The mostly empty urban centers in the United States depress me and haunt my soul. When I visit family in the United States and find myself in an abandoned shopping mall or some other place affected by America’s dismal architectural planning and over-reliance on cars, I can’t help but feel a sense of dread.
Devil's Hideout, a point-and-click horror game from indie developer Cosmic Void, takes place in an abandoned American city, and while the spooky hellscape is a bit harsh, it still manages to deliver a sense of fear.
The game puts you in the role of Lauren, who is trying to save her missing sister from cultists. Lauren's journey begins in a hospital, but it's soon revealed that the entire unnamed town is the eponymous “Devil's Lair,” and inexplicable creepiness begins to happen with great fervor. Skeletal arms sprout from walls, corpses hang from fishing hooks in the local butcher shop, and bodies are either pushed off rooftops or appear in mounds with their eyes gouged out. Even Pennywise from It – sorry, a clown who only looks and talks like Pennywise – makes a random appearance.
“Random appearance” is an apt phrase to describe many of the game's plot tricks, and this is delivered through decent but not spectacular standalone voice acting. There are hints that Lauren may have played a deeper role in her sister's disappearance and the cult's machinations, and I was expecting the city to be a crumbling depiction of Lauren's fractured psyche or another Silent Hill -like revelation. We don't get that, because Devil's Hideout is content to throw a package of horror media pieces at the player without much connective tissue. Throw in a little The Shining here, a little Lovecraft there. It even throws in some of the more unfortunate clichés found in horror movies, (spoilers regarding a character's death) The only person of color clearly visible in the game is the first to die.
The aforementioned Pennywise impersonator is a particularly good example of this game’s gumbo pot style, as it just shows up without any explanation to explain and set up two puzzles. This scattershot presentation of plot threads reminded me of the last Cosmic Void game I reviewed here at RPS: the Space Quest-style throwback Tachyon Dreams Anthology . That game dabbled in time travel and space comedy well, but it didn’t always hit the mark consistently. Devil’s Hideout falls into the same trap, though I’ll say it’s easier to excuse this time around. This is a horror game, after all, and horror doesn’t always need to be explained or pieced together. By not doing so, the game becomes even more of a More It's surreal for me, but I'm not sure all players will be so forgiving.
And this surreal nature is enhanced by an unusual interface. The game's scenes are presented from a first-person perspective, where you have to click on things on the screen to interact with them, like in hidden object games. You can press a button to highlight all the interactive objects, which I liked, and there's a small inventory section in the left corner. When Lauren encounters an interactive NPC, that NPC appears in your inventory as an “item” that you can use with other items, which is a nice touch.
I usually prefer a third-person perspective for adventure games, but this setup is effective when Devil's Hideout throws you into darkened screens lit only by the circular glow of Lauren's flashlight. Be prepared for a number of jump scares as creepy manifestations appear at unexpected intervals from the glow of your flashlight, and you should also expect talking heads at the bottom of the screen when there's dialogue. You see this in most old-school adventure games, but unlike King's Quest VI, there's no border around these half-body portraits, and they tend to distort the perspective of everything when they appear.
This is especially evident when Lauren's small portrait is juxtaposed with the giant face of a key NPC in the middle of the screen. For me, it most reminds me of Infogrames' 1993 adventure Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet. That game is very similar to Devil's Hideout, from its flashy graphical style to its reliance on highly detailed faces, including ones based on the likenesses of players, pasted onto the screen. (Seek out screenshots of Shadow of the Comet and enjoy the talking head that looks suspiciously like Jack Nicholson.)
Whether you like or loathe the graphical choices made, there's no denying that the game is expertly crafted. But when it comes to puzzles, expect some confusion. I'm not saying there's anything as surprising as Gabriel Knight 3's infamous “use cat fur and maple syrup to create fake moustaches” puzzle, but some come dangerously close. Items appear in unexpected places (why is there a telescope buried in the guts of a corpse?) and you have to be prepared to click on as many things as you can until you find the right combination of items. There's not much internal logic here to tie the horror themes together, nor is there much logic to the puzzles, sadly.
That said, Devil's Hideout still has an engaging atmosphere that makes me ignore its flaws. At its most evocative, it reminded me of a Stephen King story, and I'm not just talking about the Pennywise cameo. A city that has lost all its wholesome American style and fallen into evil is something King would have written, but Devil's Hideout would probably be one of those '80s King paperbacks where King is high on coke and needs a better editor. Like Kathy Rain, another point-and-click horror flick with a lot of random horror going on behind the scenes, I think Devil's Hideout could have benefited from a director's cut later on to flesh out the parts I liked and emphasize the parts I didn't. In other words, there's a lot of potential in this urban hellscape, and even with its flaws, I finished Devil's Hideout wanting more – something I've never wanted from an abandoned American city before.
This review is based on the game review structure provided by the developer.