The Haunted Hoard: The Mist (PC)

Stephen King’s novella The Mist tells the tale of a strange fog that rolls over a humble town in Maine, the people within a supermarket suddenly thrown into the chaos as otherworldly creatures from within the mist attack anyone who enters it. With all of these panicked people trapped together in this one location, this horror story  becomes a microcosm of how we react psychologically and socially when faced with the unexplained and inexplicable. This actually makes it a pretty easy scenario for you to imagine yourself in, it not hard for a person to try and think of how they’d react or do things differently than the lead characters. Taking that a step further and making The Mist into a video game sounds like it would be great for indulging people’s fantasies of handling the situation better, but the adaptation we did receive in 1985 is unfortunately a text adventure, a genre with some illusion of freedom since you can type in any action you want but ultimately it proves incredibly limited by the degree to which it can understand your input. Rather than being a game about the freedom of figuring out how you’d approach the situation, instead The Mist is a game about trying to gradually uncover the rigid solution required to make it out of this scenario alive.

The Mist takes a good deal of its situation straight from the book and yet doesn’t take any of the time to really lay much groundwork or build up to the more interesting moments it adapts. Some details are changed, the game never identifies you specifically as David Drayton, but in this fiction he still has a son named Billy, although now Billy was left at home during the fateful shopping trip. Billy is the point of drama for this situation beyond your own safety within the supermarket, the player needing to find a way to safely plunge into the fog and find your way back to Billy to ensure his safety in order to clear this text-only adventure game. At the game’s start, the story rushes ahead to get the mist and all its monsters into place, people freaking out and looting the place the moment they see the first creature, and a rather unfortunate rush job is done with Mrs. Carmody’s contribution to the plot. Normally, her purpose in the story of The Mist is to work up the terrified people into a religious fervor that eventually goes overboard, but before you’ve even had time to look around the supermarket, she’s preaching the end times to people who were quick to convert to her impromptu congregation. The Mist doesn’t want to take much time setting things up or really describing things, brushing over things as it cares little about the plot and more about the specific sequences of actions you need to take to survive. In fact, Carmody’s Christian cult is essentially more of a timer here to get you moving, as if you linger too long in the supermarket, they’ll be the cause of a guaranteed game over.

Having something to push you to be more daring and brave the monster-filled mist outside isn’t necessarily a bad idea even if it’s sloppily handled here and uninteractive beyond possibly just dying to it, but as you do start to press into the unknown, you’ll find the writing fails this adaptation of The Mist even more. The creatures in the fog are often referred to with deliberately vague names like the Bug or the Giant Thing, but this becomes a bit of a problem when the story leans on names like Bird, Dragonfly, or Caterpillar. Even if the text briefly says it’s a bit uglier than the creature it’s borrowing its name from, it’s not evocative or detailed enough to make you imagine much more than a bigger version of the animal. In its defense, the source material isn’t afraid to make such comparisons, but it also is freer to make the creatures more fearsome as it doesn’t limit its wording as often as the game does. The Mist is reticent to go into much detail beyond maybe a paragraph, and often that paragraph has more than just a monster’s looks to describe. Imagination can do more for them than the other characters though, the humans in the tale having dialogue but being unusually terse and reacting in odd ways to the situation. Many of them amble about the supermarket with no clear direction, and with your “time limit” until a religious encounter with Carmody being the amount of movements you make, you can sometimes edge closer to death just trying to guess where one has scurried off to. When you do talk to them, they aren’t very reactive; even if you’re standing in front of dead bodies they talk as if they’re mildly perturbed. What’s more, your ultimate success in the game does require asking very specific questions to certain characters and you might not reasonably think to prompt them because they’re so uncooperative, although that taps into one of the game’s biggest issues and an unfortunately common one to text adventures: the parser.

The Mist has you take actions by typing in your commands, and in some areas, it is reasonably designed. It recognizes various means of movement, from typing out a full statement to just typing N, S, W, or E to go in the cardinal directions. The manual outright gives you every possible command you could need besides talking to someone, although that’s also because the game confusingly will recognize dialogue you write out even without quotations but is very strict on how it handles things. You need to, for example, refer to a truck key specifically as a truck key before ever seeing one since the game also contains a generic key item, but worse than any of that is the game does not notify you whether it has correctly interpreted your input. You can attempt an action and then something may occur, such as a character speaking to you or a monster attacking you, and the response you receive may not address if you tried something and it simply failed or the game just had no idea what you were saying. When talking to the store manager Ollie, maybe his angry reaction was because he didn’t like what you said, or maybe it’s just his generic reply to something that didn’t click thanks to the game’s limited parser.

Things can get even rougher when you consider the game’s sometimes odd logic. There’s a salt box item for example that you can open, but if you want to use the salt inside, you need to remove the salt and place it in your inventory, somehow storing the loose salt for later use the same way you do a shovel, gun, or keys. Whether the game reads your intent or not, you must always live in fear that you might type the wrong thing during a fight and end up dead or you might have pointlessly advanced the countdowns because you didn’t get a key phrase right. There is, at least, a save system so you can retain progress after figuring out vital early actions, but it doesn’t relieve the issues caused by a very curious choice tied somewhat to the wandering characters. The text adventure The Mist features randomized elements.

While the random walking of people about the supermarket isn’t the worst thing to deal with, the way it interferes with monster encounters can be quite annoying. Monsters aren’t always in the same area, something that can benefit you or put a heavy strain on your very limited ammunition. Bullets are incredibly rare in The Mist, to the point you need to use all of them correctly save two to clear the game. These might be wasted if you encounter a randomly patrolling monster, especially if you didn’t grab an alternate means of killing that one yet, but the creatures also have a pointlessly implemented chance to avoid your shot entirely. You can miss through no fault of your own, and if you did, you might as well reload your save or else you might end up at a crucial moment without the ammunition that is absolutely required for clearing the game. The monsters where kills are more like puzzles adds some potential to the game, it’s something to actually figure out and adds some experimentation to learn it is possible, but it’s not alleviating the problems caused by other design choices, and even when you’ve got the main path figured out, there are points like a long boring stretch of driving that is navigated a bit too close to trying to follow real directions. Besides a moment or two where you might feel clever for figuring out the alternate way to kill a creature, The Mist isn’t offering you rewarding moments that make you feel clever for doing the exact sequence of actions needed for your rescue mission, you’re just along for a ride that can’t even take the time to copy its source material with any depth or care.

THE VERDICT: Poorly written, poorly plotted, and with some needlessly unforgiving elements like meaningless randomization and a failure to notify you when it can’t understand your input, The Mist is an unappealing text adventure and one that doesn’t derive much horror or interesting puzzle-solving from what it’s chosen to adapt. Details are often sparse save despite you needing to say or do exact things to survive, descriptions do little to immerse you in the world or nudge you the right direction, and what intrigue does exist doesn’t get much room to impact things on what proves to be a bland rescue mission that feels too rigid and too rushed save for the places where it should have actually done more to move you along or give you a hint.

And so, I give The Mist for PC…

An ATROCIOUS rating. I’m glad I also played The Lurking Horror for this year’s Haunted Hoard, as it shows how things can be handled better, even within the same genre, and these games were only released two years apart. The Lurking Horror’s writing was often evocative, its horror creatures, rather concrete real beings or Lovecraftian terrors, could feel unsettling. In The Mist, it feels like the writers only said as much as they had to in order to make sure you didn’t think the Bug was really just a regular big bug, and even when it tries to get spooky, it doesn’t devote the time or creativity to it, some deaths of other characters feeling casually dismissed or inconsequential as they are just poorly executed color for a plain scene. The Mist doesn’t muster up the best puzzles either, it relying often more on quick kills if you don’t have the right things on hand or had some poor luck, the save system not a perfect salve because you can spend time unsure what is even crucial only to get stuck after you saved beyond the reasonable point you could grab the needed item. The Mist ends up failing as an adaptation purely for fans of the material since it doesn’t like to linger long on anything besides driving and many of its elements feel very weak if you have no context since they’re so rushed or plainly described. The Mist would be a rough game even before you factor in the parser being handled pretty poorly all around, although the manual was at least a small aid in a game that otherwise cares very little for clarity.

Playing a text adventure from 1985, you should expect some tangling with a picky text parser, but the right guardrails to allow that aren’t in place and even the actions undertaken if you have a good sense for the commands lack the enjoyable substance you’d hope to find in a text-based game. You’re already reading, so details can be used to enhance the experience, yet they aren’t in The Mist. Puzzles don’t make the best use of their clues, and it’s too easy to think you’re on the wrong track because you can’t tell if your command was ignored or incorrect. The Mist doesn’t end up providing much horror, social commentary, or interesting gameplay, it just uses the novella’s setting for an adventure that is rigid in terms of what you need to do but loose when it comes to their success at times. Maybe a point and click or Telltale Games style adventure could handle the idea better in the present, but developer Angelsoft didn’t bring much creativity when trying to turn this compelling concept into a game worth paying attention to.