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Ah, Tier Four. I haven’t put something there for a long while now. Old Gods Rising, however, is offensively bad in every conceivable way.
The pitch? You’re a professor/TV host who was recently tricked by an elaborate hoax and are now considered the laughing stock of the academic community. You get a call from a director who wants your advice on a movie he’s working on: “Old Gods Rising”. Apparently having nothing better to do (they really don’t try with the plot even at this early stage), you head up to Ashgate University, where things are not what they seem. Is this all an elaborate setup to get reality-style movie footage, or is there something darker at work? Except, well, no. There isn’t. It’s just a setup for a movie and there’s never a moment you would believe otherwise. The game just pretends that the main character is the most thick-skulled person in existence.
I know Lovecraftian horror is hard – in fact, it may be impossible to make a good Lovecraftian game or movie (though the Lovecraft society has done pretty well at it). But I love this genre and am always looking for something to sate my desire for existential dread. This game doesn’t even try. This game laughs in the face of lovers of Lovecraft.
The setup seemed great – go to a university (*cough* Miskatonic *cough*) and investigate its mysterious history. Except….twenty minutes in you see behind a wall to some scaffolding that shows you the whole thing is a set. Your friend on the phone tells you that the director is known for putting people into situations like this and filming them surreptitiously. You see a drone with a camera just following you around. Areas are mysteriously unlocked in a sequential order, as if the director is moving you around. You repeatedly find backstage areas with props used to trick you. There’s an area where you find prop parts of the university walls under construction and I kid you not the main character just says “Wow – this looks almost exactly like the walls of the university.” Worse still, these are areas you just walk into – apparently the director wasn’t even attempting to fool you. There is never a moment after that first reveal (or the dozens afterwards) where you would be fooled into thinking this was anything other than an attempt at “Prof-sploitation” (as your friend on the phone terms it).
Already, this betrays the whole Lovecraftian genre and the people who would buy this game based on its description. But the problems don’t stop there. The plot, taken at face value, just doesn’t make sense. Even after seeing “behind the scenes”, the main character still seems to believe that there’s some grand design at work with no evidence whatsoever – part of why this is a slap in the face of Lovecraftian fans. A significant feature of many Lovecraftian tales is that the main character doesn’t believe in the paranormal (or are at least skeptical). They walk in with all their science and technology and are slowly worn down by the incomprehensible reality being revealed to them.
The “plot twist” at the end is that your friend on the phone who has been warning you against the director the whole time turns out to actually be the mastermind of the whole thing, “summoning” the old gods right before the director calls “That’s a wrap!” But let’s think about this for a second. This person, who you live and sleep with, has decided that during the worst time of your life they should take part in a director’s scheme to do the exact same thing that caused your humiliation to you again with the intention of having thousands of people watch it. What kind of friend is that? Who in the world would do that? That’s the true horror here – after the events of the game, the main character has lost not only all respect in the academic community but also any trust he could have had in his partner, who seemed to also be his only friend.
Now, you might say, perhaps the game is actually the movie produced by the director and your friend didn’t actually betray you for real – you’re just both in on it. But then why does the game show you behind the scenes and have the main character comment on it during the game? If this were supposed to be a “real” university, why are the mysterious objects in places that a drunk college student would definitely find during their freshman year of school? Nothing of the plot makes sense. If it’s a movie, it’s a bad movie.
There are plenty of great ideas that could have come out of this game. A fully explorable labyrinthine university, for example. Puzzles that aren’t just your friend on the phone telling you the answer (no, literally). A tightrope walk between crazy director and insane cultist. ANYTHING at all, really.
Beyond that, the game has various technical problems. Early on, I ran around a corner too fast (near a hidden loading zone) and found myself faced with the edge of the map – for a moment, I wasn’t sure if this was part of the game – until I fell off the map and had to reload. Objects will occasionally pop in – again, initially I had wondered if it was intentional, but that would be giving this game far more credit than its worth.
My final complaint, and one that I didn’t expect from a game that wasn’t Kickstarted, is the number of meta jokes and references. There are a variety of statues in the game, all of which are references to movies and video games of pop culture. Beyond the fact that this completely ruins the tone and immersion, the jokes (which, admittedly, would be funny in fewer number and a different genre) are just sorta thrown in there with so little subtlety that it doesn’t even feel fair to call them “references.”
This game completely and utterly fails at everything it attempted (except a couple jokes): drama, horror, walking simulator, puzzle, game. Tier Four and may I never think of it again.
Edit: I apparently hated this so much I forgot to add the Steam link.