Song of Horror is a psychological horror adventure. Face the manifestations of the Presence, an unpredictable, eldritch AI that reacts to your way of playing: you won't experience two exact gameplays. Death is permanent: you may die, but the horror continues.
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I think I liked what I played, but then found something more interesting and forgot about it. Something about a door flickering in and out of existence made me groan, and there were a few too many horror tropes that rubbed me the wrong way. But I'm gonna have to give this another go someday.
spooky box
One of the best pure horror games with fantastic fixed/tracking camera angles, strong level design, challenging puzzles and above all a terrifying atmosphere built from its random events and audio design. Having no combat system, one of its unique points is its permadeath that further heightens the risk and caution in exploration. The episode structure also allows for varied levels without having to interconnect and make each more compact and thought out which I would like to see more in other games. Having an older cast too is much appreciated with their own perspectives and thoughts in each episode. Overall, it is just a strong package with its mechanics and story.
As for criticisms, the encounter mini-games are fine but it lacks accessibility support for those requiring rapid taps and button pressure specially on the higher difficulty where they get harder in succeeding episodes. Perhaps options to hold instead of tap and analog stick instead of pressure would be a good compromise. With permadeath, the game has to make sure every death is consistent and fair and I think the game mostly does that except one inconsistency in the third episode. While I like the puzzles, they can be challenging or difficult but still present a block specially in the last two episodes. The one personal thing I lament is the lack of tank controls which is just a shame. Although the 3D controls is quite workable.
Strong recommend this experience and one of my new personal favorites.
As for criticisms, the encounter mini-games are fine but it lacks accessibility support for those requiring rapid taps and button pressure specially on the higher difficulty where they get harder in succeeding episodes. Perhaps options to hold instead of tap and analog stick instead of pressure would be a good compromise. With permadeath, the game has to make sure every death is consistent and fair and I think the game mostly does that except one inconsistency in the third episode. While I like the puzzles, they can be challenging or difficult but still present a block specially in the last two episodes. The one personal thing I lament is the lack of tank controls which is just a shame. Although the 3D controls is quite workable.
Strong recommend this experience and one of my new personal favorites.
survived a ghost assault only to die by falling out a window onto the conk crete cause this dumbass didn't look first
Looking at the raw ingredients, Song of Horror has all the makings of a modern masterpiece: genuinely spooky atmosphere, inventive and memorable scares, gorgeous graphics, gameplay variety, and a story that isn't half bad and helps build the lore and add to the scariness of the world.
Why, then, am I giving it a 4/5 and not a 4.5/5 or higher? Well, for a few key reasons.
The biggest problem I have with the game is how it handles its gimmick of permadeath. And yes, I say "gimmick," because that's exactly what it ends up amounting to in how the game implements it. You see, the ultimate ending of the game isn't affected by which characters live or die by the end. The story marches on, with minimal change and absolutely no alteration of outcome, regardless of whether the player keeps all of the playable characters alive, a certain number alive, or all but one alive. This is because the main character of the game, Daniel, cannot die. He has to make it to the end of the game because the story only has one ending. Therefore, if you "die" while playing as Daniel, you get to try again, and permadeath doesn't apply.
So, why in the world would anyone ever play as any of the other characters on offer? Well, the game actually does reward players for switching it up and revisiting the same areas as different characters in the form of the gameplay experience itself. Depending on the character's background, they might be able to, say, disable an alarm before it goes off, or enter a certain area of a map early, or have a unique reaction to a discovery if the contents are specifically harrowing to them. And these small differences do, in theory, give the game a lot of variety and replay value.
But this is where the game's biggest shortcoming lies. It is trying to be two counterintuitive things at once. On the one hand, the game is full of puzzles (which are great, by the way), collectables, opportunities for exploration, and unique character experiences. But on the other hand, that permadeath feature ends up discouraging the player from even bothering to explore much of the game's offered variety. This is due to the aggravation of suffering instant kills for merely clicking on a pathway that often has no indication of danger prior. It's a complete crapshoot on whether turning a certain corner or picking up a certain item will result in the character's sudden and permanent demise. Suffering such consequences for an honest mistake that I was fully warned of ahead of time and can only blame myself for is one thing; being taken out by a cheap shot because the game just wants to screw with me in the service of cheap scares is another.
The other big problem I have, which again ties into the permadeath feature, is how unintuitive and poorly explained the QTE sequences are in this game. I don't hate QTE, and depending on the type of game is using them, they are sometimes the only real player agency on offer. And I'm fine with that in the right context. I enjoy "experience games," "walking simulators," and interactive movies, and in games of those types, QTEs are common. But the best among those games also make such sequences incredibly straightforward to understand and follow. This game does not. Most of these QTE "mini-games" give a brief (and poor) instruction one time, then leave it to the player to figure it out from then on. And these instructions often do not accurately explain what the player is actually supposed to do.
For example: one of these mini-games require the player to hide somewhere while being pursued by an enemy, and while hidden, the player must, according to the on-screen instructions, "match the character's heartbeat" by pressing a certain button. But that's not actually the full story. You can't simply "match the heartbeat" by timing the button press to the sound of the beats. Instead, you must match the visual that pops up on the screen of a white circle growing and shrinking. You have to press the button when the circle is at its smallest aperture. And this visual sometimes doesn't line up perfectly with the sound of the heartbeat. Oftentimes, it follows its own pattern and rhythm, and so, I often found myself having to fight my natural instinct to match the sound of the heartbeat and focus only on the sometimes counterintuitive visual cues. As one might imagine, I wasn't always successful at this.
And remember: you only get one shot at these things. If you fail them once, your character is dead. For the rest of the game.
Unless you play as Daniel, and then you simply restart the stage you're currently on.
This sloppy approach at creating tension and a sense of danger through shoddy mechanics rather than atmosphere and true challenge is the most aggravating thing about this game for me. Primarily because the game does not need these weaker elements in order to be successfully scary. So many other things that are part of the game not only work, but they work brilliantly. Every time a ghost appears out of nowhere in the room with you, or you catch a glimpse of shadowy figures moving in the background, or you hear a noise in the darkness, the game succeeds at creating a very real sense of danger and dread. It doesn't need the threat of permanent death of a character, or clumsy QTEs going wrong, in order to keep the player on edge. Those added elements simply serve to drag the game experience down and hobble it. Furthermore, the game's insistence on keeping the Daniel character alive to the end only encourages players to always play Daniel and discourages them from experimenting with other characters. I mean, why would they when they can avoid the nonsense by just playing as the character who is allowed multiple attempts at clearing these unfair and poorly implemented hurdles?
I should note that you can play any character you want and avoid permadeath, but if you do so, the game will not let you unlock the higher difficulty for multiple playthroughs. Essentially, the game punishes you for playing it "the wrong way," despite making that way an officially offered feature. Just absolutely baffling.
Despite the flaws, I genuinely love the game's atmosphere. And for that reason alone, I can't give it anything lower than 4/5. But it was so close to being a 4.5/5 or a 5/5 that it aggravates me to see them get it so wrong in such avoidable ways.
Why, then, am I giving it a 4/5 and not a 4.5/5 or higher? Well, for a few key reasons.
The biggest problem I have with the game is how it handles its gimmick of permadeath. And yes, I say "gimmick," because that's exactly what it ends up amounting to in how the game implements it. You see, the ultimate ending of the game isn't affected by which characters live or die by the end. The story marches on, with minimal change and absolutely no alteration of outcome, regardless of whether the player keeps all of the playable characters alive, a certain number alive, or all but one alive. This is because the main character of the game, Daniel, cannot die. He has to make it to the end of the game because the story only has one ending. Therefore, if you "die" while playing as Daniel, you get to try again, and permadeath doesn't apply.
So, why in the world would anyone ever play as any of the other characters on offer? Well, the game actually does reward players for switching it up and revisiting the same areas as different characters in the form of the gameplay experience itself. Depending on the character's background, they might be able to, say, disable an alarm before it goes off, or enter a certain area of a map early, or have a unique reaction to a discovery if the contents are specifically harrowing to them. And these small differences do, in theory, give the game a lot of variety and replay value.
But this is where the game's biggest shortcoming lies. It is trying to be two counterintuitive things at once. On the one hand, the game is full of puzzles (which are great, by the way), collectables, opportunities for exploration, and unique character experiences. But on the other hand, that permadeath feature ends up discouraging the player from even bothering to explore much of the game's offered variety. This is due to the aggravation of suffering instant kills for merely clicking on a pathway that often has no indication of danger prior. It's a complete crapshoot on whether turning a certain corner or picking up a certain item will result in the character's sudden and permanent demise. Suffering such consequences for an honest mistake that I was fully warned of ahead of time and can only blame myself for is one thing; being taken out by a cheap shot because the game just wants to screw with me in the service of cheap scares is another.
The other big problem I have, which again ties into the permadeath feature, is how unintuitive and poorly explained the QTE sequences are in this game. I don't hate QTE, and depending on the type of game is using them, they are sometimes the only real player agency on offer. And I'm fine with that in the right context. I enjoy "experience games," "walking simulators," and interactive movies, and in games of those types, QTEs are common. But the best among those games also make such sequences incredibly straightforward to understand and follow. This game does not. Most of these QTE "mini-games" give a brief (and poor) instruction one time, then leave it to the player to figure it out from then on. And these instructions often do not accurately explain what the player is actually supposed to do.
For example: one of these mini-games require the player to hide somewhere while being pursued by an enemy, and while hidden, the player must, according to the on-screen instructions, "match the character's heartbeat" by pressing a certain button. But that's not actually the full story. You can't simply "match the heartbeat" by timing the button press to the sound of the beats. Instead, you must match the visual that pops up on the screen of a white circle growing and shrinking. You have to press the button when the circle is at its smallest aperture. And this visual sometimes doesn't line up perfectly with the sound of the heartbeat. Oftentimes, it follows its own pattern and rhythm, and so, I often found myself having to fight my natural instinct to match the sound of the heartbeat and focus only on the sometimes counterintuitive visual cues. As one might imagine, I wasn't always successful at this.
And remember: you only get one shot at these things. If you fail them once, your character is dead. For the rest of the game.
Unless you play as Daniel, and then you simply restart the stage you're currently on.
This sloppy approach at creating tension and a sense of danger through shoddy mechanics rather than atmosphere and true challenge is the most aggravating thing about this game for me. Primarily because the game does not need these weaker elements in order to be successfully scary. So many other things that are part of the game not only work, but they work brilliantly. Every time a ghost appears out of nowhere in the room with you, or you catch a glimpse of shadowy figures moving in the background, or you hear a noise in the darkness, the game succeeds at creating a very real sense of danger and dread. It doesn't need the threat of permanent death of a character, or clumsy QTEs going wrong, in order to keep the player on edge. Those added elements simply serve to drag the game experience down and hobble it. Furthermore, the game's insistence on keeping the Daniel character alive to the end only encourages players to always play Daniel and discourages them from experimenting with other characters. I mean, why would they when they can avoid the nonsense by just playing as the character who is allowed multiple attempts at clearing these unfair and poorly implemented hurdles?
I should note that you can play any character you want and avoid permadeath, but if you do so, the game will not let you unlock the higher difficulty for multiple playthroughs. Essentially, the game punishes you for playing it "the wrong way," despite making that way an officially offered feature. Just absolutely baffling.
Despite the flaws, I genuinely love the game's atmosphere. And for that reason alone, I can't give it anything lower than 4/5. But it was so close to being a 4.5/5 or a 5/5 that it aggravates me to see them get it so wrong in such avoidable ways.
I heard that when Resident Evil effectively codified the survival horror genre a lot of its flaws became deliberate inclusions because those limitations were what made RE's atmosphere and gameplay so memorably scary.
And if that doesn't work as a lead-in for Song of Horror I don't know what would. The game has so many ideas that make me go "why" at their inclusion but fuck me if they don't fulfil their purpose of making the game feel legitimately stressful to play. Like, for example, I don't exactly think "maze with walls you can only see via still, oddly angled images right at the beginning of the gauntlet and also if you touch the walls three times you're permakilled" is exactly fair or fun, but it's certainly scary in a way that goes beyond just the story or presentation of the game. If something bad gets included as a method of successfully achieving what the game wants to achieve, does that make that inclusion good, ultimately?
What helps make considering this game a whole lot less complicated, though, is that it's largely pretty good otherwise. The game goes like this: you are trying to solve the mystery of a being hunting you down called 'The Presence,' and trying to find traces of those who have previously encountered it. You and your group of closest confidants and also random people who stumble onto the scene must head into an archetypal horror environment, solve puzzles and achieve your objectives fixed-camera-survival-horror style all while The Presence hunts you down and makes you play minigames, lest the character you play as get killed forever. In this vein, the core gameplay really works. Environments are large and explorable but condensed enough that it's unlikely that you'll find yourself lost or in a room that doesn't serve a greater purpose. The many characters you can choose from are distinct in how they react to the environment — while I really think there could've been room for divergence for how the level changes based on the character you play (why does Erika, for example, need to get the components for a puzzle box which she then needs to solve to get the keys for her own apartment), the differing motivations and reactions of each character give a bit of value to going through episodes multiple times. The minigames themselves really help add tension even to otherwise quiet segments, as the fact that they're effectively randomly deployed means that you're never sure whether you're safe or what's going to happen just around the corner.
There are unconditional problems though, too. Episode 2 as a whole really brings the whole game down. While all the other levels have simple, one-word descriptions which tell you exactly what they are and are good prompts for puzzles endemic to those sorts of biomes, Episode 2 is... an antique shop which is connected to a series of apartments which is also connected to a storage facility which is a fucking labyrinth, and I think that lack of identity really leads into its problems: its more generic puzzles, the huge amount of areas and things that don't do anything and the horrid storage maze that functions as the climax. The game also doesn't do a great job at tutorializing certain mechanics: the stats that define each character never get explained at all (I still don't know what "Stealth" does) and the tutorials the game gives really do not do a good job of indicating what the player has to do — I almost failed the breathing minigame the first time because of this and I never really figured out how exactly the door minigame was actually supposed to work. The jank definitely does contribute to the atmosphere, but I did get frustrated from dying/nearly dying from things I felt could've been avoidable had the game taught me better.
Ultimately, though, the game is complicated... but also good, I think. It falls wayyyyyy short of 'great' given how as a game a lot of its mechanics and setpieces set out to frustrate the player, but as a horror experience, I can't deny that it worked exactly as intended. 7/10. If you wanna try it out for yourself I'm reasonably sure Episode 1 is out there for free so, like, check it out. At the very least, you won't regret it.
And if that doesn't work as a lead-in for Song of Horror I don't know what would. The game has so many ideas that make me go "why" at their inclusion but fuck me if they don't fulfil their purpose of making the game feel legitimately stressful to play. Like, for example, I don't exactly think "maze with walls you can only see via still, oddly angled images right at the beginning of the gauntlet and also if you touch the walls three times you're permakilled" is exactly fair or fun, but it's certainly scary in a way that goes beyond just the story or presentation of the game. If something bad gets included as a method of successfully achieving what the game wants to achieve, does that make that inclusion good, ultimately?
What helps make considering this game a whole lot less complicated, though, is that it's largely pretty good otherwise. The game goes like this: you are trying to solve the mystery of a being hunting you down called 'The Presence,' and trying to find traces of those who have previously encountered it. You and your group of closest confidants and also random people who stumble onto the scene must head into an archetypal horror environment, solve puzzles and achieve your objectives fixed-camera-survival-horror style all while The Presence hunts you down and makes you play minigames, lest the character you play as get killed forever. In this vein, the core gameplay really works. Environments are large and explorable but condensed enough that it's unlikely that you'll find yourself lost or in a room that doesn't serve a greater purpose. The many characters you can choose from are distinct in how they react to the environment — while I really think there could've been room for divergence for how the level changes based on the character you play (why does Erika, for example, need to get the components for a puzzle box which she then needs to solve to get the keys for her own apartment), the differing motivations and reactions of each character give a bit of value to going through episodes multiple times. The minigames themselves really help add tension even to otherwise quiet segments, as the fact that they're effectively randomly deployed means that you're never sure whether you're safe or what's going to happen just around the corner.
There are unconditional problems though, too. Episode 2 as a whole really brings the whole game down. While all the other levels have simple, one-word descriptions which tell you exactly what they are and are good prompts for puzzles endemic to those sorts of biomes, Episode 2 is... an antique shop which is connected to a series of apartments which is also connected to a storage facility which is a fucking labyrinth, and I think that lack of identity really leads into its problems: its more generic puzzles, the huge amount of areas and things that don't do anything and the horrid storage maze that functions as the climax. The game also doesn't do a great job at tutorializing certain mechanics: the stats that define each character never get explained at all (I still don't know what "Stealth" does) and the tutorials the game gives really do not do a good job of indicating what the player has to do — I almost failed the breathing minigame the first time because of this and I never really figured out how exactly the door minigame was actually supposed to work. The jank definitely does contribute to the atmosphere, but I did get frustrated from dying/nearly dying from things I felt could've been avoidable had the game taught me better.
Ultimately, though, the game is complicated... but also good, I think. It falls wayyyyyy short of 'great' given how as a game a lot of its mechanics and setpieces set out to frustrate the player, but as a horror experience, I can't deny that it worked exactly as intended. 7/10. If you wanna try it out for yourself I'm reasonably sure Episode 1 is out there for free so, like, check it out. At the very least, you won't regret it.