REVEIL Review
Horror games with a first-person view are released all the time. For Pixelsplit studio, REVEIL is not only the first attempt to perform in the horror genre, but also the first more or less major release, which even has a publisher – Daedalic Entertainment. I must say that as a horror, the new game does not justify itself, but as a psychological thriller, it works quite well — primarily due to the intriguing plot.
We play as Walter, a man who wakes up in his apartment, takes a couple of pills for a headache and is going to talk to his wife and daughter. He stumbles upon a puzzle left by a child in the nursery, solves it, and after that begins a psychedelic journey through the memories of the hero. We learn that he and his family worked at the Nelson Brothers Circus. The man was mostly busy in the workshop and spent time at the workbench, while the rest of the family showed aerial tricks to the public. Wherever he goes, he does not meet his wife at all, and his daughter seems to be playing catch-up with him and does not allow him to approach her.
According to this description, it should be obvious what happened to Walter’s family, and at first it even became a shame that such a banal plot was written for such a beautiful game. However, the creators of REVEIL have a couple of aces up their sleeve, thanks to which you quickly begin to treat the narrative differently. Even though you understand what fate befell your wife and daughter, it’s still interesting to find out the details.
REVEIL can first of all be called a thriller, not a horror: it’s hard to be scared here. Yes, the atmosphere is creepy: all sorts of frightening clowns, broken mannequins, mud—covered toys – but it doesn’t happen scary.
You can’t find fault with the surroundings — there are a lot of different locations both inside and outside the circus. Rooms with rotating walls, corridors with cloth—covered mannequins, a moving train with circus props – everything is very beautiful, and the number of details is huge. Even in Walter’s apartment there is a lot of stuff that is interesting to study. The design of the environment is so good that with a cursory glance at the room, you can learn a lot from the background of the circus, Walter and his family.
In general, the story told in the game is very interesting. The game lasts only three hours, but these three hours turned out to be very intense: the player is gradually brought up to date, given more and more notes to read, sent to new locations, new plot details are thrown up — there are no complaints about the pace of the narrative. What at first seems boring and banal, at some point turns upside down and leads to one of several endings, among which it is difficult to choose the best one.
The gameplay is also pleasing — although REVEIL is more like a walking simulator, we tried to make the gameplay not boring. Sometimes a funny mini-game will meet, then an interesting puzzle. There are no complicated riddles, but a considerable part of them consists of several stages, and therefore they are interesting to solve.
There are stealth episodes, but they don’t cause any problems at all – the opponents are pretty dumb, so it’s not difficult to hide from them. But even if you are caught, the collected items will remain in the inventory — mistakes are not punished by deleting progress. For all their simplicity, I would still not call such episodes superfluous — they are important for the plot, and they can be creepy, especially until the first time you catch the enemy’s eye.
Reveil is an excellent representative of psychological thrillers, which perfectly manages to immerse the player in the world of a broken human psyche. Despite the simplicity of the gameplay, the ever-growing degree of surrealism simultaneously keeps you in suspense and allows you to experience a whole range of emotions, trying on the role of not the most successful family man who is in a very shaky mental state. Slight disappointment may be caused by not the best graphics, rare bugs and sometimes strange physics of objects, but otherwise Reveil will give its portion of impressions to all fans of extraordinary stories.
