Keepers of The Dark was supposed to be a DLC for the first dreadout but it became so big they made it another game or a "standalone expansion". The way it's done is that you have 8 doors and two bosses in each door that you can fight and vanish.

The combat in DreadOut has always been.. clunky. Every attack can put you into a stunlock and whenever you die, you are taking into a "Limbo" section where you need to press sprint + W for like 20 seconds before you can go back to the game to just get stunlocked to death in 3 seconds, making combat incredibly frustrating. The reason why the Limbo exists with that distance that increments each time you die, is because it allows the monster to roam and not spawncamp you.

For their combat dedicated expansion; have they improved or fixed any of the issues in the previous scenario? No.
The first boss is a giant head in the dark with black hair that they use to attack you. You cannot see the hair because it's fucking DARK. To make this worse, each corner has a minion head that you can kill but respawns really quickly. If you get hit to it, you're gonna get stunned (like it happens with every attack) and it will give enough time for the boss to attack you and in that stun the head in the corner.. you know where I'm going with this.

The game main definition of difficulty is just multiple enemies. Everytime a fight is interesting enough, they add two or four more enemies to stunlock you and I get it, it's annoying, it's frustrating, it's difficult, but I feel like this game shines out the most when the difficulty doesn't come from dodging attacks but from doing puzzles or a specific task, and I say this as a dark souls, shmup bullet hell player that bathes and drinks difficult games because I enjoy them, it's just that for DreadOut, that difficulty in combat clashes with the game's entire personality and feeling.

There are some gimmicky/puzzle ghosts that were genuinely fun and enjoyable to do, like a mannequin lady that hides inbetween a lot of other mannequins or another lady that's obsessed with her beauty and uses needles to feel and look prettier. She basically runs all over the place when engaged and stops at a certain point where you need to confront her until she runs again.
These two also follow the "randomly spawn two or four stuff to make it more difficult" rule, but the way they do it is by spawning mannequins that move only when you don't see them or by telekinesis throwing stuff at you. While I didn't enjoy the latter, it certainly wasn't as bad as other ghosts in the game.

The scenarios are recycled from the first game but the ghosts, stories and lore is new. The new story is really vague to the point where I'm not entirely sure what happened and it's shown to you sometimes after a level it's complete, some other times with uh.. jumpscares? for some reason? like there was one where it was just a dinning table with a loud noise and it was so funny to me.

I don't recommend this game simply because it isn't a good game. If you got it with the bundle, by all means feel free to play it but don't buy this alone. It's genuinely not good and it serves more as curiosity or if you're okay with keeping up with BS or downloading a cheat engine table online or whatever. If you want a solid experience that's enjoyable, good and interesting from start to finish; this isn't it.

Reviewed on Jan 29, 2024


Comments