REVIEW – Do you want to know what really happened in the Blackwood asylum, as told in Until Dawn? We also, and that we have already finished The Inpatient to perform his analysis. A game focused on virtual reality for PlayStation VR that does not achieve its goal of expanding the universe created by Supermassive or generating tension.

Until Dawn was a game that I liked and surprised equally. Although I did not expect much from the game, the good ideas ended up convincing and showing that within Supermassive there was a team with a lot of interest in doing things well and taking care of the product. His seemingly classic story of teenagers in the middle of a cabin in the woods was becoming more and more tangled, trying to go a step further with the ramification of decisions, betting on the always difficult terrain of facial animation and even paying homage to horror classics as Resident Evil and Silent Hill with some fixed cameras that made you dream of a new installment of these series with the engine of this game.

If I say this, it’s because, although the studio signs The Inpatient, I do not recognize the hand of Supermassive anywhere. The experience in virtual reality has been somewhat clumsy and poorly executed, almost worthy of the first steps of a virtual reality that offered us more experiments than complete games. Yes, here is an opportunity to expand the universe of Until Dawn and tell us a little more about the events of the Blackwood asylum, but all these ideas are diluted by a game that, I am not sure if by budget or by certain laziness, fails to fulfill the proposed narrative or playable purposes.

An impatient development

All the endemic evils of a game of narrative purity are here the faces, often betting on the repetitive scenario, lacking details, with a sickly dedication to melt the image to black to skip an animation that did not give time to finish, or maybe for loading the level. The absence of ambiance is replaced by an easy scare attempt raising the volume or making something appear on your face.

To begin with, his story does not take off. Moreover, before you know it, it will be over. However, it is not a problem of its duration of two or three hours because I have played many games that have managed to captivate even in less time. It is simply that The Inpatient loses time taking you through corridors without fixed direction, at such an absurd speed that sometimes despairs.

The first time you play The Inpatient, nothing makes sense. As the protagonist, a patient of asylum with, attention, amnesia, we are urged to remember some key parts of our past. However, after a slow introduction, the subject ceases to be important, to the point of being able to finish the adventure without having the slightest idea of who you are. The events are interrupted by the demands of a loose script, and on top of that, he needs the crutch to have played Until Dawn to understand each other better.

The few sequences with force, are easily wasted sometimes because not even know that you could have changed something since the game is not skillful to teach these variations. Sometimes, we have even witnessed deep contradictions between what a character says and then does, to the point of completely lacking any sense, which ends up ruining the tension and disconnecting the player from what he is seeing.

Graphically, the game cheats. The introduction begins with one of the doctors exhibiting in front of us, but it will not be long when the lack of facial animation and the empty and repetitive scenarios take center stage. The Inpatient constantly abuses the resource of the loss of consciousness, sometimes without shielding itself in it, to advance the story. However, the scenarios keep repeating themselves during almost all their development.

The experience with the PlayStation VR is comfortable, as long as you keep the lateral movement at bay. By default, and thus we recommend leaving it, we can turn 30 degrees, although we can also activate the fluid mode or even reduce it to 15 degrees. Going forward is not uncomfortable or causes dizziness, but the reduced speed of the protagonist exaggerated obviously, remains much pace to the development of the game and is definitely affected by it. The few interactions with objects, which can open a memory or pick up a clue, can not be done naturally, and sometimes require several attempts to perform correctly. In the worst cases, we have not even managed to interact with the specific object.

There are good things, but honestly, there are not many. There is, as in the previous Supermassive work, the possibility of changing events in history through some decisions. The famous Butterfly Effect, which Until Dawn showed, but before the dazed course of the adventure, it becomes very difficult to go back to cross the endless corridors of this asylum in the skin of the slowest man in the world. Whereas Until Dawn made you wonder at all times “What happened if …?” The Inpatient ends, inexorably, with your patience.

-BadSector-

Publisher: Sony Interactive Entertainment

Developer: SuperMassive Games

Genre: Horror

Release date: January 23, 2018