This review contains a few spoilers.
I think I've mentioned Sysreb Games before.
When was it...
Probably while I was talking about that deranged hamburger pet-raising game.
Anyway.
It must have been sometime around the winter of 2022.
Possibly even earlier.
I don't necessarily play a game the moment I receive it through Curator Connect.
Sometimes I leave them sitting there for quite a long time before I finally get around to them.
I suspect other curators do the same.
Probably.
For small indie developers, I imagine it can be rather nerve-racking when someone accepts a copy of your game and then doesn't review it for ages.
Sorry.
I wasn't deliberately trying to torment you.
But there's not much I can do about it.
Curators have schedules too.
So if you're planning to send a curator a copy of your game, try contacting them at least a month in advance.
Then they might actually be able to arrange their schedule around the period when you'd like the review to appear.
The same applies when contacting YouTubers.
Anyway.
That was the beginning of my relationship with Sysreb Games.
They sent me a Curator Connect copy of Undiscovered House, their first release on Steam.
Looking at their itch.io page now, I'm not sure whether Undiscovered House was actually the first game they ever made.
There seems to be another game that looks remarkably similar to Undiscovered House, along with some cute little game involving flying drones.
Anyway.
Sysreb Games have released four games on Steam so far, and they all have fairly similar personalities.
Last Night Shift probably changes the formula the most.
Perhaps that's why I remember enjoying it more.
But fundamentally, I think all four games share a fairly similar set of rules and structures.
How should I describe them?
Horror escape rooms, perhaps.
Haunted-house escape games.
That sort of thing.
And Sysreb Games are actually quite good at making haunted houses.
I mean the horror itself.
The scares.
The jump scares.
Things like that.
Comparing their haunted houses to I found myself in a strange house and I'm scared would almost be insulting.
Sysreb Games' haunted houses have considerably more deliberate design and at least some basic context behind them.
From everything I've said so far, you can probably guess what comes next.
Yes.
These are not really my sort of games.
I absolutely hate puzzles.
All four Sysreb Games titles have puzzles.
Find the key.
Find another key.
Let's find a key.
Wouldn't you like to find a key?
Find the key.
Have you found the key?
There are more keys!
No!
I won't!
Stop making me find keys!
I'll just live in this house!
Yes.
Anyway.
Undiscovered House is still a pretty good horror game.
By my standards.
There is a killer.
At first, though, he mostly stands around staring at you like a slightly confused theme-park employee dressed up as a murderer.
Occasionally he goes:
"Boo!"
And scares you.
That's about it.
He doesn't actually hurt the protagonist.
This went on for long enough that I nearly gave the game a negative recommendation.
That isn't a slasher.
That's just a haunted-house employee who wants to finish his shift and go home.
Fortunately, things improve later.
Eventually you do get chased.
You have to hide from the killer.
And he finally starts inflicting actual physical harm.
Yes.
The essential act of a slasher.
Stab.
Well.
I can't say the antagonist's murderous artistry is quite as beautiful as the knife work of the better slashers.
It isn't particularly stylish.
Perhaps that's partly a limitation of a first-person 3D game.
He simply stabs you.
You collapse.
Game over.
Sometimes a fairly rough-looking blood decal appears across the screen, with edges that don't exactly look as though they were cut out with enormous care.
Well.
I was satisfied.
The killer himself isn't particularly charismatic.
But I appreciated the considerate effort he eventually made to cause me physical harm.
And this was Sysreb Games' first release on Steam.
It was never going to be perfect.
I wish more horror developers would watch a lot of horror films before making horror games.
Especially the classics.
There are plenty of excellent ones.
A horror game shouldn't simply be a game of tag where something vaguely frightening runs after you.
If the person playing tag catches you, there should be a proper punishment waiting.
Yes.
A death scene.
Look at Sanity Break.
It does this horribly well.
Depending on where you die and which entity kills you, your death can be different.
And brutal.
You die like a piece of meat.
What about Frozen Friday Night: The Eve?
The Santa Mask Suit can castrate a man he catches doing something rather indecent by himself.
He can hack at a couple rolling around on a bed with an axe, split their bodies open to expose their intestines, or cut off their legs and dump them in a bin.
He can bring an axe down vertically from the protagonist's head towards the lower body, leaving one enormous fatal wound.
He can swing it across the protagonist and separate the upper body from the lower body.
If he catches you with an axe from behind, your head can be torn off and left impaled on the axe as he holds it up.
And there are plenty more.
Despite still being unfinished, I wouldn't be surprised if Frozen Friday Night: The Eve already ranked somewhere in the top ten horror games on Steam for sheer number of death scenes, excluding something like Resident Evil.
Anyway.
That alone gives both of those games every right to call themselves horror games.
Horror and gore don't always have to come as a pair.
But if you're going to put a deranged murderer in your horror game whose entire purpose is to twist someone's neck like a chicken or carve people into pieces, then please don't give me something like Jaye in Tomorrow.
"Got you."
Game over.
Please give that killer a distinctive and brutal piece of killing-machine artistry that only they could perform.
Horror fans aren't asking for elegant game design.
We want:
"Wow! Intestines!"
"Wow! Blood spraying everywhere!"
"Wow! Decapitation!"
"Wow! Chunks of meat!"
Give us that and you've already earned a considerable number of bonus points.
Of course, if the game design is excellent as well, then you've made something special.
Anyway.
Why does the killer in Undiscovered House spend so much of the beginning simply watching you?
Perhaps it's because this is a puzzle escape game.
Finding keys already gives me enough of a headache.
If the killer spent the entire game chasing the protagonist around and stabbing them, causing repeated game overs while I was still trying to solve puzzles...
Well.
A horror fan like me might enjoy the violence itself.
But most people might simply say:
"What is this? Why is this game so difficult? Terrible game. Not Recommended. Refund."
Come to think of it, I would probably react exactly the same way.
If a killer relentlessly interfered with me from the very beginning of an escape-room puzzle game, I'd get extremely annoyed.
There may already be a game exactly like that sitting somewhere on Steam.
I simply haven't found it yet.
Anyway.
Perhaps that's why the killer is surprisingly polite at first.
He keeps his distance and watches.
"Mm. You're doing a good job finding those keys. Keep going."
"You're carefully reading all those notes written as though somebody else left them behind. Yes. That's the sort of person I am. Thank you for reading them."
Then, once you finally reach the climax:
"I'm not actually a friendly homeowner."
And he changes.
That's not a bad approach.
It creates an unexpected burst of horror.
Well.
In the end, Undiscovered House was a pretty good slasher escape-room game for me.
It's worth keeping in your library and giving it a go at least once.
Come to think of it, I should review Granny someday too.