When I was growing up, few things terrified me more than being shipped off to visit my grandmother for my summer vacations. My grandma was a hulking southern woman who loved to spend her free time drinking homemade moonshine and throwing rotary phones at her grandkids at the smallest transgression, which makes the horrors found in COLINA: Legacy comparable to visiting Mary Poppins.

The narrative challenges you to guide young Alex through his grandmother’s house as he attempts to survive the night. Standing between him and his loved ones is something that wants Alex to remember events from his past. It’s up to the player to use a strange relic that works in conjunction with a trusty flashlight to find an exit before it’s too late. While you’re not timed on your journey, the flashlight eats batteries at an exponential rate, as if granny buys her batteries exclusively at Dollar General. The flashlight/amulet combo is your sole method of offense, and in most cases required to solve minor puzzles and remove obstructions that hide secret entrances tucked away within the home. It’s a mechanic that we’ve seen before but serves the narrative well since finding a kid with firearms or melee training is few and far between.

The game succeeds in capturing the look and feel of classic survival horror experiences on a much smaller scale. There are the token “safe” rooms in which you can save your progress or recharge your batteries, the grainy textures that Silent Hill made a staple, as well as other small touches that sent me back in time to the glory days of the original horror powerhouses. The enemies found within are also callbacks; while they didn’t strike me as being overly original or terrifying, they are designed and animated in a way that would’ve felt at home in the newest iteration of Silent Hill or Resident Evil, particularly when it comes to the freakish mannequins that roam the halls of the mysterious manor.

While the atmosphere and design check most of the right boxes, there are quite a few missteps that mar the experience. The right stick is used for controlling Alex’s field of view and aiming the flashlight but always feels slightly off, either being too stiff or too loose, with no rhyme or reason. The story comes packed to the brim with backstory and lore that you’ll want to invest in, but reading the blocky font that is entirely too small left me with strained eyes more often than not due to the heavy amount of reading involved. The gameplay is further ruined by the previously mentioned rate that the batteries deplete, which broke up the momentum quite often as you’ll need to use the flashlight almost 100% of the time taking frequent breaks to recharge in the save room, which becomes time-consuming and serves no purpose outside of extending the short narrative.

By far the worst offense against the game is the enemy AI, which goes from having the true to life, dumb as an inanimate object intelligence that a mannequin would have to knowing what your next move is before you do in the blink of an eye. On multiple occasions I found myself crouched, sneaking past one of the creatures, standing so close I could reach out and smack it across the face and it didn’t even bat an eye at me… only to reach the room around the corner, breaking the line of sight while maintaining the crouched position only to have that same monstrosity take me down from behind with a quickness that would give The Flash a run for his money.

Clocking in around three to four hours (depending on how much time you have to kill waiting for the Energizer Bunny to show up), COLINA: Legacy is a short vacation to Hell where most horror fans will find something to love. Whether you enjoy the callbacks to the games that clearly inspired it, or its own deep lore, there’s something for most horror fans to grasp onto here. Regardless, you’ll never look at your grandma the same way again.

7 out of 10

Pros

• A Deep Story with Original Lore
• A Stunning Atmosphere
• Loads of Callbacks to Classics from the Genre

Cons

• Cheap Batteries that Die All too Quickly
• Lacking AI
• Poor Font Choice for Extensive Reading

COLINA: Legacy was developed and published by Chance6 Studios, LLC. It is available on Mobile, PC, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of COLINA: Legacy, check out the developer’s site.

 

Here at GBG we use a rating method that you are more than likely familiar with – a scale of 1 to 10. For clarification, we intend on using the entire scale: 1-4 is something you should probably avoid paying for; 5-7 is something that is worth playing, but probably not at full price; 8-10 is a great title that you can feel confident about buying. If you have any questions or comments about how we rate a game, please let us know.

 

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