When the option to review REVEIL came across my desk, I jumped at the chance to do it. I had been looking for a nice palette cleanser to the awful experience that was Silent Hill: The Short Message, and the indie scene is the only reliable source for horror games these days—for better or worse. Once again, I rolled the dice, and once again, I’ve been somewhat let down.
REVEIL isn’t the worst horror game I’ve played, but it’s just bog standard. After so many years of creative developers innovating the space—as well as hacks trying to capitalize on it—you’d think by now these kinds of games wouldn’t be making the same mistakes that reduce what could be a nail-biting experience into a boring slog. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it 1000 times—for how much games try to crib from P.T., no one fundamentally understands why that game works.
I won’t say too much about REVEIL’s plot for the risk of potential spoilers. Basically, players take on the role of Walter, who wakes up in his room one day to find that his wife and daughter are nowhere to be found. As he attempts to look for him, he’s taken down a surreal road to the circus he owned with his family. Memories and reality begin to cross, and Walter must uncover the truth about his family’s whereabouts and the circus that surrounds them.
Much like Silent Hill: The Short Message, it’s not so much the story I have an issue with but how it’s told, namely through Walter. Every single intractable object prompts an external—and sometimes internal—monologue from Walter to the point that nothing is left to interpretation. You’ll get obvious observations like a child’s drawing a family with the dad’s face scratched out, only for Walter to pontificate, “Well, this is clearly our family…but…why is my face scratched out?” I’m hyperbolizing, obviously, but not by a lot—it’s really that bad.
“REVEIL isn’t the worst horror game I’ve played, but it’s just bog standard.”
Not that there’s much to interpret anyway since so much of it is pretty obvious. When the game does reach its inevitable twist, not only can you see it coming from a mile away, but it feels completely unearned since every moment of the game was being dictated by Walter. It was pretty obvious what they were setting up.
But the game could’ve withstood a subpar story if the gameplay were solid, which, in this case, it isn’t. REVEIL is a walking simulator where players look for keys to open locked doors. There’s some mild puzzle solving—and like all mediocre horror games, these puzzles range from painfully obvious to needlessly obtuse.
A puzzle saw Walter needing to open a locked chest, the lock secured by three strange symbols. This one not only needs the player to interpret a cypher for the numbers—which wasn’t super hard but may be to other players—but on top of that, there are tons of the potential symbols painted all over the walls and objects. For how much Walter never shuts up throughout the game, at no point did he hint at the a fact that solving the puzzle required assembling a mannequin with a laser pointer in its hand, but that players would need to maneuver the waist, arm and hand in order to get the pointer at the right symbol.
“REVEIL is a walking simulator where players look for keys to open locked doors.”
This was the puzzle that broke me, not because it was particularly difficult, but because it took forever to interpret the solution through sheer guesswork. Like I’ve said 1000 times in the past, a puzzle is something you have all the information to and the challenge comes from your ability to put the pieces together. It’s not a difficult puzzle, but there’s nothing that even hints at the solution.
My initial first guess was to count all the symbols corresponding to the number in the cypher, but then I realized that was insane, so I figured maybe the number corresponded to the symbol matching the number on the lock. Only by pure chance, when I looked at the mannequin again I realized three of its joints had numbered dials on them, and then the solution became clear.
I know I’m railing on this one thing, but this kind of bad puzzle design has been present in so many bad horror games that I’ve reviewed that I have no patience for it. Furthermore, these elements are intensified by the sheer monotony of the entire game. At no point was I ever engaged or tense, so when something bugged me, it REALLY bugged me.
But of course, there’s the biggest sin of all: REVEIL just isn’t scary. Though it describes itself as a “psycho-thriller,” it leans hard into the atmosphere—and even some gameplay elements—of P.T. It tries the events happening on a loop, having Walter start each new segment in his room, and multiple moments in the game try the loop around, but everything’s different pastiche. It attempts a few jumpscares—one that was literally straight out of Spooky’s House of Jumpscares—and a couple of obnoxious chase and stealth moments for good measure.
“But of course, there’s the biggest sin of all: REVEIL just isn’t scary.”
But like I said at the beginning, Walter’s constant inability to think anything he doesn’t say removes all tension and fear from the experience. His incessant need to comment on every little thing he sees not only clearly paints the way forward—except in the case of obtuse puzzles—so you never feel like the game is working against you, and it just sucks all the air out of the room. Yes, obviously, stepping into a surreal dreamscape would be weird, but when you’re trying to create atmosphere, having some goober gawk, “Weird, it’s like I must be dreaming or something,” is just going to pull you out of the experience.
We get it; he’s clearly working through his own issues, so this is his journey, but there’s a better way to achieve that without needing the main character to comment constantly throughout—especially if you want it to be scary. Let the player make interpretations and try to piece the puzzle together on their own; that way, they feel just as confused as Walter, whose memories all seem askew. Not knowing what’s going to happen is one of the fundamental building blocks of horror.
REVEIL isn’t a terrible game, but it’s not a remarkable one, either. It’s a fine enough-looking game, graphically, and it runs fine well—but that’s a low bar to clear. Every now and again, you can see where good ideas in REVEIL, even moments that could have been scary, would have been. But its constant diffusing of tension, lacklustre storytelling, and mostly boring gameplay make it a slog to attempt.
