The Haunted Hoard: Those Who Remain (PS4)

Darkness has terrified mankind since before we even had the words to describe our fear of it. Darkness is often tied to the unknown, that lack of information leading to our minds filling in the blanks with imagined terrors. However, darkness can also shroud something so it can only barely just be seen, giving it an ethereal and eerie quality that can pack more of a punch than complete darkness. In Those Who Remain, still human figures stand wherever darkness falls, staring at you with glowing blue eyes as they hold weapons quietly at their side. They do not move, just watch and wait for that moment where your toe steps over the barrier between light and dark so they may finally have you within their grip. Admittedly, this otherwise effective imagery would work much better if some of them didn’t have problems with their blue eyes shining properly and turning on lights to make them disappear is often a fairly trivial process, but Those Who Remain in general seems to struggle with executing ideas that could work in a more competently designed horror game.

This first-person horror game stars Edward on a night when he decides it’s time to finally cut things off with a mistress, but as he heads to a motel to break it off with her, he instead finds there’s no one in sight and the world around him has begun to change. The dark figures stand out of light’s reach staring at him as he tries to find a way to safely leave the motel, but doing so leads to him turning up at locations that don’t match his idea of the area. Supernatural occurrences go beyond just the figures waiting in the dark as he heads to strange areas that pry at his own insecurities, but getting a bigger focus is the tragic tale of a young girl named Annika who died before her time and how a town of people twist their morals in the aftermath of it as their own priorities get in the path of justice. As he head to different areas around the city like a family home, the post office, and the firehouse, Edward will get to confront some of the people involved in the cover-up and be asked to judge if they’re worthy of forgiveness or deserve condemnation, the exploration of the immediate area usually making it so the answer isn’t totally straightforward although your ending is impacted by the choices you make during these moments.

What is odd about the Annika story is that Edward has no true personal investment or tie to it. He does have his own issues, these cropping up at certain points along the story, and there is a small empathetic connection to the fact he lost his daughter so the character could conceivably weigh things more heavily in Annika’s favor when judging people’s actions, but the player is the one making the decisions and Edward doesn’t voice his opinion on if they deserve judgment until after you’ve made your choice wherein he will be in line with your pick. Edward’s personal demons just seem to be a concurrent element that doesn’t really fit neatly into the broader story of Annika’s death and the community it disrupted, the supernatural elements that arise to represent both halves not really having clear connections to justify their juxtaposition. Annika’s story is the primary focus but also doesn’t have enough conviction or creativity to really bring it together, a few too many characters more guilty of looking the other way rather than having a true hand in some sort of troubling activity that would make judging them a compelling test of character.

Those Who Remain’s plot feels confused and less than impactful due to this odd construction, but if it had been willing to get more imaginative in its surreal horror representation of this community’s struggle with a dark act they’re tied to, then it could at least have approached a greater metaphorical or emotional resonance. You’ll see the people you need to forgive or condemn locked up and weeping, but exploring areas doesn’t often provide much beyond the building’s normal architecture and rooms full of the dark figures watching you. Some spaces have you step through brightly glowing doors to an adjacent world though, these sometimes taking the nearby area and altering it in some way like filling it with encroaching nature or having the furniture float weightlessly through the air. It’s ethereal but more a lightly odd state of affairs than something creepy or meaningful, and when the game does finally start to put a bit more work into some effective abnormal visuals it’s all piled in the back end and presented too rapidly to let it sink in.

Perhaps the sadder part of Those Who Remain’s visual direction though is how the eeriness of those shadowy figures that stand right on the edge of darkness is abated by how easily you can handle them. Many times when you find yourself in a new area you’ll walk through the building and notice rooms with the dark figures standing in them. The way you repel them so you can enter and look around for useful tools for the puzzle-solving elements is often to shuffle your feet in the room just enough to look at the wall next to the doorway where a light switch is. Once you flick it on, the shadow people are gone and you can actually do what work needs done in the room. Far too often this is how you engage with this almost omnipresent threat, and while there are some moments that are more creative like timing your movements to match when a blinking light is on, the terror this supposed threat was meant to cause is dampened by how often their disappearance is tied to a rather dry and simple form of interaction.

There are moments with more active threats like a fleshy creature with a spotlight for a face who can move through light and dark unimpeded, these being fairly basic sneaking sections where you move about and try to avoid being in its line of sight. If it spots you it will run over and instantly kill you and usually can do so despite attempts to run, but sneaking around it isn’t often too much of a chore. Other characters and creatures can pursue you though and sometimes they’ll stick you in a tight space with few places to run, and since some of these are during the moments the game is finally willing to be a lot more surreal, you might just be forced to guess which path is safe and come up unlucky. Death usually won’t shove you back too far but can require you to repeat narrative moments that grow tired as you can’t skip through them, especially in the final moments of the game where things start moving at a set rate for a while and dying during it means there’s no way to rush it forward.

Those Who Remain does have some good puzzles from time to time, one involving interpreting the stories of a saint told on church plaques standing out above things like searching around for keys or the right trigger to make something appear elsewhere. Sometimes those odd spaces beyond the glowing doors will be weak stealth sections, but they can have more involved interactions as well and the shift to some less literal spaces allows for odd dangers or moving environments to not feel too out of place. Sometimes the clues give too much away but at other moments you might do a puzzle where mistiming a movement is instant death so it’s hard to be upset at the moments where you are given a softball activity. That does mean few puzzles really excel though, but there is at least an ebb and flow in their difficulty so that you aren’t getting aggravated running up against time-sensitive puzzles and chases too often.

THE VERDICT: Those Who Remain has a handful of effective horror visuals it underutilizes or undermines either by cramming too much near the end or making overcoming the fearsome beings as easy as flipping a light switch. A few good puzzles can’t help it overcome a plot that feels like two disconnected stories and a judgment system that seems afraid to raise real moral dilemmas, and once the sections where you need to run and hide from pursuers get thrown in, it’s mostly a mix of bothersome dangers rather than compelling threats. Those Who Remain is a muddled morass of ideas that end up weak in execution, but that at least means they lack the strength to leave a terrible impression on the player.

And so, I give Those Who Remain for PlayStation 4…

A BAD rating. As much of a shame it is that those shadowy figures are so often invalidated by poking your head in a room and turning on the lights, at least it is so easy to dispel them. The moments where you are heading through spaces hoping you picked the right path not to be instantly killed by the creature chasing you are annoying because the threat is something you can’t easily deal with, but the horrors in Those Who Remain didn’t need to be toothless. A balance between the dangers they present and your response to being pursued by them would be key to letting them keep their perceived threat level without it coming down to luck of the draw or just activating a simple and easily executed counter. More of the eerie and unnatural spaces certainly should have been sprinkled throughout to hold intrigue better, but Annika’s tale really needed more proper moral quandaries if the game was going to have you make a judgment call on the fates of those involved. Edward could definitely use some personal tie to it as well, both to tie his personal issues to it rather than having it be scattered around haphazardly throughout and so some greater cohesion could be added to the experience. A few judgment calls do border on being better tests of your convictions, things like whether you should save a man who fired on you for getting near his property or rescue a woman who drove an ambulance away from people in need to protect herself asking you to weigh things more than almost anything directly tied to Annika’s death, but it mostly feels like an attempt at appearing to have something grander to say than its weak horror story would be able to achieve otherwise.

Those Who Remain doesn’t seem like it’s quite figured itself out yet, laying out ideas that don’t feel like they’re realized the best because either the mechanics or writing weren’t quite there. Sometimes creating light to scare away the dark figures is done in an interesting manner, some of your judgment calls are actually ones that might make you think, but oftentimes it is straightforward and bland and interrupted by the sections with weak puzzles or bothersome pursuers. Unfortunately, with none of these concepts being totally unique and handled better in other games such as how Visage more effectively makes you fear its dark spaces, Those Who Remain doesn’t really offer up anything it does well enough to draw players in.