DreadOut: Keepers of the Dark

 

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The first Dreadout game was an 'OK' typical style horror item collection game, this 'Keepers of the Dark' is a stand-alone 'dlc' where you dont have to own the original game to play it.

I installed it because I checked and its apparently only about 3 hours long.
But unfortunately it took me twice that, and that's not a good thing.
The game plops you into a hallway with doors on each side numbered 101-108
Each of these doors has two candles, indicating that theres two objectives to complete per level
The first level I tried, was some very annoying underwhelming tunnel maze sewer, so I left that one quickly to not ruin my first impression
The next level was some almost identical swampy water place where you go around in circles with some ghost chasing you. I awkardly figured out the terrible controls to start taking photos of it with my camera, then eventually I came to some boss fight arena with a giant head witch girl screaming at me knocking me over every 10 seconds.
So the game tries to do more action boss battle style gameplay instead of run around and collect items, but it doesn't work well at all

The game simply just doesnt have solid mechanics enough to justify attempting to be more action oriented.

This first 'boss' fight was a big sign of things to come
After awkwardly clumsily trying to dodge the bosses attacks, dying, going to some purgatory black void room and then respawning at the boss arena over and over. I finally killed it and progressed.

While some of the monsters and visuals can be cool and have interesting model designs and the atmosphere can be creepy in a dark room, the charade quickly falls apart once you realize how stupid the gameplay is.
That one level where a weird little doll follows you around was pretty interesting and neat, but eventually you get bored of walking in circles, and realize you have to come back later
Well you come back later with some item, and then you have another scene with a bunch of dancing ghosts, and its extremely unclear what you have to do. This game is full of trial and error bullshit where you have to die over and over again until you figure out what it wants from you. It sucks.
For the dancing ghosts part, you have to basically OBJECTIVE:SURVIVE. And just run around in circles until the song runs out. Its extremely janky and awkward and stupid.
 
So yeah, the objectives are extremely stupid and vauge at times.
Like the times you have to look at the corners of your screen to look at different colored 'vignettes' to give hints of what to do. Like having to walk around until the screen turns 'reddish' and that means theres an in invisible item in the arena you have to take a picture of to progress. Sound fun? yeah its not, its really tedious and obnoxiously boring.
The most egregious example of the game sucking, that took me probably an hour to finally complete
Is this village level where theres a small ghost girl that wants to play hide and seek, and then gives you an invisible timer to find her.
If the timer runs out, you get a jump scare, but the level doesn't end. So you can just keep walking around in circles for hours but never make any progress
You actually have to exit the stage (go back to main menu) and then go back in, to be able to try again.
The first time this happened, I had no idea thats what was expected of me, so I ran around in circles for 30 mins until I googled it and realized my suspision was correct, you have to exit to main menu then try again.

So after exiting to menu and going back to attempt the hide and seek part again, I managed to find the girl once, but then she goes to hide again and you have to find her again
The insane stupid problem is that she hides in extremely obscure unintuitive places. And everytime the 'timer' runs out - you have to exit to main menu and go back to the level to try again
So yeah, I failed this over and over and over for an hour or more, eventually looked it up, and STILL couldnt find her for another 25 mins.
Not to mention the game frequently just glitches out and the objectives bug

Theres another level that has two moronic 'boss fights'
A giant horse that follows you around where you awkwardly have to 'dodge' it and snap photos at it over and over until it dies
Then this INSANE boss called 'Zook' that  hides in the grass and instantly one hit kills you if you get 'too close' So for 40 mins I would slowly creep around and then BAM! instant one hit death.
So naturally having no fucking clue whats going on / what to do, I had to look this up too. Turns out you need to creep around incredibly slowly and try to listen to the music to tell you where he is, and then snap a photo of him to complete the stage.. ugh..

Another nail in the coffin for how fucking shit this game is,
Is this stage with a blind monster
You go around the stage trying to see what this weird blind monster wants, he swipes at you and walks around being kinda unthreatening
You go around collecting items, then eventually back around and try to kill him
I managed to acftually figure out that you have to wait until he shows an eyeball from his throat, then try to take a picture of it.

So I kept doing that, I was taking the picture of the correct spot, I was getting the yellow circles notification that it was doing damage, but I spent 30 mins just taking photo after photo of him , but he wouldnt die.

So once again, fucking clueless,  I just googled it.
Turns out if you miss A FUCKING PIECE OF PAPER NOTE then he wont die.
So you literally have to find a piece of paper, then magically he'll start to take damage, even though previously it looks like you were doing damage to him
What?
Everything about this game is unpolished, buggy, low budget, nonsensical, moronic, time wasting and annoying.
It quickly lost all of its scare/horror and quickly became an annoying stupid chore of trying to figure out wtf the game expects of me to progress.

Theres basically only ONE enjoyable level in the game, its this place full of mannequins where its pretty obvious and straightforward what you have to do, just go around and take pictures of this lady whos obsessed with being beautiful, and then once you do that theres just another monster that you have to find what the real one is instead of mannequins.
Every other level in the game was full of bullshit obscure crap objectives that are just annoying to try to figure out, mostly just running around in circles over and over and over again, being bored, and frustrated, and just wanting to progress.

It doesn't help that the game only has a few controls. but they somehow managed to fuck them up as well. The controls are awful. If you hold the camera button, it keeps going up and down. The button layout is stupid, and the inventory is literally the worst inventory ive ever seen in my life. Nothing makes sense.

What else to say? there are a few moments where yeah the models are cool, theres some creepy sound effects and funny jumpscares, some of the levels can be immersive and the camera flashlight can be engaging in a horror sense, but the actual gameplay is awful and frustrating and the game design is terrible.

Like another example, it will allow you to needlessly go all the way to the other side of the map, just to discover a giant awkward empty arena, only to realize you need to go back to the beginning of the level and kill some specific monster first, THEN when you go back to the arena, theres another awkward shitty 'boss' fight that you have to do, but the game just doesnt have proper mechanics to justify 'action' segments.  Like why couldnt they put a lock on the arena door and make it more obvious that you need to turn around to find a key? The game design is just shit.

When I almost had every candle blown out from all the levels, so almost all objectives complete, a giant door in the main hallway opened and it took me to the 'last boss' which is..surprise, another sewer. So I went through all that, saw the end credits, but still I noticed there was still 2 candles left. Well it turns out i got the 'fake' ending and theres another ending if you get all the objectives. Well if I didnt google it then I basically would have never figured it out, cause you can only get the 'true ending' if you find every single note in the game, and I missed a single one. So I looked up where the final note was, but it wasnt where the guide said it was, so I dont know, fuck it. Game sucks. legit one of the most annoying stupid games ive ever played. I thought it would be a painless , short, silly horror game to play for an evening or two, but it turned into twice the length I thought it was, consisting of mostly running around in circles and engaging in goofy shit janky 'combat' sections and weak jumpscares, yeah even the jumpscares didnt scare me, it was more like "lol that was stupid"

3/10