The Beast Inside

 


The Beast Inside is a weird coincidence, considering I recently finished Amnesia:Rebirth and this game directly copies many of the motifs from that game. The premise is something like; you move into this house in the countryside with your pregnant wife, you work for a Spy agency or something, and weird shit starts to happen where you're being spied on.

But it didn't take long for my opinion of this game to start to sour.
Right from the first few hours of the game, I was thinking to myself "is most of this game going to spent outside in broad daylight doing menial tasks?" - The answer unfortunately, is YES! What were they thinking!?
The way the game works is like this:

You play one chapter in 'present day' wandering around in broad daylight, doing ordinary literal chores like talking to your wife, painting the walls, going to get things from the shed, going into the attic to find something, bringing boxes upstairs. Literally just walking around, talking to your wife, doing house work. Or, if you get a few hours in, instead of going around your house, you instead wander around the forest behind your house using this really awful, tedious, sci-fi looking tracking device where you have to stare at some mini-screen and follow its signal and then 'scan' the area for clues, as well as randomly having to do some fucking stupid, bizarre, minigame where you shoot 'anomolies' in the sky with your sci-fi gun beams. I mean, what? so god damn stupid, all of this shit just feels like a massive chore and waste of time.

Its like you do one 'ordinary present day' chapter, then the next chapter:
you 'wake up' in the past, like 17th century, as some alternate version of yourself or something, wander around in the dark in old houses , inns, or mines, getting jump scares, and having spooky atmosphere.

Thats how the game ALWAYS operates.
You do one ordinary, broad daylight, present day chapter
Then the next chapter afterwards is always in the past, and horror

It revolves this way for all 13 chapters.

And let me tell you, every single present day broad daylight chapter is a total fucking slog and complete boring bullshit. The first half of them, like I said, you do literally nothing but menial housechores and talking to your wife, or doing some awful overly complex puzzles that make you stare at cryptic journals and scrolls for 30 mins straight before you figure it out.  Or, you wander around the backwoods of your house doing more boring bullshit like turning off powerlines, using your stupid little sci-fi scanner gun to follow some trail, theres like ZERO interesting moments. The game is so god damn boring, I was thinking to myself what the fuck am i playing frequently? Why do I have to do these boring broad daylight bullshit chapters where NOTHING happens, you just walk around and mumble bullshit to yourself with god-awful voice acting that sounds so bad you'll be either cringing or laughing at how retarded it sounds. You can clearly tell the voice actor is hastily reading off a page, without even using proper commas it sounds janky, and they constantly swear and it just sounds so unnatural and stupid. Terrible voice acting.

I mean I can't emphesis this enough, I couldnt wrap my head around why half of the game I'm just walking around in broad daylight doing absolute bullshit FOR HALF OF THE GAME. None of it is interesting! I just finished the game and I can barely remember anything about it, it was that boring. All I can remember is staring at this stupid tracking device thing and walking around in circles trying to find the next 'scanner' point where I can progress, often times getting lost, running in circles, not finding where it is, running it glitches and bugs where I have to reload previous checkpoint, or missing something like having to walk up to this specific bush I can chop with a machete or some bullshit. Its just terrible.

The game is basically a clone of Amnesia, you have the exact same control scheme where you walk up to objects in the enviornment and a hand appears and you use the same sort of physics system to move it around, but its just not as well done in this game. The controls feel clunky and janky and something about the mouse movement is just off, even with mouse sensitivty cranked you still have to swing your arm around like a jackass to do anything or operate any of the levers or tools or whatever shit you have to do. Feels awkward and not as It should. It even has some of the same puzzles as Amenesia:Rebirth such as the one in the mine where you have to push the cart into a wall.

Ok so half the chapters you're doing menial housework, in broad daylight, talking to your wife about bullshit, or wandering around in the woods in broad daylight, with zero horror. So what about the 'horror' chapters in between?

Yes, these are definitely better, and more interesting. In the horror chapters you spend them at night, in old victorian places, playing as some sort of alternate version of yourself, you talk differently and youre recounting some events of this top hat guy that goes around killing people but saving you or something. Look, the story is terrible. The character models, voice acting, and writing just feels so amateur and low budget. The wife character model looks like something straight out of unity asset store, it looks like an asset flip or some shit. The character models look terrible. The graphics in general arent awful, its got some impressive lighting and specular effects, but overal the game just looks extremely geneirc and bland, like something default in Unreal engine. It just has no character or soul. Its not as graphically impressive or polished as other similar games, for example objects in the environment frequently wont react to you, like if you run into a chain on the wall it just stays a static object, things like that. The environment is mostly static

Right, so in the horror chapters, things are a bit more interesting. Another reason its an Amnesia: Rebirth clone in particular is because you even have the same matches and lantern system, and lighting candles on the wall in the exact same way. Though this mechanic is incredibly trivial because I barely ever felt any need to use it, and by the end of game had like 100 matches and dozens of lantern refills.  The game isn't that dark even on low gamma settings.

But yeah in these horror chapters its the typical stuff, walking around victorian houses and hearing creepy noises, mostly the only forms of horror you get are these jump scares of some white ghost looking thing crawling fast at you, or jumping in your face briefly, atleast for the first half of the game. But as the game progresses, you start to have to actually avoid enemies, where you get a bunch of these "Run!" sections where the enemies keep popping up left, right , and infront of you and you have to think quick to take different paths, this quickly becomes trial and error bullshit, and the game has really long load screens so that gets old quick.

But yeah, some of the atmosphere in the horror sections are pretty decent, atleast early on. There's not all that many memorable momenmts in the horror chapters either, unfortunately, you dont come across any gruesome sights all that often, a few times you see a corpse here and there, or do a cutscene stabbing some monster, but its nothing shocking or anything youll remember in a few hours. The game is just incredibly boring and generic, nothing stands out. Towards the end of the game you start doing this Mine section where you go underground and have to find your way through this maze where it keeps resetting unless you take the right path, this part was an absolute fucking slog because youre getting chased by a monster the whole time and youll be dying and reloading A LOT, because you know that part in Mario 64 with the endless staircase? Its like that, except you have to take the right paths to get out. And you have a note in your inventory you have to keep opening and staring at to figure out the right path, its just an absolute chore. Its scary the first 1-3 times, but I had to try over and over again like 20 times to where it just started to become a massive slog. Fuck that part.

Then afterwards, you get to a swamp area, where its trying to clone something from Amnesia: The dark descent, the monster in the water, and you cant touch the water for too long or you get eaten, yeah I found this part pretty annoying too but it wasnt as bad as the mine. Then right after that you go into a house with this old witch lady in it and you have to sneak around and grab the keys from off her, but she keeps chasing you, and yeah this took a lot of trial and error too.  Like its not terrible, I get that horror games need to have stuff like this, but I dont know the stealth system is just extremely barebones, you cant hide anywhere, it just plays a sound when youre spotted and the music ends when youre safe thats about it.

And yeah you do all this, snapping in and out of modern/present day, trying to follow some story about 'commies spying on us'  no really, he keeps saying "fucking commies" so apparently the main character is a spy and is also being followed by spies, but also some shit about family drama and your father and your child, but its just a total snoozefest plus the characters and voice acting are laughably stupid and cringe I could hardly give a shit. By the end of the game its revealed you murdered your wife because you thought she was a spy, because youre in a mental hospital and youre just going mad with paranoia, but that could be the bad ending I dont know or really care. The main anagonist isnt scary or shocking or threatning at all its just some idiot in a tophat, lame.

Like I said this thing where you keep snapping in and out of modern/present day with each chapter is just such a stupid design choice. Atleast during the modern sections it should have some horror, but no, its just this really boring 'detective simulator' except the gameplay is really snooze and you barely do anything, there are frequent extremely crpytic puzzles where everytime I saw one of them i just went "ugh not this again" cause I knew I had to labour over some cryptic bullshit for dozens of minutes, its just not fun. By the end of the game I looked up the answer to one of these puzzles cause I just didnt want to anymore and wanted the game to be over.

Oh yeah, its also a relatively  long game, compared to other horror games in the genre, where most horror games you can finish in 2-6 hours, this one took me over 9 hours to complete, which isn't good because atleast half of the game sucks (present day chapters) and the other half is mostly suck with a few decent moments and atmosphere. Atleast its slightly better than Amnesia Rebirth just because it takes place in a variety of different locations, doesnt make you go to sci-fi stupid alien spaceship lands, and you dont play as a overly whiny obnoxious pregnant woman the whole game, and it doesnt take place in the desert but in victorian gothic era + in the forest, so I guess for that the devs can compliment themselves as a job well done?

4/10