Video Game Review: Song of Horror

Song of Horror

Horror-Adventure

Developer: Protocol Games

Publisher: Raiser Games

When I first started playing it, Song of Horror grabbed me very quickly with its strong premise and atmosphere. I spent several hours slowly but surely working my way through the first of its five episodes despite how intensely spooked I was, enjoying every second of my exploration of the haunted home of missing author Sebastian P. Husher… right up until the point where I experienced a glitch at the very end of the episode that prevented me from finishing it and moving on. Not to be deterred, I started the episode over, thinking that maybe I wouldn’t encounter the glitch a second time.

I encountered the glitch a second time, so I decided to just wait until a rumored patch for the issue was released, which turned out to be two weeks later.

This experience was, unfortunately, largely representative of my overall experience with Song of Horror, a horror-adventure game from Spanish development studio Protocol Games. It follows the struggle of one Daniel Noyer as he is thrown headfirst into a nightmare scenario revolving around an eldritch melody that drives any who hear it mad and the mysterious “Presence” associated with it. Over the course of the game, he is assisted in his struggle for survival by no fewer than twelve other playable characters with varying stats and personalities, each of whom can die at any moment and somewhat alter the story by their absence moving forward. You may be thinking that thirteen playable characters are a lot for a single-player game that’s just shy of 20 hours long, but the characters are introduced (and in some cases cycled back out) gradually enough that it’s not overwhelming. The story also isn’t especially character-driven anyway, being more focused around the mystery of The Presence, so it’s not the worst thing that nobody besides Daniel is developed all that much.

In terms of gameplay, Song of Horror is essentially an old-school adventure game like Day of the Tentacle given tank controls, some jump scares, and occasionally having to avoid being eaten by horrible shadow creatures. Each episode places you in a different fairly small area with a number of weird little puzzles that have equally weird but not unsolvable solutions involving random items lying around. There aren’t exactly enemies in the traditional sense, but occasionally The Presence – which is apparently an AI that adapts to the player – will throw an event at you, ranging from having to block a door to controlling your breathing while a sightless abomination tries to find you. Though the events themselves aren’t that big of a deal, the semi-randomized nature of them and accompanying anticipation when you haven’t had one in a while creates a wonderful sense of dread and tension, exactly what you want from horror. Each event is resolved by playing a short minigame, and this is where my biggest problem with the game that isn’t related to its technical performance arises. The minigames that determine in a very immediate way whether your characters will live or die are all varying degrees of unfriendly for any gamers that might have motor control issues. There were even times when I, with no history of such issues, had problems with one of them such that my arm hurt from how much button-mashing I had to do, so I can only imagine how much of a nightmare it would be for a physically disabled player.

There was one other accessibility issue I encountered centered around the audio rather than the gameplay. One of the mechanics is the ability to listen to doors for any nastiness on the other side (and opening a door with something on the other side is instant death), but unless you’re using earbuds or headphones the game’s sound design is too quiet to hear it. I know this isn’t just a factor of my hearing impairment either, because at one point early in my playthrough I was playing without earbuds with my TV volume turned up really high and I died because neither I nor the person sitting next to me (who is not hard of hearing) could tell there was something on the other side of a door while listening. I fared much better after learning my lesson from that incident and wearing earbuds for the rest of the game, but the fact that I had to is less than ideal. Song of Horror would greatly benefit from either a better audio design or a more robust audio transcription.

Despite this lack of consideration for disabled players, I was actually pleasantly surprised by a noticeable lack of narrative ableism that so commonly plagues horror as a genre. I read on the game’s steam page that one of the locales is an old abandoned mental hospital, at which time I mentally braced myself for some deeply unfortunate writing decisions… but they never came. If anything, the episode that takes place in the mental hospital is more condemning of the medical establishment of the early 20^th century than of the vulnerable patients it often victimized in the name of “treatment.” This especially came as a relief because even though the struggles I had playing Song of Horror, I found the story to be extremely compelling, and every time I put it down I’d keep thinking about it and speculating what twists might be thrown at me next. I will also note, to the game’s credit, that despite my frustrations with the minigames I was constantly unsettled by the atmosphere and moment-to-moment gameplay in the way that one hopes to get from a horror title.

As I’ve mentioned before, however, Song of Horror is full of technical issues of varying severity. In each of the first three episodes, I encountered at least one game-breaking bug that forced me to restart the episode from the beginning, from getting stuck on the floor to not being able to interact with key items. At the very least restarting an episode is never too big of an issue given the structure of the game making it easy to rush through puzzles you’ve solved once already… but the flip side there is that the only real replay value the game has is in playing sick games with the characters’ lives and seeing how things differ when various combinations of people get eaten by the eldritch god.

Even beyond the game-breakers, I’d encounter things like examining an item leading to a cut-away of something unrelated in a completely different room. At one point in episode 2, a shadow creature event spawned in the same place that I had gotten stuck in the floor earlier, though fortunately, this incident did not impact my ability to complete the minigame and continue playing. When not buggy, the game could still be stiff in terms of its character animations, and more than once subtitles would be inaccurate for the actual lines being spoken.

Honestly, it’s a testament to the high quality of the story and atmosphere that I still enjoyed Song of Horror immensely despite these things, but they did put a damper on that enjoyment somewhat. The developers describe the game in their promotional materials as being heavily inspired by classic horror stories in both literary and gaming spheres, and while it’s certainly easy to see that (a major character is named Husher, for Poe’s sake) everything manages to feel fresh and original enough that it’s still thrilling and engaging. Sure, it might not be quite as scary once you start figuring out the game’s patterns and inner workings, but no horror game is, so it’s hard to count that against it. If you can tolerate some jank and questionable gameplay deHorror is a real scream, and I’d recommend giving it a shot.