As a general rule, horror games are typically best enjoyed in a very specific setting: alone. Sitting in a dark room with nothing but the dull glow of the TV, no distractions, and my personal favorite, late at night when your brain starts to play tricks on you. Unlike other genres, setting the right atmosphere is imperative when it comes to delivering the perfect experience. The feeling of being alone is something that plays on our basic need of community and is hammered into our DNA, often putting the player on edge, and historically, adding other players to the experience has a negative effect. If you don’t believe me, think back to Resident Evil 5 or Dead Space 3, both of which were great (if not amazing games), but watered down the horror that their respective series were known for. Does the newest attempt at horror in a group setting succeed where these heavyweights have stumbled?
If you take the developer’s suggestion and jump into the single-player, there’s a narrative-driven tutorial that not only brings you up to speed with the story, but touches on most of the primary mechanics of the game. You’re placed within the shoes of a teenage girl living in her own personal version of Hell within a small town in the state of Washington. On the surface, everything seems normal as people go on living their day to day lives. When the sun sets though, something more sinister awaits. Something or someone is taking control of you and the townsfolk each night, and it’s up to you to escape the town with tangible evidence to blow the lid on the events that have taken your friends and family hostage night after night. Sadly, the prologue is the best part of the game and it’s not due to incorporating additional players, it’s the fact that the two experiences are almost like night and day. The prologue relies heavily on exploring a linear path and partaking in scripted events that dial up the tension quickly and effectively. While nothing you see is extremely horrifying, the ambient industrial music and ultra-realistic sound design evoke Silent Hill vibes early on, keeping you on the edge of your seat waiting for anything to pop out of the shadows and make you wish you changed into your brown pants before embarking on the journey.
Upon completing the scripted segment, you’ll awaken in The Blackout Club’s home base – a series of abandoned rail cars tucked within the woods surrounding the small town that the “woke” kids all meet in as they go out and about during the wee hours to uncover and investigate the who’s and why’s. This works as a hub that includes various areas allowing you to customize your character, review some of the game’s lore, and a few other surprises tucked away once you progress into the game further. You’ll return here after each mission to upgrade your character and purchase cosmetic items using the snacks you earn while exploring the open-world portion of the main game. While you earn XP from completing objectives in the main game, the progression tree is so narrow it removes the feeling of choice completely, leaving only a handful of true “options,” simply tasking you with selecting what’s available to you in the order they are offered, failing to let you save up at an attempt to skip from Point A to Point D or E. The only area that you can perform free-form customization is the main piece of starting equipment. From the start, you can select either a stun gun, grappling hook, or a crossbow with tranquilizer darts. With no idea what tasks you’ll complete on the next mission, these come down to preference rather than situational planning, as every randomly generated mission will take place within the same open-world with varying degrees depending on how far you’ve gone down the rabbit hole.
Once you (and your party if you elect to play with other players) have seen everything that the car has to offer, you’ll be able to embark on a mission. Akin to those found within the Payday series, you’ll select an area of the town to visit (as of this writing, I have only unlocked two of what appears to be three areas), and be tasked with completing a random series of objectives within the world. The game world is designed in a way that looks and feels like a procedurally generated rogue-lite experience, but is a static environment with random modifiers (starting/exit points, enemy and objective placement, locked doors/open windows), with multiple layers that all connect in a vast network that begs to be explored. From the start, the story and setting are what intrigued me and propelled my desire to solve the mysteries that were tucked away deep below the surface; but the repetitive nature of the game, on top of a lack of proper direction and the fact that the story seems to be tossed to the wayside once the prologue is complete made this a struggle after the first few hours.
Initially, the goals are varied just enough to keep you interested, but slowly become a slog through a repetitious cycle of taking photos, finding items or specific NPCs, interacting with them, maybe getting another goal, repeating, and attempting to exit once all is said and done. As you progress through the leveling system, new variations of the fetch quest style missions are unlocked, but they are essentially more of the same, rarely bringing anything fresh to the table. Completing the objectives earns you the two forms of currency incorporated into the game: XP and Snacks. Neither of these comes in abundance at any point in the adventure. While you can complete some optional objectives, such as taking photos of bonus items, the amount of XP and snacks you get boils down to what you as a team completed, multiplied by how many players are in the session. It never takes into account what actions or goals you or your teammates specifically achieved, allowing you or your teammates to essentially get participation trophies each and every time you complete (or fail) a mission, even if they were in no part a valued asset to the team.
Playing the main campaign with other players is completely optional, but is recommended; largely due to the massive XP buff you receive by completing missions in a group (finishing a mission solo netted me around 100 XP, but completing the same mission with a full squad boosted it to around 500). The level of enjoyment/success you’ll gain from playing with a group will vary depending on how well your team communicates. Working together with a plan of attack, such as having some of the players creating havoc around the objective to draw out the enemies while others sneak in silently to complete the task at hand yields some of the best co-op play I’ve been a part of in a while. On the flip side, the experience can spiral out of control if you group up with silent players who prefer to go off doing their own thing, constantly getting downed or drawing out The Shape (we’ll circle back to this fellow later) sooner than you’d like. Being stuck in a session with the latter can become even more infuriating when you reach the exit, only to find yourself having to backtrack deep within the map to retrieve someone who was downed en route to the exit. Communication issues are not exclusive to the other player(s) being anti-social, as the voice function has a habit of muting other players randomly mid-mission, requiring you to either suffer in silence or leave yourself open to attack while you start a party using the Xbox Live secondary option.
Standing between you and your goals are a small group of enemies that come in a few flavors, typically being able to either see or hear you and your comrades. Regardless of the type, they typically require the player to crouch and slowly work their way around the open world at a snail’s pace, sticking to the shadows to remain unseen. Once the bulk of the enemies make themselves known, I found the horror and associated feeling of dread that most games in this genre drag behind it like a large oversized blade to be lacking, but this could be due to the fact I am not a huge fan of a number of series this title clearly takes inspiration from. Since we’re dealing with teenagers, the violence and gore are essentially removed, with death being all but a joke. The trailer and opening segment evoke a feeling of some Silent Hill vibes mixed with Stranger Things, when in reality it’s more like The Goonies or Scooby Doo. The stalking enemies look ridiculous in their most common form (adults wearing the same style PJs as their neighbors, which I can only assume is part of some weird Home Owner’s Association rule. You’re telling me none of the townspeople sleep naked? Really?), as well as a generic cult style robe. Once you incorporate their dumb as a sack of hammers AI, the experience boils down to a game of hide and go seek, with too many mechanics and not enough fully fleshed out ideas. After completing the prologue and spending a few hours in the main game, I felt like I was duped into buying a ticket to Outlast: The Movie and wound up in the wrong theater with Goosebumps being the main feature.
It manages to shoehorn in additional mechanics that don’t feel fully explored and are poorly explained. There is a bar-less morality system in place, where being spotted by enemies or kicking in locked doors negatively impacts it, and who knows what raises it. If you fall too low on this spectrum, The Shape will be unleashed and will systematically make his way through your group. This often occurs unfairly during other events, such as being dragged off by standard enemies in a mini-game that tasks you with grabbing frantically for items that can be used to help free you from their grasp, effectively punishing you twice for your same mistake. There is a rather interesting feature where the game will (with your permission) record clips of your voice chat and incorporate them in other player’s sessions. I am not 100% sure how this works, but I have heard some of the blurbs which add some much-needed creepiness to an experience that quickly goes from a promising horror title to a flawed open-world survival game.
The one mechanic that was unique and worked as advertised is the ability to close your eyes. I know this sounds a bit dumb in a situation where you should and would normally want to see what is around you, but hear me out. Closing your eyes provides a number of benefits – this allows you to see the path toward your current objective (a godsend in these types of games where getting lost with no clear path forward is more common than it should be), as well as hidden messages scrawled on the walls and floors. The most common use for this will be seeing “The Shape.” What is “The Shape?” Well, he’s invisible, and the only way of seeing it is to close your eyes, leaving a Predator style heat signature where he would be. If the mysterious being finds you, he will turn you into a lumbering zombie-like creature that meanders about the level, spouting out vague statements and often giving away your teammate’s position as they try to complete the objectives, or more importantly, bring you back onto their team. Not only is this the polite thing to do when someone is downed in a cooperative game, but this is also something that is required to exit the level upon completing the primary objectives.
The open-world you’ll explore is literally all over the place in terms of visual representation. Most of the elements look outstanding, coming fully equipped with realistic textures and lighting that delivered some of the most impressive shadows I’ve seen this console generation. The level of quality in this stands out primarily when it comes to the prologue, and is still decent when it comes to the open-world setting, making the occasional glitch or poorly rendered asset stand out that much more when issues arise. If you take the time to explore the various houses and mysterious underground structures, you’ll regularly find items that pop in or out of view, or in other cases, look downright weird due to their size in relation to other. The biggest offender is by far the characters’ arms when they are not holding an item; their flailing appendages bending at awkward angles all the while looking like limbs you’d find in a low budget VR game. As I mentioned before, the sound design is as atmospheric as it gets – the eerie whispers of the enemies, their pounding footsteps as they give chase to you or your friends, and the ultra-realistic footsteps your character emits when walking on less forgiving environments deliver a true sense of dread that the rest of the package falters on every step of the way.
The controls are passable, but still a little on the clunky side. Since there is a fair amount of parkour-ish traversal required, jumping about plays a huge part in the gameplay and unfortunately, isn’t as accurate as it should be. More often than not, I found myself getting stuck on edges or jumping through an open window when the ledge above or below it was the intended target. This is a bit of a trend when it comes down to the more action-oriented segments, as you’ll often find yourself struggling with the controls registering when you hit the proper button to either push away or use one of the defensive items against the assailants.
The Blackout Club is an ambitious title that brings many interesting mechanics to the table, but fails to deliver on the majority of them and weighs too heavily on the interaction with other players. It’s a shame as it starts off with an extremely strong prologue, but sadly, that momentum putters out long before the payoff due to a lack of player direction. The story seems to fall to the wayside, half-hearted systems lack polish, and the multiplayer gameplay is unbalanced and suffers due to the grindy nature of player progression – not even the suburb narrative setup and audio design can save it. This isn’t the worst horror option on the market, but it’s not going to stand as an example of why we need more multiplayer horror experiences either.
6 out of 10
Pros
- Sound Design That is so Realistic, it’s Scary
- Stellar Prologue
- An Interesting Narrative…
Cons
- …That Falls to the Wayside Early In
- Under Developed Mechanics
- Grindy, Repetitive Gameplay
- Lack of Polish
- Multiplayer Focus is Flawed
The Blackout Club was developed and published by Question. It is available on PC, PS4, and X1 as of July 30th, 2019. The game was provided to us for review via two codes on X1. If you’d like to see more of The Blackout Club, check out the official 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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