Accompanied by his ward Alice, Edward is following the trail of his missing sister, Elizabeth. Edward Harden has just arrived in the remote coastal community of Graavik after a harrowing ocean journey from Boston, USA. It’s October and we’re on the threshold of winter. We got curious and checked the official website afterward and the homepage reveals that Red Thread is currently planning to release it next year for PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One.ĭraugen is a first-person psychological suspense story set in north-western Norway in the year 1923. Red Thread Games provided us with a Draugen PS4 code for review purposes.However, the official Twitter account posted an update to prove that's not the case, stating that the 'dead' (Draugr are undead creatures in Norse mythology) will live again. If you’ve never played those before, this won’t seem nearly as derivative - but that’s more an argument for playing those other games than it is for playing Draugen. A game shouldn’t make you want to play other games, yet most of the time I spent with Draugen I was wondering about whether it was too soon to go back and play Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. Likewise, the voice acting is okay, too - not incredible by any stretch, but I’ve heard worse, even if it starts feeling a little silly post-twist.īut it’s really hard to enjoy Draugen when it all feels like it’s a collection of nods to other, better games. On top of that, the island feels truly dead, as if no one could possibly live there - which, admittedly, morphs into that aforementioned sterility once you realize there’s not much more to the game than what you see, but at first it’s genuinely creepy. Draugen starts off really well, between the mysterious island and the search for the missing sister. Even if you don’t have issues with how Draugen portrays mental illness, it still all feels like a big cop-out, as if the game came up with a cool premise and then had no idea how to flesh it out further.īecause it certainly is a cool premise. And the companion? Just a figment of his imagination. The sister that the main character is searching for? She’s been dead the whole time. Even before the big twists - which again, I’ll get to in a moment, and which I’m holding off discussing for spoiler reasons - everything feels flat and lifeless, perhaps because all of it seems so derivative of other, better games.Īnd as for those twists - one last spoiler alert! - they aren’t that shocking, and because the story is so derivative, you can spot them coming a mile away. Mind you, the game isn’t helped by the fact that the story isn’t great. If the whole point of the game is its immersive story, it’s a little self-defeating to throw all these barriers in your way that take you out of the immersion. There are invisible walls everywhere, anything more than a step is barely traversable, and the character you’re controlling moves awkwardly. The game limits what you can and can’t interact with, and it feels a little random, since some of the objects you can touch don’t really add anything to the story. Everything looks and feels a little too sterile, and not in a good way. It doesn’t help that the world doesn’t feel all that lived in. That’s not necessarily taken from another specific game, but it still doesn’t feel particularly original. There are also a couple of pretty significant twists (that I’ll get into in a moment) that, while not necessarily taken directly from another game, feel a little too formulaic to have the shock value Draugen clearly intended. You discover that there’s a “curse” that’s impacted everyone on the island - that feels a lot like What Remains of Edith Finch. You search through the house and learn that something isn’t right while piecing together the story - that would be Gone Home. You can see Dear Esther in the basic premise - a man (and in this case, his companion) exploring a remote island to solve a mystery. I mean, I didn’t hate it by any means, but I’m quite certain that, in a couple of years, I won’t be looking back at it with the same reverence I have for games like Edith Finch or Gone Home.Ī big part of the problem is that it never feels like more than a collection of influences. Given that those are some of my all-time favourite games, it would only make sense if I loved Draugen, too. The game is an artsy walking simulator, and it borrows liberally from some of the very best games the genre has to offer: there’s a bit of Dear Esther here, a dash of Gone Home there, and a helping of What Remains of Edith Finch to top it all off. If nothing else, Draugen’s creators have pretty solid taste.
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