Ever since little Elliott Taylor’s brother Michael found E.T.’s pasty and emaciated body lying dying in the woods, with John Williams’ iconic, yet utterly haunting score ensuring that the twinkling soundtrack to this childhood movie would creep me out even in adulthood – I have had a fear of aliens. Even the painfully dull Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull had a lasting impact on me after the ending scene where a strikingly tall alien creature glares down at Kate Blanchett before promptly blowing up her head. So, theoretically, Refugium Games’ survival horror set in a small farming town which experiences an alien invasion, should have scared the heebie-jeebies out of me.
Set in the 1990s USA, Greyhill Incident opens with a paranoid conversation taking place over a radio as the local residents of Greyhill, prompted by recent paranormal sightings in the local area, have come to the conclusion that the government is lying, any attempt to go to the authorities about the invasion will result in a trip to a mental health facility, and their only solution is to board up their windows and doors and start wearing tin foil hats so that the aliens can’t tamper with their minds should they be abducted.
We play as Ryan, a Greyhill local who lives with his son, Henry. That’s all we know about Ryan. Don’t be misled by Greyhill Incident‘s store page which states that the game is “story-driven.” It’s not. I’m starting to think that the ‘story-driven’ label is slapped on to anything that has a few lines of plot. In fact, just don’t read the store page description at all, not just because of the poor punctuation but also because there’s no puzzles involved despite what the developers have described.
After the opening conversation, Ryan hears strange noises come from Henry’s bedroom. Upon investigating, Ryan sees that Henry’s window is open and concludes that someone snuck in and out. He goes to check outside, heading into the shed where more strange noises are occurring. Suddenly, bright lights appear from outside the shed before moving over the cornfield, with Ryan’s dog chasing after them. Unbothered by the disappearance of his dog, Ryan then gets word that one of his neighbors has gone quiet, so he goes to check up on them.
Greyhill Incident had a very thorough demo to give players an impression of the game before its release. And by ‘thorough’, I mean half the game. The developers have previously stated that Greyhill Incident should take around four hours to complete. This is not true; with decent navigation, visuals and objective listings, Greyhill Incident would only take two hours to complete, as seen in the walkthroughs that have been uploaded so far. Thankfully, Greyhill Incident does a terrible job with all of these.
After the demo period, otherwise known as halfway through the game, Ryan is finally equipped with a baseball bat and revolver – now the survival horror elements can (briefly) begin. Like most survival horror games, Greyhill Incident relies on a mix of stealth and action as its core gameplay elements. You have limited ammo, so when you don’t have enough to take down your opponent (exactly two gunshots to the head), you must then rely on stealth and hiding to survive. The aliens will be patrolling the area as Ryan goes on his errands, if caught, there will be an awkward hugging animation where Ryan will use the same shouting sound effects as the player mashes the spacebar (on keyboard) to free themselves. If they fail, the screen will simply cut to black and the words ‘abducted’ will appear. It’s safe to say that the gameplay is boring and just outright terrible. There is no variation in enemy at all, just the same old aliens that you’ll bump into more frequently as Greyhill Incident progresses. I mean, with a two hour playthrough time, I guess there wasn’t much of a chance to squeeze in anything else. Half the time, stealth isn’t actually needed as it’s easy enough to just outrun these creeps and find somewhere to hide.
Unfortunately, on top of this bland fighting experience, Greyhill Incident also packs on other survival horror elements such as an EXTREME lack of stamina and a torch which only lasts five seconds before you have to crank it again. Ryan has the lung capacity of a 90-year-old man who has smoked five packets of cigarettes every day since he was five years old. He can briefly run for about 20 seconds, but will then have to catch his breath for about a minute and a half before you can start running again. On top of this, I spent half of Greyhill Incident (so, the demo) getting frustrated by a lack of a stamina bar – then I realised there is one, it’s just tiny and the game doesn’t care to point it out in the tutorial. The minuscule dot cursor in the middle of the screen has a little circle that appears round it while you’re walking only. This is the stamina bar. So, it’s not actually present while you’re running and when you’re not it’s so small that I missed it for half the game, otherwise known as the demo. This tiny dot also doubles up as your indication of interactable objects. Normally, it appears as a small circle, when you hover over an interactable object, it will fill up and appear ever so slightly bigger – so hardly any indication at all.
Like many aspects of Greyhill Incident, the dialogue is also dreadful. I’m not going to pin this on the voice actors; although Ryan’s voice actor does overact half his lines and consistently switches between unbothered and severely distressed in the same sentence, the writing itself is absolutely abysmal – some of the worst written dialogue I have ever heard in a game before. Everything is so flat, full of pointless expositionary anecdotes and little to no story progression other than ordering Ryan to do menial tasks that anyone else could be doing.
A lot of the characters are also very unbothered by distressing points in the story. For example, while investigating the disappearance of his neighbor, Ryan enters a field full of butchered cows, when someone asks over the radio if everything is okay, Ryan just responds with “I don’t think so.” You don’t THINK SO?! Are the gutted cows not a big enough pointer that things are certainly NOT okay?! Another example is when you find Bob’s cat, Kitty, in the field of dead cows and she has metal implants embedded into her head. Ryan, again, just finds this slightly disturbing, and when he hands her over to Bob, Bob simply claims she must have been abducted and experimented on before promptly moving onto the next subject and putting his tortured cat on the sofa. We also come across a point where a police car speeds past Ryan’s house before crashing into a fence. Upon investigating, Ryan finds top secret files on Greyhill. He wonders why the cop would have these and what they entail, but doesn’t open them to read them, like a good citizen I suppose…
There are also plenty of weird moments where it feels like certain character’s reactions are for a different moment in the game but were messily chopped into another sentence. Speaking of bad editing, a lot of the dialogue lines also overlap, there are even moment where Ryan is saying two different things at once. Did I mention that the subtitles also aren’t in sync with the dialogue?
With all of these technical faults from the dialogue listed off, it should come at no surprise that Greyhill Incident is littered with punctuation and grammatical errors, to the point that I would gladly offer a free proofread if it means, at the very least, that all the names are capitalized and not just the odd few. This terrible writing also transfers to the objective descriptions which appear in the pause menu. Almost every time they are completely unhelpful in guiding your way, in fact at one point I had ‘bring the kitty to Bob, his caravan is over there’ – over WHERE?!
This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if you could see more than three feet in front of you. While Greyhill Incident‘s green fog look is great for building tension and ensuring that aliens can sneak up on you from nowhere, it’s absolutely awful for navigation. I believe the reason why the developers may have said that Greyhill Incident would last four hours is because two of these hours involve aimlessly stumbling around the area for the next progression in the level.
So, does Greyhill Incident have anything that it DOES do well? One thing: the music score used when the aliens spot you and start chasing you is actually quite chilling. Other than that there is actually nothing that I enjoyed about this game. And to top off everything else, even the sound mixing is completely dreadful. Dialogue is really quiet, to the point where you can’t hear what the characters are saying if there’s any background noise, or if you’ve been spotted and that chase score starts blaring. Of course, you could otherwise rely on the subtitles… if they were actually in sync with the dialogue.
If you’re still questioning why I’ve slated Greyhill Incident so much, it’s probably because the ending really rubbed me up the wrong way. Early on in the story (or during the demo, which is actually half the game), Henry is beamed up to the UFO ship. Ryan then spends the rest of Greyhill Incident (so, the next hour) trying to find a way onto the ship so that he can rescue his son. This has no conclusion. We’re just sent on fetch quests for another hour and then the game abruptly ends, because for some reason the developers thought we would have much more fun wading through thick fog and finding rolls of tin foil than we would exploring an alien spaceship for our abducted son.
In conclusion, I don’t think I have much more to say about the Greyhill Incident other than it’s one of the poorest games I’ve played this year, maybe of all time. I reviewed Bleak Faith: Forsaken which was a barely playable, buggy mess, but that at the very least had minimal effort put into it and the developers are now working very hard to fix it. Greyhill Incident, however, has no redeeming qualities, other than the fact that the misery is a short run and it also ran absolutely fine – I’m not calling that a good point by the way, a two hour game not crashing to death is the absolute bare minimum.
Jess played Greyhill Incident on PC with a review code. The game will also available on PlayStation 5.
