I was among the lucky few who got to play D2 on the Sega Dreamcast, a tentacle-filled survival horror 3D action adventure. “The Undead Syndrome” hits some of those same notes.
The game turns the weirdness up to 11 immediately, with a woman being stabbed and apparently being transported to some kind of nightmarish purgatory where she has to solve puzzles, kill tentacles, and eventually avenge her murder. And it gets weirder from there. People who played Persona Team’s “Catherine” will be right at home.
One interesting element is that you are pretty limited in what you can carry around with you. The people who play Elder Scrolls games like they’re some kind of medieval vacuum cleaner (pulling every dead rat carcass they can get their hands on back to town) will hate that, but I think it’s a gameplay element that actually enhances things. Much like Halo was improved by not letting you carry around a dozen guns simultaneously, as it forced you to make decisions about what to take and what to leave behind, I think “The Undead Syndrome” benefits from you having to make choices about what to leave and what to take; yes you may find yourself backtracking for something on occasion, but in real life do you walk around with dozens of things in your pockets as you grab every object that’s not nailed down? Unless you’re a kleptomaniac, this probably doesn’t seem like normal behaviour to you.
Presentation’s a little mid-’90s PC-ish (I originally wrote “Sega Saturn-ish”, but I think it’s better than that), but it’s more than reasonable for a 240 MSP indie game. This one is so weird that I strongly recommend a trial: you won’t want to buy before you try, but nor would you want to miss a free trial on something so unusual.
Here’s what the developer (MUKAGOSOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT) has to say about the game:
“Nightmare or Reality…? Use your KI power and defeat the unimaginable. Nothing is certain in the haunted house. There is no turning back…”
Writings of Mass Deduction 