Here They Lie review/rant

Horror games aren’t normally my sort of thing, but I saw a review snarkily describing Here They Lie as a walking simulator, & those very much are my thing, so I thought I’d give it a shot. Awesome & imaginative design, & a great atmosphere, with some good scares that add enough of a feeling of peril to wind up the tension & push you onward, while not being too much for a wuss like me (the feeling of desperately trying to ninja past monsters, before being spotted & having to run frantically toward your goal in the hope you can make it before they catch you, is fantastic).

The story is confusing & poorly explained & it’s hard to say if it goes anywhere as you don’t even know what it’s supposed to be. Now, I don’t need every last detail of a game’s story explained to me. Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, another game described as a walking simulator, which also has some horror elements (just very very lowkey ones, presented in a more bucolic, calm-seeming package) has similar elements - hunting around for snippets that you put together to get a sense of what happened, though so much is still left unclear, & you have to interpret & infer the rest & come to your own meaning. And of course, I bloody love Journey, in which nothing is ever really explained & you interpret it however you want.

Here though… there’s something about how Buddy is trying to find his girlfriend Dana (man he is punching well above his weight there), only maybe that’s not what is happening & Dana created this world? Or something?? And Buddy is in a mirror? But so is everything else maybe because it’s about maybe saving the world? I think??? There’s phonecalls from a friend who may or may not be Buddy? And there are various notes & audio snippets scattered around, which are weird & creepy (well, the notes are - the audio recordings are obnoxious people talking about consciousness & similar bollocks), but don’t connect to anything.

I mean, maybe that’s the point? It was all made up as they went along & nowt makes sense & I’m trying to look for a meaning where there isn’t one etc etc. But it felt like they were going for something super deep & it ended up a mess.

The supposed moral choices didn’t really add anything (aside from getting trophies for what happens in the theatre & your choice at the end). It’s just, like, a few random moments where you have the choice to do something or walk away. But it really is only a few, & the dialogue at the end refers to them so obliquely that it’s obvious it doesn’t make any difference to the ending. Maybe it affected the game in other ways, but it didn’t seem like it. So it doesn’t feel like your choices even matter, making it hard to care.

The controls in VR were also awful. The click-turning was so jarring I was nauseous within moments. This is the ONLY game where I’ve had this problem. In fact, one of my main motivations for getting a VR headset is I normally have motion sickness playing first person 2D games, & hoped that would help, & it has. With this one exception. Luckily the 2D mode here didn’t make me ill - I assume because controls & movement in the 2D version worked & felt exactly like in Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture, & I’ve acclimatised myself to that game (though it was tricky at first & I had to take a lot of breaks). It’s a shame, because this game would be amazing in VR.

Still, annoyances aside I don’t regret playing this game. Exploring the imaginative environments was cool, & it hit the sweet spot of how much a game can scare me before I stop finding it fun, but it was like they spent so much work on how it looked & felt that they half-arsed the narrative, & I can’t see myself replaying it.