The Haunted Hoard: Creeping Terror (PC)

With the unique setup of the DS and 3DS handhelds, porting games specifically developed for them to other hardware comes with two major questions. The easier one to solve is how to integrate the touch screen functionality they often feature, but since mobile phones, certain PCs, and even the Nintendo Switch still include touch screens it’s not too big a barrier to carrying the game’s controls over. However, adapting the dual screen setups of the DS systems to a single screen layout raises a few questions about the best approach to doing so. Creeping Terror has an interesting approach to this issue though, that being to pretend it’s not even an issue and having the PC release feature both screens in a vertical arrangement rather than attempting something more natural looking. Perhaps even odder about this form of porting is that the release on home computers coincided with the 3DS release, meaning they weren’t even carrying over the style for authenticity’s sake and just decided to have parity between both versions of the title. Regardless of how odd this may seem at first, so long as your scren isn’t too small it actually doesn’t hurt the experience much to go with this unusual but effective method of keeping both screens in play at all times.

 

Creeping Terror’s story follows a band of four students who head out to an abandoned mansion in the forest to record a video for the internet. Arisa is the character the player controls, the Japanese exchange student soon stumbling through some rotten wood and encountering a shovel-carrying killer in the mines below that she needs to outrun. While the students naturally want to leave the moment they reunite, the escape has been cut off and the group has trouble sticking together, Arisa trying to reunite her friends, avoid a few murderous stalkers in the area, and find a safe way to make it back to civilization. While our main group of teenagers feel a bit like stock characters for a horror story, I must give some credit to Bob. Not only does Bob add some levity to the adventure as the comic relief, but he also fulfills the role of the strongest in the group, his stocky build meaning that he’s actually able to tackle and hold off some of the pursuers like the robed cultist. Creeping Terror does try to emphasize the helplessness of Arisa and her friends in their situation and your own efforts to fight back are usually more defensive, but Bob sticking up for the group when he can is a nice touch and he’s not so strong that he’s able to completely rob the game’s villains of their danger.

Creeping Terror’s story mostly keeps its focus on the escape effort lead by Arisa, the player starting in the mansion but traveling through other abandoned locations like the mines and a rundown hospital in the hopes of finding ways to safely escape the killers patrolling these areas. There are plenty of notes laying around the game world to pick up and read, these helping to flesh out the histories of the locations and giving clues to the identities of characters like the large man with the shovel or the robed cultist. Finding the notes is actually fairly easy to do as you adventure so long as you make sure to duck into every available room and investigate, and having the map on the second screen actually makes it easy to check if you’ve properly scoured an area for all its details. The records do enough to explain why this horror scenario exists in the first place, but the unfortunate truth about Creeping Terror is that it is a game with four endings and no one ending completely addresses every question about its plot. The game’s best ending chooses to finish detailing the identity of the shovel-wielding killer and feels the closest to a proper wrap-up of the game’s events, but it does leave questions about the cultist and where some characters were during certain events up in the air. The remaining three endings address those aspects instead while pushing the shovel man aside, and their focus on B Movie twists that aim for weirdness over strong resolution to plot threads make them a bit harder to swallow if you only go for one ending. Multiple save slots do mean you can go for them all if you so desire, the junction point being when you grab a medkit in the hospital area, so it’s easy to go for the best ending and then explore the more unusual finales to get the other answers it didn’t bother addressing.

 

Besides the atmospheric darkness and the natural eeriness of run-down locations, the stalkers are the main source of terror in Creeping Terror. The shovel man is certainly the most interesting of the bunch, the imposing figure’s empty shadow of a face, disheveled hair hanging to the sides, and long limping gait making him feel like an otherworldly and unstoppable figure. When he appears, the player needs to run and find a hiding place to throw him off your trail, the layout of the game world sometimes meaning this is as simple as backtracking to a spot where you know its safe but other times you’ll need to outmaneuver him as he blocks the path to a reliable spot. Throwing rocks or similar items can briefly disorient him and let you past, but if he does grab you, you’re not necessarily doomed to die. Mashing a button will let you break away from him, but you have a stamina meter that plays a key part in how this will unfold. Stamina is vital to running and will temporarily drain as you do so, but it also serves as your life during any moments you receive damage. Not only will any immediate damage reduce your stamina, but it deals some permanent damage to your maximum stamina until you use a healing item or find a saferoom. If you run out of stamina completely you’ll die, and if the shovel man grabs you while you’re low on stamina, he’s harder to escape and any damage he deals has a higher chance of being fatal.

Even if you do escape the shovel man you may have to hold onto that stamina damage for a while until you can find a way to fix it, which is one reason the dogs are the next most effective pursuer. Fast and likely to jump you for quick damage the moment you encounter them, they can be completely negated by distracting them with a bone but they often add that little toll to your stamina that makes you more vulnerable when the two main stalkers show up. The robed cultist has his own dagger to make him dangerous, but his fewer appearances and general placement make him more an obstacle to progress rather than a threat equal to the shovel man. Still, the sudden appearance of any of these deadly stalkers can definitely spice up the navigation, and with your limited inventory you won’t always have the best tools to reply to them. Your phone’s flashlight requires battery chargers so you’ll hang onto those to ensure you don’t trip over rubble while trying to run from enemies, rocks and bones can be used for brief distractions so you’ll likely have one or two of those, and then carting around some healing items is key to handling the moments where you might otherwise be cornered so your inventory’s six slots feels appropriately strained as you try to figure out what you want to carry. The good news is the game isn’t too stingy in putting pickups for any of these item types, but finding yourself short of something vital at the right time does do a bit to up this game’s survival horror appeal despite the otherwise generally low difficulty that normally makes completing it a cakewalk.

 

Returning to the fact this is clearly a rather straight adaptation of a 3DS game, Creeping Terror’s design does have a few quirks for it. The first is certainly its art design. While its dark game world and its stalkers all have the right level of detail to play into the game’s atmosphere, an odd choice was made in how the regular human characters are designed. Rather than having their faces have actual features, the four leads all have these mannequin like heads with only the hints of features in their shaping. The bump of a nose is still present, but there are no mouths and rather than having eyes they’ll have dark shadows beneath their eyebrow ridges. On the 3DS’s small screen this would still look odd but the darkness of the game and the size of display would pull off the illusion of these being normal but simplistic faces a bit better. On the computer you can get accustomed to it still, but characters like Arisa’s friend Emily sometimes look like they have completely flat faces. The game’s official art features this design direction as well so it is a stylistic choice rather than some sort of limitation, but it’s hard to say if it lands as intentional creepiness or a distracting art direction.

 

The bottom screen inclusion is a bit easier to point to as something that may seem odd at first but earns its place. Having the ability to always have your map open on the bottom screen helps so much with navigating the often large areas you traverse, and without it they would certainly be confusing to scour for all the notes and items hidden around these locations. You can play Creeping Terror with a controller easily with the bottom screen’s controls similar in concept to a pause menu just without obfuscating the gameplay when accessed, but there is an annoying quirk where picking up a new item will swap your map screen over to show the inventory instead. Slicing the game’s vertical real estate in half to display this lower screen at all times is a rather inelegant approach to keeping its important data and functions on hand, but it justifies its presence by making the gameplay go a touch smoother than it would otherwise.

THE VERDICT: While Creeping Terror ports over the 3DS’s dual screen setup in a somewhat sloppy way, the added convenience of the map’s constant presence avoids making this adventure full of backtracking and exploration feel tedious. It is a rather easy game to get through just due to the nature of its objectives and abundant item availability, but limited inventory means you can find yourself in a tense situation with one of your deadly stalkers who are still fearsome despite your escape options. The story is a bit basic or, if you choose the weaker endings, filled with twists that aren’t that great, but the atmospheric design and the looming dread of knowing a killer might be in the next room waiting to grab you allows Creeping Terror to maintain a decent level of quality despite not bringing anything particularly noteworthy to the table.

 

And so, I give Creeping Terror for PC…

An OKAY rating. The shovel man and the abandoned locations are definitely Creeping Terror’s strong suit when it comes to its horror trappings, and the stamina meter is actually a fairly smart concept in that it balances your willingness to run with the dangers of being caught without enough power to survive a hit. The difficulty is definitely where some of the tension is sapped away though because of the effectiveness of the hiding spots and how some foes like the robed cultist will never really get their moment to shine since they’re often located too close to the way to avoid them, but there’s still that brief shock of running into him that means he’s not an outright failure. The notes do a good job of building up the story behind Creeping Terror even if a bit more direct storytelling or focus on the actual main characters would do a lot more to help it shine, and while some of the twists do explore our four students some, it feels like the kind of cheap swerve put into a tale for a surprise rather than as a way to bring a story together.

 

The retaining of the bottom screen from the 3DS version is actually one of the easier parts to praise because it does a lot to help the game maintain a good flow, the player never lost for too long and able to handle important info more easily than if they had to stop the action and flit through menus each time they needed it. While something like a solid minimap could have invalidated much of the reason the bottom screen feels justified here, it would likely be better for Creeping Terror to first pursue making its survival horror have more of an edge first. The potential for danger is here in the design of the stalker system but the game’s too kind with items and escape options, but Creeping Terror is still a solid enough horror experience because it’s not made completely toothless by such choices. Even if it’s a somewhat standard scary adventure, piecing together the story and avoiding the killers still keeps you on board and immersed in Creeping Terror.