Systems: Windows
Release Date: February 3, 2017
Publisher: IMGN.PRO
Developer: UndeadScout
Time Spent: 6.8 Hours
husk is an interesting game, although having played Kholat which was developed by IMGN.PRO whereas husk was developed by UndeadScout and published by IMGN.PRO, I had an idea about what I was getting into both in terms of narrative and expectations about the game itself. The biggest difference between Kholat and husk and will likely be the last comparison between the two, is that husk was linear and had an easier-to-understand storyline, although that storyline does involve alcohol parental abuse, spousal abuse, child abuse, and generational trauma, so just a heads up that we will likely be covering that to some extent as we go through the events in husk.
husk starts out on a train with you the player Matthew Palmer, his wife Ellen, and daughter Ann as they travel to Matthew's childhood home of Shivercliff, WA upon the request of his estranged father. I played the majority of the game with medium-level graphic settings across the board, and the opening interaction with Ellen and Ann was not at all conducive to the quality of the rest of the game. Granted, there were never any other characters for Matthew to interact with for the rest of the game so having reactive character models aside from the monsters that attack you later in the game was really only necessary here in the train car in the beginning. That being said, this opening scene did not give a good first impression for the rest of the game, which is possibly why only 30.7% of people on Steam who started husk made it through the prologue; also the prologue takes fewer than 10 minutes. Literally, the entire prologue sets the mood as you discover that after leaving to go to the bathroom, you are unable to locate either Ellen, Ann, or any other person on the entire train. You do some linear exploring (because trains run in a linear line), solve one minor puzzle and unlock a door which is the extent of the types of puzzles in the rest of the game, then the train derails and you wake up outside of the train just outside of Shivercliff.
Like any game, there were things that I liked about husk and things that I thought could have been done better or ironed out a bit.
I would describe husk as a survival horror walking sim as there is a lot of walking, and only two weapons, a metal pipe, and a slow-firing gun with limited ammunition; you can perform a melee attack with the gun too. Without spoiling too much, there are monsters in this game that you can either avoid, stun and run away from, or kill, all depending on your environment and how much ammunition you have. Ammunition is pretty scarce, with you usually having fewer than six rounds of ammunition and at one time I managed to have 13 bullets, but this was towards the end of the game and I ended up not using them before the gun was taken away and I never used it again; I probably could have had 12 bullets earlier in the game (to earn the Horder achievement where you need to have 12 bullets) had I realized that I could just bash padlocks with the gun instead of shooting them and wasting two precious bullets.
husk occupies an interesting middle ground of walking sim and survival horror, similar to the first game in the Penumbra series by Frictional Games (Amnesia, SOMA). There are enemies that stalk the various areas within Shivercliff and once spotted, the music intensifies, you are chased and after a few hits, depending on the enemy that is hitting you, you will die. Depending on where you are in the game, you do have weapons that you can use to either stun or kill enemies, but like all good survival horror games, ammunition is scarce enough to warrant its own achievement if you have 12 or more bullets on you at any given time.
Combat is mediocre at best, but husk does not feel like it was developed with tight combat in mind, and might have even been an afterthought because once you kill an enemy, most of the fear associated with them is significantly decreased, even with dwindling reserves of bullets. When enemies are first introduced in the game, you have only a pipe that had previously been used to bash open padlocks and when used on an enemy, briefly stuns them so you can run further away before needing to turn around to unleash another round of bludgeoning attacks to give you time to enter a new building or close a door behind you. These types of encounters I was perfectly fine with because my only real recourse was to run away. Once the gun was introduced, conveniently enough in a police station, and I found that I could kill these creatures, I did feel powerful enough to not worry when I saw one stalking hallways or crouched behind a crate awaiting my arrival. When I ran into them in the system of intertwining tunnels in the caves near the ocean, I had enough ammunition to patiently wait for them to charge at me whereupon I would pistol whip them to stun them, step back, then take a well-aimed shot to the head and repeated the process until they died after the second shot.
That is not to say that this game was not creepy and unnerving. Knowing that I had a gun did help with knowing that I could defend myself, but it was the tension in exploring a claustrophobic house or walking through an apartment building to find a half dozen dolls sitting on furniture watching the static on a TV in an otherwise darkened room. These were the times when I really enjoyed husk for what I felt it was trying to do. Put the player in a familiar setting, make the setting unsettling, and have nothing happen. There were the occasional jump scares where a monster would drop down out of a darkened alcove but I knew that I could kill it once it got to me. It was when one would appear at the end of a lit hallway only to have the lights flash and it progressively got closer with each flicker of light, only to disappear before it got to you that really got me on edge. It is the monsters that I could not kill, that I was not supposed to be able to kill that made me afraid.
There was one game mechanic that I found a little distracting and for people who feel that immersion is key to playing a survival horror game will most likely not be able to get past how the game highlights objects that you can interact with. Any object that Matthew can pick up and or manipulate is outlined with a bright white line and is visible even if the object itself is not within your line of sight. This could be something as important as a set of keys needed to unlock a door, a keycard to access an elevator, or just a letter from Matthew's father to a neighbor on a desk that exists only to further develop the story. All of these objects are lit up for you to be able to find and easily interact with. Which is all well and good, except there were multiple times when I could see the outline of some unknown object coming from a building I was slowly approaching. Because of the white outlined item, I knew that I would need to get something over that way or behind a particular wall. It was a little distracting, to say the least. I also noticed that UndeadScout seemed to use only one or two different assets for all of the keys found in the entire game. Just something I noticed while trying to stay focused on the story.
The story that unfolds as you play husk is really at the heart of the game, and how that story is told requires a bit of delicate footwork to not spoil much. husk is similar to a lot of games that throw you into a person's life and story in the middle because they need to convey all of the history that you the player are not aware of and to do that in a way that feels natural. As mentioned above, the story revolves around Matthew and the physical and mental abuse he suffered from his father growing up in the semi-isolated small town of Shivercliff. It is pretty clear early on that there is very little love for Matthew's father, who is also revealed to be an alcoholic and abuser to both his wife and Matthew when he was younger. The inklings that Matthew likely in turn abused his wife Ellen verbally and physically are scattered throughout the game, primarily through Matthew's self-monologue as he walks the streets and through the buildings of Shivercliff. There were a couple of moments with Matthew's inner voice that took on a strange tone and really took me out of the game whenever this particular voice was used.
As Matthew searches through Shivercliff for his wife and daughter, he ends up visiting locations from his past that have deep significance to him when he was a kid, and at times, these moments of reminiscence seem to overshadow the fact that his wife and daughter are missing and that aside from the periodic creature roaming the town, there are no other people anywhere. There is also a pulsating black goo that I never fully understood outside of its game mechanic to act as a barrier to prevent the player from accessing certain areas and just be all-around unsettling. By the end of the game, it is obviously clear what is going on with Ellen and Ann and why they always seem to be just out of reach of Matthew although I never fully got the deeper significance of the faceless shambling creatures that would crop up. They genuinely felt like they were there to give the player something to avoid and ramp up the tension, but to me, often felt unnecessary. Sure there was the one outside the diner that was legitimately creepy and the one in the interrogation room of the police station had Licker-vibes written all over it, but I think that husk could have been creepier had there been no actual interaction with the creatures that roamed the streets; maybe keep the one with the forklift in the mannequin factory through, that was a nice touch.
There was a section of the game after the prince was revealed*, that just seemed to keep going. As in, I understood what the point of the story was, it was revealed what had been going on with Matthew and his family in Shivercliff, but the game just kept playing. I was still wandering through hallways, cornfields, and houses and I just wanted the game to be over at that point. Maybe shave an extra 25 minutes off as I felt that it was only there to show more of Matthew's frustration with the situation he found himself in. The end-end of the game felt very fitting based on the rest of the story between Matthew and his father and Matthew and Ellen, but I think that the game could have been a little bit more of a tighter experience had some fat been cut between when Matthew visits the lighthouse and when he visits his home (that will make sense if you play the game).
husk was an interesting game that I wanted to like more than I did, and I think a lot of what I liked about the game could have been better had it taken the Amnesia approach and had enemies that you could not kill. The atmosphere was perfect and there were plenty of times that I did not want to go where the game wanted me to go because of what I thought might be around the next corner. The music (which I realize I have failed to mention) was composed by Arkaduisz Reikowski (Kholat, Layers of Fear, The Medium) which was one of the absolute highlights of the game for me. I do not think that I would universally recommend husk to someone if they were not already interested in first-person exploration games, and survival horror games, and are a little forgiving towards indie developers with a game that has a few non-game-breaking hiccups. A game that was far from perfect, with a mostly well-conceived story. I think.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
*P.S. I realize I haven't used the "prince" analogy in some time. This is an inside joke of sorts that started with Conklederp and her brother Beardsnbourbon, where he accidentally spoiled a book they both were reading where a character was revealed to be the prince near the end of the story. We now like to refer to key story points as "the prince," so that is all this reference is about.
No comments:
Post a Comment