspect with pretty much every other person who can stalk you as you explore the inn: they’re all fairly ineffective.

Save for a few scripted sequences where screwing up is an instant death or you are actually meant to lose, these stalkers are barely threatening at all. You can easily run circles around them with Celeste, running past them with only a bit of caution if they’re winding up their weapon to be on your way. The game gives you some items you can use as distractions as well as tools to use to break yourself free if they happen to grab you and prepare to kill you, but even if you’re pressing up against them in a corner they sometimes will just swing their weapon at you for low damage rather than going for the kill. Celeste can sustain a surprising amount of damage without being in danger of dying so you can take whatever licks are necessary and be on your way to completing whatever basic task you need to complete to advance the story. The Ashmann Inn certainly had the potential to be an effective host to these stealth segments, areas like the restaurant and laundry room having layouts conducive to sneaking around and the interconnected hallways and dead end rooms built to provide hiding places and host chases well, but since the enemies are such pitiful threats, the atmosphere and area design mostly goes to waste.

 

The distraction and protection items as well as their associated crafting system pretty much becomes pointless save for the extremely rare instance where the stalkers remember they can kill you if they felt like it, and while you do get some interesting abilities later in the game that could have been used for interesting long range decoys and the like, they pretty much just exist for the moments where you must perform the expected action or die. The movement in general is pretty quick so things proceed at a decent pace, but there’s an upgrade system tied to moth keys hidden around the inn that feels incredibly unnecessary save for attributes that can speed things up a bit more.

 

There are a few boss fights to be found in Remothered: Broken Porcelain as well, and they are not designed well either. The stealth is thrown out, the player instead needing to do things like run around in a circle while Porcelain chases them. Your only option for damaging him is to wait until things line up properly to activate a lamp and exploit his photosensitivity, and even when the game tries to give you a power trip moment near the end, it completely botches it by having it be a slow-going chase rather than a quick and satisfying inversion of the game’s intended sense of helplessness. You won’t really feel outmatched too often though, and it’s a little sad how freely you can run around unopposed in a game that is trying to have its stealth be its source of terror save for some scenes banking on shock value. I didn’t encounter any major bugs at least save perhaps one with a disappearing character, but it seems the patches meant to adjust the difficulty might have overcorrected to the point the game now lacks any teeth outside of moments where it’s asking for only one specific action to determine your success.

THE VERDICT: With a story that mainly aims to fill the plot holes left by its predecessor and fails to competently write any new story directions it pursues, Remothered: Broken Porcelain squanders the intriguing cliffhanger of Remothered: Tormented Fathers and abruptly wraps things up to ensure the series ends on a sour note. The stealth is laughable as you are given tools you’ll never need to use due to the ineptitude of the stalkers who rarely ever go for the kill and deal pitiful damage. The boss fights are poorly conceived, and some sections of the game require a specific reaction rather than trying to figure out anything clever with game mechanics that never get their chance to be useful. Sometimes the narrative beats, visuals, and the atmosphere of an isolated inn on a snowy night squeak out something effective, but then you’ll be thrown back to an awfully written plot and gameplay that mostly avoids being worse because of how easy it is to breeze through the game mostly unopposed.

 

And so, I give Remothered: Broken Porcelain for PlayStation 4…

A TERRIBLE rating. Remothered: Broken Porcelain feels like a step backwards in so many ways, both in how its mechanics regress after the first game and how much time is spent trying to rectify the issues with Remothered: Tormented Fathers’s plot. Coming out the other side there is a fuller story to be appreciated in regards to the first game’s context and you do have a good understanding of Celeste’s situation at the Ashmann Inn by the end. Sadly, the new elements are handled horrendously. From a rushed and unearned romance to a story that tries to substitute vulgarity and shocking images for horror to a narrative that would rather completely rush its conclusion and the conclusion to the series, Remothered: Broken Porcelain’s biggest problem is certainly its terrible handling of the thing that drew me to wanting to play the sequel in the first place. It gives answers, but they are stuck in the muck with awkward attempts to give Celeste’s history new poorly thought out plot beats. The stealth is definitely the biggest dropped ball, but what saves Remothered: Broken Porcelain from being a drag is that the problems with it are ones that make it easy to progress through the game unopposed. The incredibly basic boss fights can be slow and dull, but when the stalkers are all you need to worry about and there’s no instant death loss condition at play, you can easily make your way around the area to get things done and move things along. The fact a design like Porcelain’s is reduced to a guy that kind of paws at you as you pass is definitely a shame thematically and the atmosphere and detail put into the setting is squandered, but you’ll progress unopposed quite often and thus play  is instead heavily disappointing rather than agonizingly tedious or frustratingly difficult.

 

Remothered: Broken Porcelain may have released a buggy mess, but those glitches were a veil that drew attention away from the deeper design flaws. I thankfully was more mildly intrigued than actually invested in how plot details from Remothered: Tormented Fathers would be explored in its follow-up, but Broken Porcelain killed even that subdued interest. It does tidy up the plot and world-building to a decent enough degree, but the story of Celeste Felton is squandered as the stealth can’t muster up any degree of horror once you realize you barely need to play things safe. The flaws in the gameplay rob it of effectiveness without dipping too low that they become intolerable, but it does feel like this horror game sequel tanked most of the promise shown in its already rather middling predecessor. Remothered: Broken Porcelain’s technical side may not be broken anymore, but its design concepts and and storytelling are now front and center where their numerous flaws are sadly much more apparent.