[REVIEW] Creeping Terror

 I’m a big fan of East Asian horror, even if I’m also simultaneously a bit of a wuss about such games and movies. (Hey, nothing in the rules saying that I can’t both enjoy and be terrified by something.) So upon discovering a little game called Creeping Terror, and seeing the game’s teaser image, it was one that I decided I was going to gather my courage for and start playing.

 
A TYPICAL ASIAN HORROR STORY

Turns out I didn’t need to gather so much courage in the end. Creeping Terror, which has seemingly no relation to the 1964 movie The Creeping Terror, isn’t really a horror game that’s actively scary, but more of a game that’s occasionally tense. It would be easy to blame this on the graphics, which intentionally don’t put much focus on realism but prefer to take a more artistic and stylized approach (which still looks gorgeous, by the way; I’m not knocking it for its art style), but I’ve played games that look worse than this and yet come across as more unnerving. The game’s appearance isn’t the problem.

The fairly short game (you can beat it in around 3 hours, give or take) centres around Arisa, a Japanese exchange student in an American school, who gets convinced to explore a creepy mansion with lots of rumours surrounding it, as part of her friend Bob’s video channel. While inside, the floor gives way and Arisa falls into a system of caves and mines below the mansion, because Japan. (Seriously, a surprising number of J-horror games involve cave systems underneath mansions.) In attempting to escape, she encounters a large angry man wielding a shovel, who attacks and chases her. As the game goes on, you explore more of the caves, the mansion, and a nearby abandoned hospital, trying to find a way for you and your friends to leave the area and to escape the Shovel Man.

With that, it seems like it could have the makings of a really good game, one of those underappreciated gems that languished in obscurity thanks to a bad release schedule or something like that.

TENSION, NO TENSION

 
The game’s biggest threat are the Shovel Man, and some guy in a red cloak that, at least when I played through it, didn’t actually get explained at all, leaving me a bit baffled as to what was even going on with him. Maybe info about him was in some document that I missed, but if the only explanation for a character who plays an active part in the story is in an easily-missed book or piece of paper, then that’s some flimsy storytelling right there. He shows up a couple of times, suggests he knows Arisa, kidnaps someone… and then vanishes and isn’t heard from again. …Okay.

Anyway, the biggest threats are from those two characters, but really, it’s the Shovel Man you’ll need to be concerned with most. He chases you, meaning you have to run away from him. Getting far enough ahead won’t save you; you have to hide. Under tipped mine carts, behind a curtain, under a bed, anything. Do this properly and he’ll leave you alone. This is made difficult, though, by a mechanic I have mixed feelings over: stamina.

Your health bar is also your stamina bar. Lose health due to tripping on rocks, getting swarmed by bats, whatever, and you will have less stamina to use when you need to run away. Which is really interesting, and I like how that was handled. Directly tying health into physical ability makes sense in a game like this. This makes keeping your health bar high a major priority, avoiding all damage if you can, because you will need to run for as long as possible when trying to escape.

However, this only matters when you’re being chased. Not being chased by anything? Then run all you like, the sky’s the limit, no matter how low your health. It’s a cool mechanic that’s inconsistently used. Probably because relying on that mechanic for the rest of the game would have been too tedious, and I understand that, but it makes the game’s rules feel arbitrary and frustrating.

 
Combine this with the fact that if you get unlucky and the Shovel Man catches you, you have 2 chances to escape. Fail both of those chances, and you die. No matter how full your life bar was.

If this so far sounds a lot like Clock Tower games (running from Scissor Shovel Man, hiding to escape him, etc), then you wouldn’t be the first to make that comparison. It feels very much like a Clock Tower spin-off, and I suspect that’s where a lot of the game’s inspiration came from.

Healing items are very common, so the game feels very forgiving and makes you feel like you have a chance. But it’s that double-edged sword. Healing items are common, but you have limited inventory space, so you can’t just stockpile everything. Staying at full health really only matters for stamina purposes, since getting caught means the possibility of a 2-hit KO. You can get away and take a little damage, which means you have less time in which to run, so you probably think at first that you should just use a healing item to recover that little bit of lost stamina, only to discover that healing involves you standing still while you eat something, giving Shovel Man a chance to catch up to you. But let your stamina dip too low before healing, and you’ll be running for 5 steps and then walking sedately until your bar refills.

It makes he game’s tension remarkably inconsistent. The game is slow and pretty calm most of the time, exploring around and looking for a way out and discovering little tidbits of information about the history of the area as you go, punctuated by blind panic as you try to run away… then walk for a bit as your stamina refills, then run again for a bit, then walk a bit more.

THAT LAYOUT, THOUGH...

Creeping Terror was, on its initial Japanese release, a 3DS game. When given an English translation, it was ported to PC, and now can be found on Steam. Nothing wrong with that in theory. But in practice…

The problem with this game’s layout is that it immediately looks like a 3DS game. Like 2 different screens were just combined into one for the PC release. I played this game feeling uncomfortably like I was playing it on an emulator. The action is on the top half of the playing field, with the menu always around on the bottom half.

The menu is where your map is, by the way. Great to have always on screen… until picking up any item means that section switches to your item inventory. On a 3DS, you could just tap the map icon to bring the right field back into view. Here, you have to press the menu button, then back out of it part way, press more buttons to scroll through the different submenus, and finally get back to your map. It’s time-consuming, it’s awkward, and it’s a clunky interface.

I’m not going to say that this is a lazy port. But it feels like a lazy port. It feels rushed, with no care or attention given to how the game would look when played on a different platform, and the end result means that you’re essentially playing a game using half a screen, while the other half is taken up by a menu that doesn’t need to always be in view, or a map that would be so much better as a mini-map.

 

Creeping Terror is not a bad game. Honestly, as far as short little J-horror games go, it’s not too bad. There are multiple endings to uncover (though they mostly all depend on a single branching path, so once you’ve gotten one ending it should be fairly quick to get all of them), the art style is really nice to look at, and the presented story was decently interesting enough to keep me moving forward and looking for more information to uncover the game’s backstory.

But that doesn’t erase the game’s many problems, especially the PC port. Dangling plot threads, a clunky and sloppy interface, and weirdly delayed controls (extra irritating when you’re trying to run away from Shovel Man and you end up overshooting a door even though you stopped running right in front of it) make it more frustrating that it needed to be. Really, I’d love to see this game not ported, but remade. Properly. Give me the same art style, the same story, only actually make it properly for the PC instead of giving that weird “I’m playing this on an emulator” look.