Horror Gaming – Haunted Memories (Episode One)

Haunted Memories is, without a doubt, an exceptionally mysterious game. As the nameless (but beardy) protagonist, you awaken in a rainy, gloom laden countryside scene. As you make your way down the path, there’s a car by the side of the road – empty, lights on. What is this place? There’s a note on the car – will this shed any light? Yes! It seems that mumble mumble mumble mumble. The plot thickens. Shortly thereafter, we enter a park – there’s a map directly in front of us, and what’s this? Another note? Aha, now I understand that mumble mumble mumble mumble.

OK, chaps and chappesses of MadMan Theory Games, if you’re going to do Sound Options, you have to have “voice” as a separate one, so we can turn it up, and “music” and “sounds” down. Seriously, I cannot hear a thing the protagonist is saying. I may be no spring chicken, but I don’t think I’m yet to the point I need to cup my hand behind my ear and lean towards the tentacley monster saying “Eh? What’s that, sonny?”

This is largely a shame as the opening was otherwise quite atmospheric. The title screen is nicely done, with subtle, understated music (a blessed relief after Amnesia MFP at that). On starting, the patter of rainfall is well done, and I was quite happily trotting down the path, willing to get lost in this game for a while, before the mumblethon hit. It took me a few game play attempts for me to realise there is a typewriter next to the car as I kept running past the damned thing in an attempt to hear what my character was saying.

Typewriters serve as save points, you see, which would have been useful on my first playthrough. I wandered through the first gate into the park which serves as the Chapter One arena, decided to head off left at random, walked up to a gate, tried it, found it locked, and then Game Over appeared across the screen. Either there are some unusually fierce punishments for not having the correct keys in this game, or I had missed something. It was the latter, of course, and what I had missed was the audio cue that the Slenderman is about, and I should run away, and not mess about with gates. He must have come up behind me.

Oh and did I say Slenderman? Silly me, that would be copyright infringement. It’s a monster which appears at random, prompting audio cues, which you must avoid, while navigating a park with multiple trails at night. But it’s not the Slenderman. For starters, it has a face. And tentacley things. I shall call them….The Slondurmin. Yes, that’s what it is.

Despite this “inspiration,” it would not be right to portray Haunted Memories as an Eight Pages clone; it does have character of its own. Whereas in Eight Pages, the Slenderman appears with increasing frequency whether you find pages or not, in Haunted Memories, the, er, Slondurmin maintain a roughly even appearance schedule. This is actually rather good, as it keeps an edge up while allowing you to explore the park at your own pace. I discovered a short while in that my character keeps a scrapbook which includes the script of what he had inaudibly enunciated earlier. There’s also a point when you reach the cave at the top of the area which prompts a cut-scene of certain imagery that, according to my review prep notes, caused me to opine: “Oh, it’s just gone full-on crackers. OK….”

You can also kill the Slondurmin (ahem) apparently. After running away from the buggers for most of an hour, when I finally got the gun I was keen to try this out. Either they are more resilient than you’d expect, I’m a worse shot than I think, or there’s a current bug in the game, but whichever it is, I found that running away remained the surest way to avoid a trip back to the last typewriter.

The game is indie, so a little roughness around the edges is perhaps to be expected. There’s the above mentioned sound issue. The bloom effect is so strong (even when turned off) that at times the screen is rendered as black and bloom and you navigate by pointing towards the latter. And, ultimately, it’s just a series of “open new area with key. Walk to back of new area. Save at typewriter. Pick up key to another area. Walk all the way across map to new area, avoiding the *cough* Slondurmin. Repeat.” I also saw the “loading” logo materialise in the night air at one point.

However, the first chapter is also free, and if exploring lonely, atmospheric locations with occasional bizarre imagery is your thing, you may just find enough to make you spring for episode two.

Haunted Memories (Episode One)
Story	Moderately familiar “organisation messes with things it shouldn’t” mixed up with some odd imagery – it’s intriguing.
Gameplay	Controls are simple, however there are sound and visual effect issues
Frustration	Low. I found it impossible to kill the monsters, but running away is the easier option
				Rough around the edges, I hope MadMan Theory can patch some of the issues. A little empty, but OK for a spooky explore for an hour or two. For genre fans only.

This review was originally published on Fextralife.com. Used with permission