You know that game where you walk down a tight corridor with a door at the end that suddenly shuts in your face right as you’re about to reach it, and when you turn around, something about the room has changed? Hmm? Oh no, not that one. I meant Reveil, the newest entry in a long line of indie psychological horror games following the famously surprising shadowdrop and ensuing cancellation of P.T. (2014), developed by Pixelsplit and published by Daedalic Entertainment. It’s the type of game that’s clearly long run out of any new ideas.
I mentioned P.T. (2014) because I believe that’s where this trend started to become a more common kind of game, especially within the indie space, but even more than that, Reveil is indebted to Layers of Fear (2023) and its predecessors. Say what you want about Bloober Team and their games; for better or for worse, they’ve had a huge effect on the indie horror space, to the point that many games within this subgenre feel derivative of their work. Especially so, Reveil. There’s nothing wrong with taking inspiration from other games, but you have to build upon them—or if you don’t, at least be a damn good version of them—to succeed, and that’s not the case with Reveil. Even the story feels familiar.
You play as an average man, a father, a husband, and wake up in your very normal house that shifts around you as you walk through its corridors, turning into anything but a normal house. In one moment, you’re in your daughter’s bedroom, and in the next, you’re in the circus. Your wife and daughter are mysteriously missing, but you briefly see a little girl running around the circus, and so, of course, you follow, walking right into a funhouse, and from there, this psychological journey into the mind of Walter Thompson begins. Every beat and plot twist is entirely predictable, laughably so, and in many cases doesn’t even really make a whole lot of sense. It just repeats the things other games of this caliber do. In one of the early chapters, you discover the atelier of your wife, an artist who got obsessed with her art and eventually would rarely leave her room. You then encounter your wife, the enemy of the chapter, whom you have to outmaneuver to collect some things to fulfill the ritual. If that sounds familiar, then… yeah.
The delivery of said story is also lazy at best. The main character comments on absolutely everything that happens, and Reveil has made the weird choice to split the narration into both things he says out loud and things he only thinks about silently in his mind. Even though he’s all alone for about 99% of the game, what reason would he have to not say certain things out loud? Well, I mean, really, what reason would he have to say anything out loud? But that’s become a bit of a standard in games, so I’ll stick with why he would keep silent about anything. Either way, why split them up when absolutely nothing is gained from it? Reveil also frequently has flashbacks that happen seemingly randomly when the game has decided that now you need to know a little more backstory, and it’s nothing more than an additional type of narration, but this time a female voice coming from your wife in the past.
There comes a point in the story, around the last third, where it does turn into something slightly different, with story beats that aren’t just the exact same thing you’ve seen a hundred times by now (although don’t get me wrong, we still aren’t talking about anything wholly original here). But by then, I was already so done with the narrative, and this new plot that opens up still doesn’t make much sense and just throws you into a new kind of psychological horror cliché. But at least it looks a little different than everything else in Reveil until then.
Speaking of the visuals, they’re… fine. The game is primarily split into normal house environments, circus environments, a forest, and a train (and then, of course, the final one, which I won’t spoil), but it’s all just so unremarkable. You know exactly what this kind of indie horror game looks like. It attempts to go for realism and almost gets there, but not quite because, naturally, it doesn’t have the resources to do so, and so it ends up with that very artificial look. These games would really be helped by attempting to stylize a little more, but alas.
And when it comes to gameplay, well, I mean, it’s a walking simulator, isn’t it? What gameplay do you expect? You walk around in some corridors that change every time you turn around, which means you basically just walk forward and backward until you’re finally where you need to be. There are some puzzles, but really not that many, and the ones that exist are mostly just escape room style; take item one to open item two to gain item three, and so on. You get two chasing sequences as well, and then that’s it. It’s also a very short game that took me not much more than three hours to complete. All of this wouldn’t be the end of the world if the narrative were any more interesting. As we’ve established, it’s not at all.
I used to really dig these kinds of games, but Reveil was another reminder of how derivative these games have become of each other, with absolutely no new ideas or anything at all to add to the existing formula. And then Reveil isn’t exactly a good version of that formula either.
Nairon reviewed Reveil on PC with a review code.
