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This review contains spoilers.
Straight after my Honrang review, here we are with The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok.
And, just like last time, I still don't know nearly enough about Korea to recognise every cultural reference on my own, so I had GPT help me out with a few things.
First, Yeongdeok.
Apparently, Yeongdeok is a real place in South Korea, and it's particularly famous for snow crab.
Which may explain why, at one point in the game, you encounter a ghost shaped like a crab with Yeongjin's head attached to it.
I liked that.
Very local.
Very distinctive.
The abandoned building itself is covered in graffiti too, nearly all of it written in Korean, so once again I took screenshots and asked GPT what people had written on the walls.
Most of it was fairly meaningless graffiti.
"F-word."
"Your girlfriend."
"I love you."
That sort of thing.
A few were slightly more unsettling. One warned people to watch out for organ trafficking, and I found not one but two pieces of graffiti strongly condemning drink-driving.
Whether anyone in the actual story was drink-driving, I'm not entirely sure.
There are some images shown on an old television inside the abandoned house, and from what little I could make out, it's possible the team leader drove drunk, hit someone and concealed the body afterwards.
But the footage went by very quickly, so don't take that as fact.
Speaking of Yeongjin.
I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly. I'm still rather bad with Korean names.
He also looks remarkably familiar.
Unless I'm mistaken, he appears to be the same sweet fellow who sat inside the rubbish bin in Honrang and encouraged me not to give up.
Maybe.
The hairstyle looks very slightly different, but the facial features, thick-framed glasses and clothing looked awfully similar to me.
Anyway.
Our protagonist this time is a woman.
As it should be.
It's a horror story, after all.
A female protagonist and a memorable antagonist are practically a matching pair in horror.
I was actually a little disappointed that the game is first-person, because that means I never get to see her at all. If you're going to give me a female horror protagonist, I would quite like to know what she looks like.
As it turns out, however, the first-person perspective is also responsible for some of the game's best horror.
We'll get to that.
The protagonist quit her old job after suffering workplace harassment and seems to have become something of a shut-in afterwards. She mentions that she hasn't been outside for quite some time, and now spends plenty of time streaming from home.
She appears to be a horror-game streamer too.
The games she streams include Honrang and Alone in the School.
Both are previous games connected to the developers, although Alone in the School was made by 티민이 alone.
Honrang in particular seems to enjoy making little cameo appearances throughout the game.
One of the television brands inside the abandoned building is called Honrang, and the jangseung from the previous game makes a particularly welcome return.
At first, it's simply been discarded there like some enormous piece of rubbish.
Later it gets up.
And chases you.
Nice to see you again.
The English localisation?
Hmm.
It's better than Honrang in some ways, but there are still quite a few moments where the dialogue feels as though Korean has been translated rather directly into English.
Every now and then, something surprisingly American-sounding will appear, so the quality varies quite a bit.
There is far more dialogue here than there was in Honrang, which probably makes the awkwardness easier to notice too.
None of it prevented me from understanding the story.
One thing did repeatedly damage my concentration, though.
Yeongjin calls his sister "Noona".
A lot.
Now, I understand that this is perfectly natural in Korean. As far as I know, it's what a younger man commonly calls his older sister.
But every time Yeongjin said "Noona", my brain immediately went:
Numa Numa.
And then I started thinking about the Numa Numa Guy.
I'm sorry.
This is probably just me.
The two words sound similar enough in my head that once the connection had been made, there was no getting rid of it.
Anyway.
Our protagonist isn't exactly an innocent angel herself.
As a middle-school student, she was apparently something of a bully.
She seems to have beaten up some unpleasant kids from another school, which sounds fairly heroic.
Unfortunately, she was also apparently fond of picking on weaker kids and tormenting them.
Less heroic.
She sounds like she was something of a teenage outlaw.
Well, Tree in Happy Death Day starts out pretty rude and arrogant too.
Not that the film ever suggests she bullied people quite like our protagonist apparently did.
Perhaps everything happening to her now is karma finally finding the correct address.
One of the people connected to that past is Minji, an old friend from middle school.
Minji eventually returns in the form of a small doll and confronts the protagonist over what happened between them.
I liked Minji.
She was cute.
Even while accusing me of being a terrible person.
Now let's talk about the horror itself.
This is where I think Working Doves have improved considerably since Honrang.
Honrang was an anomaly game, so its scares were mostly individual strange events appearing inside a repeating environment.
The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok has something much more useful from the beginning.
Context.
For much of the game, you're never entirely sure whether the person standing in front of you is actually your little brother or some horrible thing pretending to be him.
Is that Yeongjin?
Is Yeongjin really dead?
Or is that another ghost wearing Yeongjin?
The game keeps returning to that uncertainty, and it works.
The camera direction worked particularly well on me too.
At important moments, the game sometimes takes control of where you're looking and fixes your view around the protagonist's perspective.
You know something awful is nearby.
And the camera plants the fear that if you turn your head just a little farther, you might see it.
Quite often, what you're afraid of seeing is Yeongjin with his body in a state that bodies really shouldn't be in.
That anticipation did a lot of the work.
I also liked how often the game actually makes you run for your life.
There are about three little chase sequences in total.
I tend to think three is about the right number for a chase plot anyway, so this feels close to perfectly judged.
Earlier I complained that I would've liked a third-person camera so I could actually see the protagonist.
Fair enough.
But some of these scenes probably wouldn't work nearly as well outside first-person.
Sometimes you have to sacrifice seeing the pretty Final Girl so that the pretty Final Girl can be properly terrified.
There are also plenty of moments that feel less like conventional Korean ghost horror and considerably more like an American B-movie.
Usually whenever the siblings start insulting each other.
At one point, Yeongjin is unconscious and his sister starts looking at his thinning hair, wondering why he spent money on a car instead of a hair transplant.
No girlfriend.
Barely any hair.
Poor Yeongjin.
Later, when the jangseung comes after them, Yeongjin simply bolts ahead of his sister with his arms thrown backwards like he's trying to qualify for Naruto.
Family first.
Unless there's a monster behind you.
Then things become even sillier near the ending.
A murderous former team leader appears, the story suddenly turns into a crime thriller, and then an angry local old man arrives and starts fighting the killer because murdering people around here is going to hurt local property values.
At some point, The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok stops being a haunted-house story and starts behaving like a low-budget action film.
And the best part is that both of them can actually fight.
Quite well.
The old man eventually manages to subdue the killer, who is later apprehended by police.
A surprisingly effective deus ex machina.
Never underestimate an elderly property owner with something to lose.
And then there's the suitcase.
The ghost wants it.
The protagonist keeps wanting to see what's inside.
It disappears.
It comes back.
Everyone seems extremely interested in this bloody suitcase.
So what's inside?
A king crab?
A dismembered corpse?
Property deeds?
A Steam key for Honrang?
I still don't know.
The game never gives us a proper answer.
It simply remains a MacGuffin.
And I rather liked that.
Not everything in a horror story needs to be opened up, labelled and explained.
Another thing I appreciated is that the protagonist doesn't enter the abandoned house simply because she and her friends are idiots looking for somewhere scary to spend Friday night.
That's one of those horror premises you accept because otherwise there wouldn't be a film.
Here, there's at least a professional reason for doing something stupid.
She's a horror streamer.
She receives a punishment during a stream and has to visit an abandoned house for her audience.
Someone even offers her money and king crab if she survives.
That's considerably more believable than:
"There's a murderous abandoned building outside town."
"Cool. Shall we go inside?"
And this isn't simply some random abandoned house either.
She and Yeongjin were there as children.
She lost her phone there.
Something happened there that she can no longer properly remember.
The place is tied to her past, Minji, the local missing-person cases and eventually the killer himself.
It's exactly the sort of ridiculous collection of coincidences I enjoy in a B-movie.
Everything eventually leads back to the same horrible building.
After all of this is over, the protagonist returns home safely and starts streaming another horror game.
I don't know what game it is.
I don't recognise it, and I couldn't find anything resembling it among Working Doves' currently released games.
Maybe it's nothing.
Maybe it's just a fictional game made for the scene.
Or perhaps it's a tiny glimpse of something they're planning to make next.
We'll see.
There are also no Steam achievements at the moment.
There isn't exactly a huge amount of room for elaborate challenges here, so I can understand that, but I still would've liked at least one achievement for reaching the ending.
Achievements are a small thing, but once a game qualifies for Steam's profile features, they also give players something from the game to carry onto their profiles.
Perhaps Working Doves could add a few later.
Anyway.
If Honrang was a light, accessible anomaly game, at least on the surface, because it actually left a considerably deeper impression on me than I expected, then The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok feels like Working Doves deciding to make an entire B-movie.
A pretty good one too.
The localisation still needs some work, and compared with the more outrageous end of American B-horror, the game is actually fairly restrained overall.
The jokes are tamer.
It never quite reaches that gleefully tasteless level of excess American B-movies sometimes enjoy.
But that's also part of what I enjoyed about it.
It's a game set firmly in Korea, full of Korean locations, folklore, family relationships and bits of local culture, yet the way it behaves often feels strangely un-Korean.
Ghosts.
Sibling banter.
A crab with my brother's head.
A Naruto run.
A mysterious suitcase.
A corrupt team leader.
An old man protecting property values by personally beating up a murderer.
It shouldn't fit together nearly as well as it does.
But it does.
The Abandoned House in Yeongdeok feels like Korean culture drenched in American B-movie horror.
And after Honrang, Working Doves are starting to look like a horror studio worth keeping a very close eye on.
Oh, and there's a piano on the first floor of the abandoned house.
You only need to interact with it once, and it'll play the entire piece by itself from beginning to end.
It was quite nice to listen to.
So I made it play twice.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4406360/The_Abandoned_House_in_Yeongdeok/?curator_clanid=41272875