Following an outburst of dark energy, an unnamed human must survive the new reality, a reality which has turned into a nightmare...

The gloomy aesthetic harks back to a bygone era of gaming

Plastomorphosis is a 3rd person horror survival game which has a sensibility much in common with the GameCube iteration of Resident Evil. The gloomy aesthetic of the game deliberately invokes those early games with pixilated characters, puzzles to solve and the inevitable horrors to fight.

You arrive at your destination on an empty and rubbish-filled train. On the floor a lone phone rings. When you answer it, a female voice explains that like you she is trying to get to the modern city to escape the dark energy. This sets up the game as you follow the breadcrumbs of clues, she leaves behind using the phone as a torch.

Whilst they have harkened back to an older aesthetic, in some cases the choices have not done the game many favours.

Firstly, it’s dark. Very dark. So much so that you must turn up the brightness of the TV to have a chance of seeing some things. The fixed camera also doesn’t help, sometimes obscuring objects and exits that you need to be able to see.

The game is dark. Very dark

They have also decided to make the picture very grainy, like trying to play the game in an unnecessary snowstorm. Lastly, the picture tends to break up, effective in some sequences, but it’s mostly annoying.

Some of the good aspects of the game are the puzzles and weapons. Though the puzzles are logical - find X to get Y - they do require you to think to solve them. The various weapons you craft or find are satisfying even if the fixed camera can make combat a little frustrating. One of the things that did really work was the music and sound effects, which made the experience creepy as hell.

Overall, I can see what they were trying to do, and, in some instances, it works, but in a lot it doesn’t. I didn’t understand why she constantly had to wear a crash helmet (if it’s a survival respirator, it still looked like a crash helmet) and why the character ran in a most peculiar fashion, don’t remember that in Resident Evil.

6

Charles Packer