The Haunted Hoard: The Chant (Xbox Series X)
In most horror games, you’ll find it’s the body or the mind that end up being the source of terror. Mutated monsters or gruesome violence pull on our fears about our physical form, but intangible terrors that warp perception and drive us insane remind us our mind is just as susceptible to danger. The Chant taps into the little explored realm of the soul, a strong thread of spirituality throughout leading to ideas like meditation, crystals, and incense all finding their way into the game’s supernatural phenomena for something far more fascinating than if it had stuck to well worn roads to horror.
With a trauma she can’t forget constantly weighing on her life, Jess Briars seeks relief through a spiritualist retreat on an isolated island. Her friend Kim spoke highly of the Prismic Science Spiritual Retreat and it does mask some of its alternative practices under a supposed marriage with scientific understanding, but there is more authenticity to their spiritual beliefs than it first seems. During a group chant for mental wellness, the ritual is interrupted, destabilizing a connection formed with another realm’s layer over reality. The Gloom contains many hostile creatures and forces that are now able to directly corrupt the small band of people who participated in the ritual, and with the other five cracking under the weight of the issues that brought them to the retreat, Jess ends up being the one to step up and fight to try and sever the link between the two realities.
The Chant isn’t a particularly long game, this survival horror experience has six chapters and it took me about six hours to complete it, but those six chapters are well-segmented thanks to you controlling Jess as she heads around the island trying to prevent the five others from falling deeper into spiritual despair. Not only will you head to unique locations like the rocky shore by the lighthouse, the mines, and the abandoned hippy commune that ties to a different spiritual ritual from the 70s you witness in the game’s opening moments, but they all tie closely to the character grappling with their inadequacies or grief. Inevitable connections are made between these desperate people and the spiritual monsters of The Gloom who find ways to exploit or intertwine with their fracturing minds, Jess’s trauma even being wound up into the affair as her own issues start to get prodded at as different angles on how she thinks about it are drudged up in the struggles of others. That group active in the 1970s is also a fairly smart way to seed details about The Gloom, its effects, and its relationship to reality, the six people in the present not really having time to investigate it but the old cult’s notes help to reasonably introduce vital details and even help Jess avoid being helpless.
Jess is very quick to adapt to her role and yet not totally immune to what she’s seeing, the player able to competently hold their own while the animations used still suggest an awkwardness to Jess being thrust into this role. The Chant has plenty of combat against the malevolent creatures of The Gloom, but you need to manage three parts of Jess’s health to effectively tackle them. Her Body stat is the simplest, if she gets directly injured too much, she’ll die. Mind is a bit different, the player gradually losing sanity whenever they’re in an area steeped in The Gloom and some enemies can even directly attack your mind, Jess recoiling when under assault until your shake free and if she loses her faculties entirely, she’ll panic and be unable to do much until you find a means of calming her down. Spirit though is not something that can be worn down, but it is limited in certain ways. You can spend spirit by meditating to regain your mental fortitude, and with spirit abilities you can directly influence The Gloom like turning invisible, repelling creatures with a forceful shout, or even calling on a swarm of small Gloom creatures to assist you. Managing these three aspects of Jess’s health ends up a huge part of The Chant, the player sometimes feeling the strain on one and wondering how much of the other they can afford to lose seeking recovery.
The spirituality elements are more than just nominal things like your powers technically drawing from the soul. To heal your body, mind, and spirit all require specific plants like ginger and lavender, and not only does scooping up these natural remedies around the island give you a way to heal, you can also turn things like sage into weapons. The player is able to craft three different weapon types in The Chant and each one targets a different aspects of the enemy. Creatures will have different vulnerabilities as indicated by their health bar, a Fire Lash more heavily effecting a corporeal being like a cultist while something in The Gloom will likely sustain more damage from a Sage Stick or Witch Stick that harm the mind or soul most respectively. Managing which of these you use in a fight is important to resolving conflicts swiftly, Jess able to put together decent combos and while her dodge looks deliberately sloppy, it’s actually incredibly reliable in avoiding damage when timed well. A more interesting layer is added to the combat by the secondary weapons. Salt can be thrown at an enemy to interrupt an attack while essential oil will instead slow and damage them, and while this allows you to control your enemy’s behavior some, you can also lay them as traps with slightly different effects so something like the Fire Oil can be used like a time bomb rather than just a way of igniting your enemies. The Chant does a great job of spacing out where the materials needed for these tools are so using them is a conscious choice but overuse is discouraged, and with upgrades to carrying capacity taking quite a while and some scouring extra areas to earn, this fighting system lands in a nice spot where fights are dangerous but entertaining, slightly strategic but still allowing you to focus a lot on the action.
The way The Gloom is designed is particularly effective as well. While parts of the island at night are definitely imposing in how dark they are, The Gloom is an ethereal place where the world is overlaid with colors matching the associated emotional crystal required to enter it. This leads to areas bathed in ethereal glows that come in a range of colors. The purple, blue, and green featured lean more towards their brighter shades but the The Gloom isn’t illuminated to such a degree that it would stop being eerie, and with strange eyes and flora adorning areas within it, the space feels otherworldly in a unique way. The spiritual realm isn’t some torture dimension, it’s an uncanny world with its own ecosystem, and that ecosystem leads to some unusual creatures you’ll have to face. The Chant does contain some standard cultist enemies as well as a few monster designs like giant frogs that are more about corrupted organisms from our world, but there are also unusual creatures unique to the different areas you explore that are more surreal and abnormal. Things like the hovering flower bud creatures with long feeding tentacles blur the line between monster and plant, and when trying to connect to the spirits of those visiting its realm, some creatures take their mimicry of mankind to disturbing levels.
One element of The Chant that feels a little underfed is a response system that will have you answering characters questions with one of three choices. These are meant to represent body, mind, and spirit, but the choices don’t feel weighted well so you’re sometimes left with one reasonable choice, a strange one, or a non-answer. These mostly tie to the game’s ending, more in that the choices you make earn you experience towards one of those three aspects as do other actions like using items and fighting monsters of a certain type. The endings are all a bit strange in what they do or do not resolve but it feels like an intentional choice, albeit one that makes the game’s free DLC The Gloom Below being an epilogue for just one of them feel odd. The Gloom Below leans more into the game’s combat as you’re mostly exploring large areas filled with danger and new traversal gimmicks, and were this mostly just an action-focused addition, it could have been nice. You get new upgrades for spirit powers and some of the new areas are tense to navigate as you try to make a much lower resource pool last, but an odd choice was made to have any death during The Gloom Below wipe away most of your progress. Any shortcuts or area progress will be kept, but all upgrades and found items are gone and even though they do give you a few replacements, it feels sorely lacking if you’re getting into the deeper areas. The Chant’s combat works well within its story, especially since there are other concepts at play to keep you busy like an interesting alchemical puzzle or linking together light beacons at the lighthouse, but the small bits of lore found in the DLC and the tight hold on crafting materials makes it harder to get invested in than the more cohesive main story.
THE VERDICT: The Chant draws from spirituality in a constantly fascinating manner, the horrors you experience feeling far more distinct and ethereal because of those ties. The combat system is deepened through three health meters and the ways your weapons interact with them, The Gloom produces unexpected dangers and sights since it is trying to be an unfathomable spirit realm, and the small cast of characters all host memorable portions thanks to their spiritual instability informing already intriguing navigation and puzzle solving segments. The DLC helps expose that it’s the tightly maintained relationship in the main story that helps these systems shine since they can lose their sheen when the spotlight lingers any one of them too long, but that still means there’s an enjoyable six hour campaign that mixes its involved action and plot well.
And so, I give The Chant for Xbox Series X…
A GOOD rating. The Chant’s creativity in concept is definitely its crowning achievement, and effectively rooting everything it presents in the spirituality angle really helps it stand out even if it could afford to push into tougher places. The Chant can be a bit breezy once you get the hang of its combat and admittedly the fascinating monster designs and choice to use color instead of darkness perhaps do not lead to much actual horror. You know you can hold your own and it is entertaining to do so because the battle system’s basic combos are enhanced through the weapon system and powers. You do get a few powers like the invisibility that feel like they don’t have a distinct spot in the plot, and while the DLC tries to rectify this by just making things harder, The Chant’s runtime might end up being what keeps it from building up into something truly great. With more time to up the difficulty or ask for more specific power uses in combat then The Chant would really start to turn heads, but its reliance on an intriguing setting and commitment to it definitely earns it some worthy attention.
The Chant won’t exactly make you fear for your soul, but it does have a lot of spirit. Its combination of ideas come together nicely into an entertaining experience that easily hooks you for the time it lasts even if it doesn’t push any one other element deeper to really earn a player’s love. There are definitely games that will become classics, the ones people call “must-plays” of their genre, but The Chant is simply a nice contributor to survival horror. It heads in a unique direction that will be a nice change of pace from the body horror and mind screws found elsewhere, it certainly an interesting addition to a horror game collection because it commits to its concept well and has the imagination to craft its own world and monsters from the recognizable elements it borrows well from real world spirituality.