The Haunted Hoard: Charon’s Staircase (Xbox Series X)

In ancient Greece, the theater contained a hidden tunnel beneath the stage to allow actors to make their way to center stage unseen, this allowing for characters from the underworld to emerge with a sense of supernatural gravitas. Known as the charon’s staircase, the first-person horror game bearing that name doesn’t relate to the theater or Greece, but Charon’s Staircase does concoct a nifty recontexualization where the phrase is instead used to refer to a supposed subterranean escape from the experimental facilities a group of experiments and creators find themselves trapped in.

 

You are not one such unfortunate soul dreaming of such an escape though, instead heading out to investigate the buildings of the Oack Grove estate decades after the peak of their immoral activities. A despotic regime known as the Ministry once ruled over the country with a callous indifference towards human life and propagandist egotism that they mask with a constructed God who Judges Everything that supposedly endorses their ways, but an agent created during this dark part of their history is now sent to recover and destroy the evidence of their experiments as a more sanitized Ministry attempts to enter the world stage. Your character, Desmond, makes it clear pretty quickly he intends to share his findings rather than cover them up, and one highlight of the game’s narrative is Desmond’s predilection for narrating his experiences in a slightly poetic way. Not quite noir since it is often more an investigation of old abandoned buildings than any sort of drama, Charon’s Staircase uses its three main locations to pull you along through the personal tales of those involved in the horrible experiments of Oack Grove.  The notes you find and flashbacks you witness do work together as decent set-up for a horror tale, but when it comes to the follow-through, Charon’s Staircase is a lot sloppier as its presentation often undermines its attempts to be terrifying or atmospheric.

While I wouldn’t normally knock an indie game for subpar graphics and believe even retro horror can still construct effective imagery despite their limitations, Charon’s Staircase finds itself in an unfortunate spot where it is clear more could have been done without having to undergo a major graphical overhaul. While it’s already laughable the weak texture work and passable level of environmental detail would allow you to choose between better graphics or better performance on the Xbox Series X, the area where the visuals come up short is actually more in regards to deliberate choices in lighting and what the player’s attention is drawn to. It’s easy enough to accept the so-so graphics and in some areas like the mansion it can even be a bit moody, but when you do start to encounter the game’s only threatening experiments, it almost always takes the wind of their sales with some odd presentation quirk.

 

While you do get some brief sightings of them before they’re actually a threat, the game doesn’t always mask them properly, one segment having a genetic experiment standing out in the brightly lit hallway twitching and waiting patiently for you to approach to attempt to spook you. Even on the game’s recommended lowest brightness this figure still seemed to be oddly bright in a game that can set the lights very low when it wants to, and things get worse when there are some active threats trying to grab you. One starts sprinting towards you after a cutscene, but the game poorly loads the shift from its furious screaming to sprinting at you, leaving a brief moment where you can see it on screen twice as the swap was done sloppily. One segment meant to show how gruesome the test subjects are now has them over a corpse that the camera really shouldn’t have zoomed in on not because it’s grisly but because its low level of detail gives it a rather silly expression. It ends up feeling like anything beyond deep darkness really drops the ball on effectively mustering up some terror, especially since those few active threats are often easily avoided to the point it would feel generous to imply this game has any real action to it.

Charon’s Staircase is thus best thought of as a narrative exploration game with a batch of puzzles in each location to gate your progress. Unfortunately, a great deal of these puzzles tie to getting a four digit code by using environmental clues, and the degree to which it tries to obfuscate what you’re looking for is often lacking. Oftentimes the only reason you might not immediately connect the code clues to the areas in the environment comes from the fact you maybe haven’t found a normal key to open the door to the area with the relevant decorations or objects, and while it’s entirely straightforward, sometimes that’s to its detriment. One code clue involves looking at a stopped clock face in the mansion, and the mansion has many clocks all stopped on the same time save for one that you might not even notice after having already seen all the others were identical. These feel like weak obstructions that often are more about making sure you’ve wandered around and had the chance to find relevant notes before you can input a code, but even when it tries to get a little more clever it falls short.

 

Figuring out how to play a piano based on clues in a song’s lyrics sounds nifty but they’re too direct to really not pick up on, something that would almost be true of a similar tarot card puzzle if not for the fact the game makes it a touch harder since you can’t look at the tarot cards as closely as you’d want to. It’s not without a few puzzles that do ask for some thought though, but at other times you can hit a roadblock simply because you didn’t have your vision linger on the right spot long enough to trigger an event. Overall, it rarely feels like you’re needing to think much save to remember those clues since your character won’t carry the notes containing them around with him, and when distance between details is often the bigger puzzle than figuring out how they connect, that doesn’t speak too highly for the creativity of the puzzles on show.

THE VERDICT: Charon’s Staircase unfortunately ends up with a lot of walking around to grab keys, read notes, and eventually build codes when the keys allow you to reach the areas with the clues. Charon’s Staircase seems to struggle on how to handle its horror elements, the visual quality harming its attempts to be eerie and its oppressive darkness isn’t applied smartly to mask what really should be obscured. The narrative mystery ends up being the driving motivator to keep moving and it’s a short enough game you can move on through it quickly and enjoy the puzzles that are a rare hit, but failures in the atmosphere and imagination on show leaves the gameplay side of Charon’s Staircase feeling hollow.

 

And so, I give Charon’s Staircase for Xbox Series X…

A BAD rating. Desmond’s poetic narration and a mystery tied to a newly imagined despotic regime would have been a wonderful core to a better constructed horror game, but here in Charon’s Staircase they mostly help drag the player through a few locations that can’t carry their part of the experience very well. Too often the game declaws itself, the initial presentation of a puzzle sounding like it might require some thought to solve until you start uncovering the relevant pieces and find it’s quite often straightforward, the hardest barriers to progress thus being when you don’t realize you’re meant to let your vision linger on a spot long enough to trigger something.  It’s not entirely bereft of moments that are a bit eerie or require some deeper problem solving than figuring out how a number can be gleaned from conspicuous objects, but Charon’s Staircase isn’t a particularly long game either and spending so much of it digging up codes makes it feel unimaginative. On the other hand, there are enough notes to keep constructing the characters involved in experiments around Oack Grove and maybe in a more ambitious game these could work hand-in-hand with area design and obstacles to your progress to make you eager to pass challenges and learn more. Perhaps forgoing any actual danger would have maybe lead to some of its later moments feeling underwhelming, there already being enough sights and sounds and implied horror to have carried this if some weak textures and visual glitches didn’t wear it down so often.

 

Charon’s Staircase drudging up an element from old theater is perhaps its most interesting aspect sadly, the game getting in its own way with its commitment to poor presentation choices and seems to run low on ideas on what to do before moving you to the next bit of lore. Charon’s Staircase is unfortunately unable to find its way out of its less inspired choices to provide a compelling narrative or effective horror.