SFB’s retro-styled horror begins by rewinding to 1990. It’s where this story starts, but the date also hints toward where it calls back – a little earlier than its main inspirations, perhaps, albeit a year after Tokuro Fujiwara’s genre-sparking Sweet Home. It’s an agenda-setting moment for a game with the hallmarks of a blow-away-the-cobwebs lockdown project extended well beyond its original scope. Which doesn’t mean it’s bloated – its taut six-hour runtime is comparable with the classics – but rather that this is an evident labour of love, packed with atmosphere, detail and character.
You wonder if the pandemic directly inspired the theme: you need merely add an ‘r’ to Covid, after all, to get the family of birds whose presence looms large over this abandoned amusement park. As investigating agent Mara Forest, your first task is to shoot the padlock off the gate, the doors swinging open with a portentous creak. It’s a sign that creators the Vian brothers are more than happy to embrace horror staples, at the same time as they depart from formula, affording the player control of a rotatable camera. Not that it lets you see what’s inside – you’ll have to bravely stride forward toward the arrow that points into the darkness beyond.
Step in, and you enter an instant classic of a setting. There is always something askew about the artificial cheerfulness of a theme park; you need merely dial up that uncanniness to transform it from a welcoming place to a decidedly unwelcoming one. It’s presented through a gauzy filter that softens every edge – capturing the quality of playing a game on a CRT set without resorting to familiar aesthetic shortcuts – while simultaneously dulling the primary colours and hinting at something lurking in the shadows. As for Mara, she resembles Jill Valentine spliced with a collapsible push puppet, at once evoking the chunky character models of the early PS1 era and the juxtaposition of childhood memories and horror seen in the likes of Radiohead’s Burn The Witch video. Think Camberwick Green fused with Silent Hill 3.
Between the thousand-yard stares of the animatronic crows and the minacious caws of the real ones, gathering to feed off unidentified carrion, you steel for worse – though your first encounter with a wounded NPC doesn’t play out according to tradition, as you carry him back to your car to recover. But then, notch by notch, the Vians gradually crank up the threat; again, they’re not too proud to lean on a few old tricks. The snap of a steel trap or the hiss of poison gas, each barely hidden by the cobwebby mist but easily overlooked in your haste to escape pursuers or combine newly acquired keys with recently discovered locks, remain reliable pulse-quickeners. The sound design, too, is expertly judged: the skeletal rattle of one enemy variant feels purpose-built to set your teeth on edge.
Developer/publisher SFB G
