The Haunted Hoard: The Coma: Recut (PC)
The stalker is an enemy archetype that can be found in quite a few horror games. Often taking the form of a relentless pursuer who has a penchant for popping up at random times and is able to appear in many areas rather than being locked to set spawn points, this special killer is often much stronger than the player and thus there’s little to do but run or perform some action to keep them distracted as you escape. The stalker can add a lot of tension to exploring a horror game’s world, and the sudden appearance of this frightening foe can make for some organic unpredictable horror where a dangerous variable is always in play. However, The Coma: Recut’s implementation of this classic killer archetype is done so poorly it becomes a nuisance rather than a source of terror.
The Coma: Recut follows a Korean teenager named Youngho Choi on the day of some incredibly important school exams. Despite a kid almost taking his life on campus, the exams are still held that day, but the unusual circumstances surrounding this school begin to grow as Youngho soon finds himself waking up in a dark alternate version of his high school known as The Coma. This macabre reflection of a familiar location has claimed other students before and fed off their insecurities and dark desires, and Youngho quickly sets to making sure he can escape The Coma before succumbing to any of its influence only to encounter a warped version of his teacher Ms. Song along the way.
Ms. Song is this game’s stalker killer, her corrupted self taking a kind and supportive teacher and turning her into a weapon-wielding lunatic who will shriek any time she appears nearby. Her only objective when she appears is to run towards you and slash you apart with whatever weapon she happens to be wielding, and the game seems to at least understand some basics of making an encounter tense with her. Running in The Coma: Recut exhausts a stamina meter so you can’t just outrun her forever, but the process of outmaneuvering her is rather bland and sometimes outright silly. The side-scrolling view of the school means she can only approach from the left or right, and if she is close you can do a dodge roll to get on the other side of her if necessary. However, entering rooms or going up staircases will buy you time as she won’t attack immediately upon following you. You can go right back out of the room or down the stairs to repeat the process if necessary, and this quickly becomes an easy way to buy time or easily outmaneuver her provided an area has multiple entrances you can pop in and out of to disorient her.
Ms. Song won’t disappear until you’ve successfully hidden from her, and around the school building there are hiding spots like cabinets or bathroom stalls you can pop in and wait her out so long as she doesn’t see you enter them. This works flawlessly so long as she’s not in the room, and with the bathrooms being consistently placed around the school, any time your stalker appears it is quite easy to head off, pop in a bathroom stall, and wait until she’s disappeared before you get back to whatever task you’re meant to be doing. There are other ways to distract Ms. Song like activating sound systems to throw her off, but the process of leaping into a hiding spot after tricking her with door shenanigans is so effective and easy that it’s hard to justify bothering with any other method. This turns Ms. Song from a fearsome pursuer into a frequent annoyance as she must be dealt with but doing so is too straightforward but also too important to try and outmaneuver her some other way. It’s not a perfect solution either, especially in the more convoluted layouts of the later portions of the game, so while she can still land some hits on you during the adventure, it’s not to the point she remains an effective threat looming over the act of navigation. There’s also the annoying quirk where she can sometimes just spawn right on top of you suddenly while going between floors, immediately slashing you with it being impossible for you to respond to her presence in time, meaning this stalker mostly adds frustration instead of tension to the experience of exploring The Coma.
A few other enemies do appear as you explore the hallways of your warped school, but these are fairly simple and only a worry if you are currently being pursued. Vine-like tentacles will lash out in a slow cycle that can be avoided easily and the spirits of school girls will hide under objects like the desks to swipe at you, but these foes are rare and only require baiting out the attack before you can move by without a concern. Getting around Ms. Song’s frequent appearances is pretty much the only injection of horror the game has besides some admittedly creepy cutscenes that make use of the game’s well done character design and hand-drawn art, but these scenes unfortunately don’t add up to much. Whether you get the game’s good ending or one of its many bad endings that barely swap out small details, The Coma: Recut wraps up its story rather inconclusively without doing much with the characters and setting it just spent its time establishing. Youngho’s specific situation is resolved, but other characters feel like they’re being built up for the game’s sequel rather than the story at hand. You’re no closer to clear answers on The Coma or characters like your friendly if rather terse guide through it Yaesol, but The Coma: Recut at least does use a lot of notes to reveal a seedier side to the school staff’s operations and does touch a little on how other characters like Youngho’s classmate Seho experience The Coma’s corruption in their own way. It’s clear the game wants to make some comments on modern education systems as well with the kinds of dark secrets you can find during explanation or the way certain characters have been warped, but these feel like brief brushes against possible poignancy since they aren’t given the focus needed to really make a strong statement.
The maze-like orientation of the school is definitely meant to give Ms. Song a chance of catching you and cutting you up despite the problems in her design meaning that isn’t executed as well as the developers likely intended, and running around its length can get rather tedious, especially if you’re trying to do the extra tasks required for the better ending. The atmosphere of the school is done well and the combination of thick darkness with strange alterations to the environment from The Coma’s nature mean stumbling deeper into the unknown feels appropriately unsettling, but the atmospheric payoff is usually just Ms. Song popping up again so some of that work goes to waste. Your have an inventory you need to manage that lets you carry healing items if you do get caught and the chalkboards used to save are spaced out enough that Ms. Song could have been a terrifying danger if she was as big of a threat as she might first appear to be, but mostly the healing and saving is just another part of the chore of accommodating her presence in your adventure that only has a few little puzzles to otherwise test your ability to make it through The Coma.
THE VERDICT: The quality art, creepy cutscenes, and atmospheric darkness of The Coma: Recut are a fine foundation for a horror game, but with the entire experience’s danger hinging mostly on your single pursuer, her inability to be an interesting threat means the game primarily built around making her threatening begins to fall apart. Outmaneuvering your stalker is easy once you understand it and doing so becomes a chore, and when it’s not easy it’s often because she’s appeared right on top of you for free damage you couldn’t have prevented. With the story bringing up things it doesn’t bother resolving in this installment of the series, The Coma: Recut ends up mostly being about navigating a maze-like high school and reading notes as you are forced to take routine breaks to hide and wait out a foe who is more frustrating than fearsome.
And so, I give The Coma: Recut for PC…
A BAD rating. Perhaps the best thing that can be said about Ms. Song is that the ease with which you can throw her off your trail by popping into a bathroom or playing door tricks on her means this game is merely lackluster rather than truly terrible. Her interruptions are certainly annoying because you’ll often need to backtrack and manage your sprinting to ensure you get to the right spots to hide from her, but doing so isn’t enough of a challenge that she can be the kind of terrifying, seemingly random danger the stalker archetype is meant to evoke. Without her the rest of the game does at least do a lot right with its artistic direction, but the play is shallow because it relies on Ms. Song so heavily in a failed attempt to spice up walking around and occasionally engaging with a puzzle. The fact Ms. Song is the only enemy with any real teeth is also a let down as having multiple stalkers or some other considerations could at least shake things up from time to time even if Ms. Song’s problems weren’t ironed out. Naturally the most important improvement would be to make Ms. Song a fair foe who you can’t trick the same way over and over throughout the whole adventure, but building up the world of The Coma a bit more could have at least justified interest in a sequel rather than making future games necessary for seeing payoff to the basic groundwork for characters and phenomena laid out here.
The Coma: Recut seems to have hoped having an effective stalker killer was enough to base an entire horror game around, but its inability to deliver on a threatening pursuer drags it down to something that really avoids being worse by being so empty once you’ve removed this singular danger. Games like Remothered: Tormented Fathers and Creeping Terror at least understand the basics of making a stalker effective despite their other faults, but The Coma: Recut ends up a hollow and forgettable affair since its few highlights are fleeting instances of effective imagery rather than some really terrifying survival horror gameplay.