There is something about the mostly empty urban centers in the U.S. that depresses me and unsettles my soul. Every time I visit family in the States and find myself in an abandoned mall or other place tainted by America’s depressing sense of architectural planning and over-reliance on cars, I can’t support but feel a sense of dread.
Devil’s Hideout, a point-and-click horror game from an independent developer Cosmic Voidtakes place in one such abandoned American town, and manages to evoke a sense of dread, even if its eerie, hellish landscape isn’t entirely stark.
The game casts you in the role of Lauren, who is trying to save her missing sister from cultists. Lauren’s journey begins in a hospital, but soon the entire unnamed town turns out to be the titular “devil’s lair,” and unexplained horrors begin to appear with great gusto. Skeletal arms pop out of the walls, corpses hang from hooks in the local slaughterhouse, and bodies are either pushed off rooftops or appear in mounds with their eyeballs gouged out. Even Pennywise from It – sorry, the clown who just looks and talks like Pennywise – shows up randomly.
“Random appearances” is an apt description of the game’s many storyline tricks, which are delivered through decent but unspectacular voice acting. There are hints that Lauren may have played a deeper role in her sister’s disappearance, as well as in the cult’s intrigue, and I half expected the town to be a ruined representation of Lauren’s fractured psyche or some other Silent Hill-style revelation. We don’t get that, as Devil’s Hideout is content to throw a bag of horror movie bits at the player without bothering with the connective tissue. Insert a dash of The Shining here, add a pinch of Lovecraft there. Even some of the more unfortunate tropes present in horror movies emerge, like (spoiler alert for an impending character death) the only person of color in the game is the one who dies first.
The aforementioned Pennywise impersonator is a particularly good example of this game’s gumbo pot style, as it simply appears without explanation to provide exposition and set up two puzzles. This scattershot presentation of storylines reminds me of the last Cosmic Void game I reviewed here on RPS: a throwback to the Space Quest style of Tachyon Dreams Anthology. That game played with time travel and space comedy in a way that was okay, but didn’t always land in a coherent way. Devil’s Hideout falls into the same trap, but I’ll say that it’s easier to justify this time around. This is a horror game, after all, and horror doesn’t always need to be explained or connected. By not doing so, the game felt even more like more For me it’s surreal, although I’m not sure if all players will be so understanding.
And that surreal nature is reinforced by the unusual interface. The game’s scenes are presented in a first-person perspective, where you have to click on things on the screen to interact with them, much like a hidden object game. You can press a button to highlight all the interactive objects, which I appreciated, and there’s a petite inventory section in the left corner. On the occasional occasions when Lauren encounters an interactive NPC, that NPC appears in your inventory as an “item” that you can employ with other items, which is a clever choice.
I tend to prefer a third-person perspective in adventure games, but this setup is effective when Devil’s Hideout throws you into darkened screens lit only by the circular glow of Lauren’s flashlight. Prepare for a number of jumpscares as horrific manifestations jump out of your flashlight’s glow at unexpected intervals, and you should also expect talking heads at the bottom of the screen whenever dialogue comes up. You see this in most senior adventure games, but unlike, say, King’s Quest VI, there’s no frame around these half-body portraits, and they tend to disrupt the perspective of everything else when they appear.
This is especially noticeable when Lauren’s petite portrait is juxtaposed with the oversized face of a major NPC in the center of the screen. It reminds me most of all of Call of Cthulhu: Shadow of the Comet, a 1993 adventure game from Infogrames that closely resembles Devil’s Hideout, from its garish art style to its reliance on highly detailed faces plastered on the screen, including those based on actors’ likenesses. (Search for screenshots of Shadow of the Comet and feast your eyes on a talking head that looks suspiciously like Jack Nicholson.)
Whether you like the graphical choices or not, there’s no denying that the game is masterfully drawn. As for the puzzles, expect a certain amount of obfuscation. I’m not saying anything here is as mind-blowing as the infamous “use cat fur and maple syrup to create fake whiskers” puzzle from Gabriel Knight 3, but some of them come dangerously close. Objects appear in unexpected places (why is there a telescope embedded in the guts of a corpse?) and you should also be prepared to click on as many things as possible until you find the right combination of items. Just as there’s not much internal logic here to tie together the horror theme, the puzzles are also, unfortunately, low on logic.
Still, Devil’s Hideout has a compelling atmosphere that makes me overlook its flaws. At its most evocative, it reminds me of a Stephen King story, and I don’t just mean the Pennywise episode. A town that has lost all its wholesome Americanness and fallen into evil is something King would have written about, though Devil’s Hideout would probably be one of those ’80s King books where he was high on coke and needed a better editor. Like Kathy Rain, another point and click that had a lot of random horror going on behind the scenes, I think Devil’s Hideout could have benefited from a director’s cut later on to support flesh out the parts I liked and tighten up the parts I didn’t. In other words, there’s a ton of potential lurking within the alleys of this urban hellscape, and even if it was imperfect, I finished Devil’s Hideout wanting more – something I’ve never expected from an abandoned American city before.
This review is based on a test version of the game provided by the game developer.
