This is the second time this year that I’ve played an indie horror game based around the concept of a haunted video game that we have to play within the game. And while Rat Cliff Game’s psychological horror game, Among Ashes, is vastly different to Croxel Studios’ Tormenture, it’s just as scary.
We play as ourselves (literally, the game uses your Steam account to address you by your real name) and after having our Awesome Messenger account hacked, we appear to have not learnt our lesson and happily click on a mysterious link sent to us by our friend, Mark. The link takes us to a horror forum site called Nightmare Fuel, where a video game developer, David Smith, has uploaded a link to a free horror game that he’s developed. Could we possibly be hacked again if we download this game off some random forum following a cryptic post from its developer? Nonsense! We hit download immediately.
Now that it’s clear how we got our account hacked in the first place, we boot up the strange game, Night Call, and sit down to play it. Night Call is a PlayStation 1-style game inspired by horror game classics such as Resident Devil and Silent Mill, though it takes on a first person perspective to increase tension. This is all explained in some fake developer blog posts that Mark shares later in the game, a lot of which I’m sure might actually be Rat Cliff Games’ process and thoughts on developing Among Ashes, minus the haunting… I hope.
In Night Call, we play as a detective who is investigating a report of a woman screaming from an old manor. As we enter the manor and speak to Dr. Stoker, the manor’s owner who lives there with his wife and son, we find out that not only is Dr. Stoker up to some nefarious stuff but the manor is also infested with grotesque, mutated beings. In Night Call, we must uncover what Dr. Stoker is up to and escape the manor with our partner, Amy.
Much like Tormenture, we switch between playing Night Call and exploring our flat. While we play, we’ll often hear movements happening around the flat; doors opening and closing, banging, things being broken and mysterious cries coming from our flatmate’s vacant bedroom. The “real world” also plays a part in the puzzle solving of Night Call; sometimes answers to puzzles can be found around the flat or keys will appear outside the game. Most of the time, the real world is where we experience most of the horrors happening as a result of whatever entity is haunting Night Call.
As we play, Mark will be playing alongside us, and we can switch from Night Call to Awesome Messenger to communicate with him. He’ll send us deleted blog posts from the developer that the forum users have found, which entail not only the developer’s processes but also hints as to darker goings on behind the game. Along with the blog posts, we’ll be able to read the comments from the forum users and find out about the experiences they’ve had while playing the game which somehow makes it even more unnerving as we realise what’s to come.
Night Call is designed to look like an amateur video game project with poor voice acting and bad recording quality to go alongside it. The graphics and audio will consistently glitch and it’s evidentally full of bugs much to the frustration of Mark and the other forum users… but how much of this is a part of the usual development process and how much is interferance from the entity haunting it? As we find out through the developer’s blog posts, Night Call seemingly has a mind of its own with some unexplainable bugs appearing out of nowhere. Unfortunately, along with the bugs purposely put into Among Ashes, I did experience a few genuine ones such as floating enemies. This wasn’t so much of a problem, but I did experience a lot of stuttering too, especially as the game moved from Night Call to the “real world”.
Night Call plays very much in a similar style to Resident Devil and Silent Mill with survival game mechanics and various puzzles to solve. To begin with, I grew a little irritated with how Mark would handhold us with some of the puzzles, but this soon stopped once we had solved the first couple. The survival mechanics are also very recognisable to other games within the genre, though I did find that the aiming for gun combat seemed off with a lot of shots missing when the crosshairs had been directly on the enemies, or maybe the visual effects to let the player know that the enemy has been hit aren’t obvious enough. Either way, it made the gunplay feel less satisying. It would have also been quite helpful to have ammo numbers on the HUD so I wouldn’t have to keep count of how many bullets I had left. And oddly enough, you can remap some buttons but not all of them and not all actions are listed in the controls menu either.
Aside from a frustratingly long mini game and a silly chase sequence towards the end of the game, Among Ashes was otherwise a treat to play. The atmosphere is absolutely nailed by both the visual and audio designs. There is a slow build in the creepiness too, starting with Night Call’s minor audio and visual glitches and reading through the developer blogs of an increasingly disturbed developer along with the forum comments as other players, who are ahead of us in the game, describe things happening in their own homes. The game will then drip feed us increasingly disturbing enemies, starting with generic zombies (though still parting from the classic design and instead opting for these strange, stumbling ladies with enlarged hands) and ending with some of the most awful monstrosities I’ve encountered in a game before, which are partnered with sound effects that made me want to remove my headset on multiple occasions.
The tension is then increased as the occurrences happening in the real world grow more frequent, until eventually the lines between the video game and real world become blurred and… god forbid, the awful monstrosities we’ve just been freaked out by in PlayStation 1-style graphics are suddenly rendered in modern visuals. That being said, Among Ashes does use quite a lot of jump scares which I don’t believe were necessary. I’ve always seen jump scares as a cheap way to generate horror and this becomes really evident when most of the game achieves this without them anyway.
While the storyline of Night Call is predictable with a Resident Devil-style evil scientist who wants to make mutants to save his family from death, the storyline behind the game itself is interesting and well put together. Although it taps into certain themes that I’m not really a fan of, the overall presentation is well done and there is a twist in there that a lot of players probably won’t be expecting.
Overall, Among Ashes is among the scariest horror games of the year. It has some fantastic enemy design which is matched with horrifying audio and visuals that tie up into a package that will certainly have you taking frequent breaks to calm down again. To top this off is some fun survival gameplay which is reminiscent to recognisable classics.
Jess played Among Ashes on PC with a review code.
This game look so cool