bsd.network/@cev/115451573316749175
// / 115451573316749175
Tags:
1990s,
collection,
fantasy,
horror,
review,
video games.
I finished Realms of the Haunting (PC, 1996) yesterday. Enjoyed it & had a few thoughts:
As a first-person-shooter it's rough. It predates what are now the standard controls (mouselook, WASD) and so takes some effort to play. There's a version of the game available (the US release) that allows you to rebind some controls and that helps a lot. Aside from that the basics are here: an array of weapons, monsters with strengths and weaknesses, healing items, etc. . Nothing groundbreaking but fun enough.
I don't really have the experience to evaluate it as an adventure game. The puzzles I was able to solve were fun; the ones that I couldn't solve (or found overly tedious) I looked up solutions for. There were sufficient hints for most things, I think.
As a narrative, a story, it was fantastic and very well-told. And there was a surprising amount of it! Spoken dialog, readable text journals and notes, and a large amount of FMV sequences. The FMV scenes really impressed me, they were atmospheric, slow-paced, well-directed and edited.
The narrative itself was a kind of biblical-fantasy-horror thing, a mashup of a bunch of different themes and influences. Angels, demons, cults, magic, other dimensions, an old spooky mansion, etc. . Felt to me like something Clive Barker might have come up with in order to hit a G rating.
Was a really cool game. I'm a little surprised it isn't more well-known or discussed.
