Developed by Camel 101 and published by Wired Productions, Those Who Remain is a psychological horror game meets narrative adventure that, while largely familiar, seems like it may bring some interesting twists to the table.
Following a man whose depths of loneliness are unfurled over time, Those Who Remain immediately conjures to mind a handful of similarly bleak mysteries. Separated from his wife and daughter (though just how irrevocably is seemingly intentionally unclear), Edward is on a downward spiral with plenty of skeletons in his closet. Games like Home Sweet Home, Green Hell, and Chernobylite have all excelled with the concept in recent times, so Those Who Remains’ narrative doesn’t exactly leap off the screen as something unique — at least initially.
After travelling to a motel in the town of Dormont, Edward’s car is stolen and everything plunged into darkness with malevolent shapes waiting beyond the light. Venture too far from a light source and the strange creatures will consume you, though getting up close and personal to their character models does immediately neuter their scare factor. It’s not that they are bad per se, just somewhat basic — perhaps a wall of darkness and peering eyes would have been a bit more effective. That said, it does seem like Those Who Remain will have even more daunting ghoulies the deeper into the darkness you descend; the preview build offered just a small slice of what’s ahead.
Those Who Remain is a simple experience to begin with in terms of gameplay, items being inspected with the left click and thrown with the right. It’s just a case of turning lights on to disperse the apparitions and moving forward through Dormont, its “empty” houses and unnerving roads lighting up as you go. There’s the obligatory fumbling around to find keys, and would it really be a first-person horror game without them?
However, when portals are introduced, that’s when Those Who Remain really starts to distinguish itself. Appearing as doorways, these portals allow you to travel to a different time in the same spot, making its puzzles ingenious and likely to absolutely melt minds the further the game progresses. One puzzle sees you travelling through the portal to get some weed killer, spraying it on a car so you can access the lights in the present time, and then lifting a smaller wooden pallet so that the larger, previously too heavy wooden pallet also moves.
This mechanic was probably the jewel in Those Who Remain’s crown from what I played, though the full release will also give you the option to save Dormont survivors, even if everyone in the town isn’t as innocent as they appear. On top of that, Edward’s decisions will create multiple paths that decide his fate, but I wasn’t able to notice any hints of choice within my short slice of gameplay. It was rather brief at roughly 20 minutes of gameplay, almost too little to really get invested in the game’s world, though it does show some overall promise.
While I have my concerns that the sad-man-in-a-twisted-place trope might have been done to death (really, it’s been wheeled out regularly since the early Silent Hill days) and its horror elements are fairly vanilla, I still feel that Those Who Remain may have a few aces up its sleeve. It was just a flying visit to Dormont for me, after all.
It will be fascinating to see how Those Who Remain distances itself from its peers when it launches this June.
PC preview build supplied by PR
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