The big trend in horror games over the last several years or so is to make something that apes titles like Amnesia. The conventional formula involves a game where your morally questionable protagonist is punished or judged for their past transgressions by being forced to wander around a gloomy, dark, confusing hellscape solving puzzles and searching for keys. As you might have guessed, Those Who Remain follows this horror game playbook to a tee without a whole lot of innovation or excitement, so if you're familiar with a lot of the tropes of the modern horror genre, you'll be pretty comfortable playing this.
Next Time, Use Airbnb
Those Who Remain follows the unfortunate adventure of Edward, a man heading to a seedy motel to break up with the woman he's been having an affair with. Upon arriving, he finds the motel completely abandoned with no sign of the woman he came to see or even an employee manning the front desk. After exploring the area, his car is stolen, and he's forced to hoof it to the nearby town of Dormont. That's when the creepy, bright-eyed shadow-people come out of the woodwork, and Edward has to stay in the light to survive against the abominations he encounters, while he finds out what's happening and contends with the memories of his troubled past.
What works in Those Who Remains' favor is its environmental story-telling. Edward gets brought to a variety of different, eerie locations where conditions like time or gravity are distorted. It's obvious that the development team was influenced by properties like Twin Peaks or Silent Hill, as everything has an ethereal, dream-like quality to it. The sound design also does a stellar job of creating a horrifying atmosphere. Doors slam, lightbulbs break, and it usually makes for a decent jump-scare. Along with the screeching drone of the music when you're being watched or chased, Those Who Remain is good at amping up the tension and anxiety through its sound alone.
That makes things more frightening, which is good because, from a visual standpoint, I was usually more scared conjuring up ideas about what was coming using my imagination than I was by the actual monsters. The shadow-folk along with the other creatures roaming around the world aren't all that intimidating and were occasionally more comical than frightening. This is usually because the awkward animations combined with the commonly used Unity assets - the entire house from popular adult game House Party shows up near the beginning - made things seem goofier than they were probably intended to be.
Not only was I not that scared of the creatures here, I don't think Edward was either. At least if he was, you couldn't tell by the voice-acting. While most of the actors do an alright to mediocre job, the person who voices Edward sounds pretty bored by all the horror going on around him. At best he seems mildly irritated or inconvenienced by the monsters, otherwise, he sounds like he's moments away from taking a nap. This was supposed to be a dismal journey into a shadowy nightmare town, yet the actor's performance has the same energy as Stu Pickles making pudding at 4 in the morning.
Are You Afraid Of The Dark?
The gameplay is pretty standard horror fare. You walk around looking through drawers and under objects, searching for keys or items that allow you to progress through the story. Newspapers and anonymously written notes are there to fill in backstory or give hints about what to do next. There are also puzzles to solve that will let you open doors or gain access to new locations.
As for the scary portion of the gameplay mechanics, the shadow-people seem pretty ominous, but are easily defeated by light sources. Taking a page from Alan Wake - although certainly not as exciting - standing in the light will protect you from these shadowy figures while turning on new lights or using objects like a lighter will either cause them to vanish or push them back into the blackness of the night. You'll also need to run from time to time as there are some delightful demons that will chase you unless you manage to hide or stay out of their line of sight.
The way light factored into the gameplay mechanics was fairly clever. It made for some interesting puzzle solutions as you often had to figure out how to allow light into a room to disperse the shadow-people so you could explore or progress. Sometimes it was as easy as flicking a switch while other times you had to exit a building and move objects out of the way so the light from outside could pour in through a window. Figuring out how to brighten a space was routinely the most compelling part of Those Who Remain. It also helped with the scares as feeling safe while bathed in light only for the bulb to break and leave you standing in the dark was a good way to take away any sense of security.
Unfortunately, I often found the controls of Those Who Remain to feel rather stiff. Edward moves like an elderly man with bad knees trying to wade through a river of molasses. Trying to reach light switches or grab items felt cumbersome and many objects feel weightless. This almost controlled like a Source game from the 2000s rather than a modern title.
Ho-Hum Horror
Horror games like this need an amazing or at least intriguing narrative to draw the player in, but I found myself not all that concerned about the tale of Edward. Without an engaging story, this is mostly just a game about guiding a lead-footed doofus as he finds keys, avoids a shadow-cult with an unusual affinity for axes, and is occasionally pursued by unfriendly ghouls. It doesn't do anything that I haven't seen in scarier and more satisfying games before, but it does play the horror hits competently and there are some fun ideas that I thought were creative. However, after it was over, I found myself shrugging my shoulders and saying, "Well, that was certainly another horror game."
If you're simply looking for some quick jump-scares, then Those Who Remain is an adequate choice, but there are likely dozens of games on Steam or Itch.io that are better and less expensive than this.
A PlayStation 4 copy of Those Who Remain was provided to TheGamer for this review. Those Who Remain is available on Playstation 4, Xbox One, and PC, with a Nintendo Switch version releasing sometime this summer.
Those Who Remain