JanduSoft’s Scholar’s Mate is an escape room-style horror puzzle game where you play as Judith, a woman who has been kidnapped and locked in an abandoned psychiatric hospital where a brutish killer stalks the halls. We must escape this place while avoiding the hunter who will be relentlessly pacing around the building.
Scholar’s Mate started off well with an eerie setting and some great voice acting from Aimee Smith as Judith. There’s very little to no music despite the soundtrack being mentioned proudly on the game’s Steam page as a feature, but I often find that this works in favour of most horror games – including this one, as it allows the atmosphere to take control. I did find that the symbol to highlight interactable objects was ridiculously small, so much so that it was indistinguishable from the flecks of dust in the air. This meant I struggled to find objects lying in the dark on numerous occasions, which wasted a lot of time. This was more frustrating given the example image in the difficulty settings showed a much clearer interactable symbol than the one in the actual game (you can turn the symbol off by switching to a higher difficulty).
After solving the first few puzzles and switching on the power to the first floor, we hear a scream coming from one of the locked rooms. But we are unable to investigate before our hulking kidnapper bursts from the basement and begins his relentless pursuit.
Scholar’s Mate’s villain feels like Mr X’s lame cousin. He will pace in the same loop around the building, growling repetitive lines about being able to smell you and demanding that you stop hiding. If you open a door, walk or flick a switch while he’s nearby, he’ll hear you and a chase will ensue. Luckily, on the ‘normal’ difficulty, his AI is pretty easy to outsmart; even when you’ve attracted his attention, you can outrun him and the moment you find cover, he will forget he ever saw you to begin with. Unfortunately, despite what the difficulty settings say, I found that adjusting the difficulty did very little in lessening his hearing capabilities; he was still able to hear me walking around when I was on a different floor to him.
It does feel like the atmosphere goes out the window the moment the hunter shows up. You can’t even take time to read the lore snippets lying around because the game doesn’t pause while you’re reading. As you can imagine, trying to take the time to solve puzzles also becomes painstakingly difficult once you have to consistently avoid an invincible monster too. This definitely heightened my anxiety of what I think would have otherwise been quite a forgettable puzzle game. But as this nightmare progressed, I began to realise that this was for the worse rather than the better.
For one, you move at a snail’s pace when crouching, meaning you can’t even make it from one end of the hallway to the other without the hunter looping back around and coming across you. This wouldn’t be so bad if there were more opportunities to hide, such as a locker or under a bed. But there’s not, so if you enter a room that doesn’t have an object to hide behind, you will die. This also makes having to keep traipsing back and forth to the basement to switch the electricity to a different floor incredibly annoying, especially when we keep being sent on a wild goose chase with projector slides which don’t actually reveal anything helpful after we’ve just gone through the trouble of turning the 1st Floor’s power back on and then made our way to the projector room on the other side of the corridor.
This turns Scholar’s Mate into a waiting game. Luckily the sound design for the hunter’s footsteps is well done, and with a good set of headphones you can tell where he is based on his footsteps. This means wearing headphones is really essential for being able to even play Scholar’s Mate, but this is fine as I can name a few more horror games that rely on sound design like this. What isn’t so great is that this also means 60% of the game involves finding a hiding place and waiting around three minutes for the hunter to do his round until you can have the most amount of time to slowly crawl to where you need to be. Then you do whatever you needed to do, find a hiding place, and wait again. Rinse and repeat.
This all was massively annoying, but what really knocked Scholar’s Mate’s experience were the bugs – one of which was game-breaking but was patched right before this review went out. To begin with, it was small things; the hunter would get caught on obstacles or would sometimes freeze in place until I walked past his eyeline. There was a point where I also loaded up a save and found myself right outside a closed door with the monster nearby, meaning every time I loaded up that save, I would have to hide and wait for the monster to get out of ear-shot or open the door and quickly run for cover before he caught me. I also encountered a problem where I couldn’t view projector slides because when I tried to load a slide into the projector, the screen would bug out and I couldn’t put anything in there – so I had to rely on watching Let’s Play clips to see what the slides actually showed. The game-breaking bug I encountered was caused by the hunter interrupting me as I was flicking a switch, meaning whenever I loaded up the game, the switch would be turned on but the event that was supposed to happen afterwards would be frozen. This was mainly caused by the hunter’s overly sensitive hearing, the fact that there is no way to protect yourself if he does decide to come into the room you’re in, and also the game’s autosave feature which doesn’t let you load up alternative saves.
Scholar’s Mate is a messy puzzle horror game with, quite frankly, one of the most overbearing and annoying enemies I have encountered in a game before. This encounter complete saps any fun and even atmosphere from the game, turning it into a slog of painstakingly crawling from one end of the building to the other while having to listen to a repetition of the hunter’s favourite slogans.
Jess played Scholar’s Mate on PC with a review code.
