Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Celebrating All Things Spooky: Shadow Hearts

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: ,
Oct 312019
 

Happy Halloween!

For my longer horror game this year, I held a poll on social media to pick a game, and readers chose Shadow Hearts!

Shadow Hearts is one of those games I’d wanted to play for a long time and finally got a copy this year. It’s a turn-based JRPG set in 1913, where a young man named Yuri who can transform into monsters rescues a young woman named Alice, who is being hunted by a warlock for unknown reasons.

It has a very Gothic horror tone, with curses, vampires, demons, and similar supernatural phenomena. Without spoiling it, the story was exactly the sort of thing I love.

Click for Shadow Hearts spoilers
By the time the plot brought in the Inquisition, which secretly still existed, I was starting to feel like this story was tailor-made for me, and that was before it took a decidedly Lovecraftian turn near the end.

It’s also a spin-off/sequel to Koudelka, another game I’d like to play someday. I expected its links to Koudelka to be just a few minor references, but the connections are more important than that. Several moments left me wanting to check out Koudelka, although Shadow Hearts still stands on its own perfectly well.

I generally liked all of the main characters, even though by the end I settled in on a single group I preferred to use in battle, and the villain wasn’t as one-dimensional as he first appeared. Overall, it has a pretty good cast.

While it’s a turn-based RPG, the combat system has a twist due to the “Judgment Ring.” The Judgment Ring system requires you to hit certain indicators on a ring when it’s your turn, not just to make your attack more powerful, but to attack at all. This adds additional tension (should you try for the more powerful attack and risk missing entirely?) and makes the combat feel unique even when compared to similar systems.

Now, I messed a few things up and missed some stuff that would have made my life a lot easier. I intended to have this blog post up yesterday, except I didn’t successfully beat the final boss until about 10 minutes ago!

Since I enjoyed Shadow Hearts so much, however, maybe someday I’ll start a new game and this time take care to avoid those mistakes – and also get the good ending, since Shadow Hearts has two endings.

Shadow Hearts is an excellent horror JRPG, and I’m so happy I finally got a chance to play it. I’ll be looking forward to play its sequel sometime in the future… maybe next October?

Celebrating All Things Spooky: The Last Door

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  1 Response »  Tagged with:
Oct 282019
 

A few months ago, I picked up several games in a sale, including The Last Door.

The Last Door is an adventure game split into four episodes. The first episode begins with the main character receiving a strange letter from an old friend and then traveling to his manor, only to learn that things have gone terribly wrong.

From there, the remaining three episodes deal with his attempts to find out what happened and the consequences of his investigation. I don’t want to go into too much detail, because it’s a pretty short game. It took me about 3 hours to finish the entire thing, with roughly 45 minutes per episode.

It’s a point-and-click adventure game, but since it’s divided into episodes, each episode has its own self-contained area and puzzles to solve. Some parts are tricky, but overall it’s not too hard since each episode is so small.

And the story is wonderfully Lovecraftian. The first episode is creepy on its own and really sets the stage for what is to follow, a story of people who delved into a world they should never have touched and now are paying the price as an ancient force stirs.

It also has a great atmosphere, especially due to the soundtrack.

Some of the episodes are better than others, but overall I enjoyed The Last Door a lot. It ends on an ominous cliffhanger (or you could view it as a dark ending with a sequel hook), so I’ll definitely pick up The Last Door: Season 2 to see how the story ends.

And don’t worry – my review of Shadow Hearts is coming soon as promised! In fact, I played The Last Door after realizing I wouldn’t be done with Shadow Hearts in time for today’s post…

In the meantime, don’t forget that you have until the end of this month to get my horror stories The Book at Dernier and It Came Back for $0.99 each, as well as to earn points and win prizes just by posting here on the site!

Celebrating All Things Spooky: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter

 Celebrating All Things Spooky, Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with:
Oct 232019
 

There are three games I routinely get mixed up: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter, Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, and What Remains of Edith Finch.

We discussed What Remains of Edith Finch last October, and so this year I decided to finally play The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

(I’ll probably never play Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, since I haven’t enjoyed the developer’s other games, unless someone wins the contest and asks me to review it.)

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a story-driven mystery in which you play an occult detective investigating the strange incidents in Red Creek Valley after receiving a letter from a boy named Ethan Carter.

As you explore the area, you’ll come across crime scenes and similar disturbances. Using your supernatural abilities, your goal is to learn what happened. This usually consists of recreating the scene as it was before by finding any missing objects or other changes, then correctly ordering the ghostly images that appear. Once you’ve put the scene in order, the entire thing plays out.

These scenes, along with notes and documents you find, teach you more about Ethan Carter, his relationship with his family, and the events leading up to his letter. You soon learn that Ethan awakened a supernatural force known as “the sleeper,” which caused his family to turn against him and try to kill him due to the influence of this evil force.

Piecing together the crime scenes was fun, and the story seemed to be going in a creepy direction. But have you ever had the sinking feeling that a story you’re enjoying is building up to a conclusion you won’t enjoy at all?

After the first few notes, I realized a possible direction the story might go in. That concern hung over me like a shroud for the rest of the time I played, despite a few glimmers of hope that it wasn’t going there after all. Unfortunately, my prediction was right.

Click for major The Vanishing of Ethan Carter spoilers
I’d said to myself, “I hope this isn’t one of those stories where the supernatural incidents turn out to just be a metaphor.”

See, the notes had given me the idea that at least some of the scenes were based on stories Ethan had written and the flashback conversations made me wonder if his family actually turned against him because… uh… he’s a writer?

That was not nearly as interesting to me as the creepy story about “the sleeper,” so I really hoped it wouldn’t happen.

But yes, that’s how it turned out. Ethan’s family considered him weird because he liked to write stories, none of the murders actually took place, and even the protagonist is a fictional character invented by Ethan, who is dying after getting trapped in the old house.

Writing this actually made me dislike it even more. Edith Finch might have left its curse ambiguous, but at least the incidents themselves actually happened. None of the murders in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter actually happened!

I would have much preferred an ambiguous horror story about “the sleeper.”

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter does a good job of foreshadowing its twist, I’ll give it that. It’s just the one twist I was hoping not to see, because I was much more interested in the direction the story appeared to be going at first.

In the end, The Vanishing of Ethan Carter certainly fit my theme for this month and had a lot of creepy potential (including a Lovecraft reference I enjoyed), but the conclusion left me disappointed with the game overall.

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