There are many imitative games of the iconic Resident Evil, from borrowing some of the mechanics of titles to almost complete clones, trying to accurately reproduce the formula for the perfect horror. In this review, we will introduce you to Fobia – St. Dinfna Hotel, and we will tell you if the game manages Friv2Online to claim the laurels of the heir to the great series.
The main character of Fobia is St. Dinfna Hotel, journalist Roberto Lopez, arrives at a secluded hotel where people are rumored to be disappearing. It is likely that the mysterious events may be related to the activities of the local sect, but it is impossible to say with certainty until an investigation is carried out.
However, it quickly comes to a standstill, and when the journalist is about to give up, pack up and rush home, an inexplicable spatial rift appears in the bath of his own room, stunning the character. Roberto comes to his senses already in a new reality: the hotel is almost destroyed, monsters are wheezing somewhere behind the walls, and it seems that the hero has been unconscious for about a year. He will have to arm himself with journalistic ingenuity, a camera and a pistol, and go to reveal the secrets of this terrible place.
Traditionally for the genre, the lion's share of the plot is presented in notes and audio cassettes, while infrequent cut scenes mostly confuse the player, keeping the intrigue until the very end. Finding notes on locations, Roberto will get acquainted in absentia with the previous inhabitants of the hotel and learn about their fate, and some episodes of the friv game even provide an opportunity to look at what is happening through the eyes of other characters.
The ending let us down, but it is interesting to follow to the finale, and the inner perfectionist motivates to study all corners for materials that reveal the gloomy history of the hotel. In addition, various resources are also hidden in secluded places, which will be useful in passing - we are playing survival horror here, and not a walking simulator.
Some hour after the start of the campaign, the protagonist will acquire a pistol, which he will immediately use against the first monster - a shuffling half-zombie, as if he had escaped from Silent Hill: Homecoming. The enemy is deceptively slow: taking a couple of unhurried steps towards the player, he suddenly rushes at him, immediately removing a good half of the health bar. No less insidious are toothy cockroaches that imperceptibly sneak up on the character and suddenly dig into parts of the body.
Things are a bit more boring with the bosses, although sometimes Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel forces you to be smart in order to understand how to defeat the enemy after all. However, the boss fights are mostly long and repetitive. And in general, battles are far from the strongest side of the game, and you will be grateful to the developers that they did not focus on them. Especially if you play with a gamepad : a slightly drunk camera combined with a walking scope can cause seasickness in an unprepared gamer.
If the authors did not work out with the action, then with puzzles, on the contrary, everything is very good. You will have to look for keys, solve ciphers, repair mechanisms and add puzzles. There are very inventive puzzles, and even optional quests, the completion of which will bring valuable rewards. Obvious clues often lead to plot puzzles, but sometimes you have to strain yourself and, for example, read notes more carefully or examine the environment more carefully: missing a box with the right item is easy here.
However, for all the fascination of the puzzles, it was not without an unpleasant nuance. His name is backtracking: Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel makes you have a good run around the hotel rooms in search of a place to use the newly found artifact. Please note that the hero's inventory is not unlimited, so periodically you need to dump loot in a special storage, as in friv games of the Resident Evil series.
And if in RE backtracking does not tire, then in Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel is obsessively annoying, especially since here you often have to wade through mountains of rubbish that do not allow you to rush to the goal with the run button held down. There are no maps in the game, except for those hanging on the floors, so please remember the location of locked doors and puzzles.
Slows down the player and the need to use a camera that shows what is not available to the naked eye. These can be resources, like a bandage or cartridges, as well as quest items, and even hitherto hidden passages: a hole will suddenly appear in place of the wall, and you can get into another room. The camera idea is great, plus it helps you see in the dark with night vision like in Outlast, but the animation of using it is so slow that you don't want to fiddle with it.
Fobia-St. Dinfna Hotel is a very dark game. I rarely have the desire to go into the settings and twist the gamma to the maximum in order to be able to at least see something. Here, I had to. The flashlight that Roberto finds in his adventures is of little help: firstly, for some reason it turns off with any action, which causes the "F" key, to which it is assigned by default, to constantly spam, and secondly, its light reveals a terrible the technical state of the game - soapy textures, lazy character models and environments.
At a glance, the friv game seems like a typical cheap Unreal Engine 4 indie horror game, assembled from ready-made assets and thrown out on Steam for a couple of thousand copies sold - and it really has a modest budget invested in it, but it deserves more than you might think, thanks to its puzzles and some kind of horror atmosphere. For a debut work (and this is the first game of the Brazilian team Pulsatrix Studios), this is a very good result, but, definitely, the developers have room to grow. In the meantime, call Fobia - St. Dinfna Hotel a worthy successor to the Resident Evil series is a stretch.
