Horror Gaming – Huntsman: The Orphanage (originally published 2013/12/05)

Dick van Dyke has a lot to answer for. As a child, growing up in my native England, seeing Mary Poppins on television and van Dyke’s character “Bert” enunciating preposterous syllables in a ridiculous manner, I simply assumed that, as this was a fantasy movie, that’s how people from Planet Chimneysweep speak. Because it most definitely is not how any person from the British Isles has ever spoken. Ever. EVER. Not Cockney, Scouser, Mancunian, Black Country, and I don’t even know how to subdivide regional Welsh or Scottish accents.

But that was me as an innocent English child. Not so for generations of Americans, many of whom (more than reasonably, living in their own country as they are with no Brits necessarily to hand) apparently have been led to believe that van Dyke’s godawful utterances in some way represent a “British Accent.” This one, terrible moment of acting has left a scar on the consciousness of a nation.

I was given cause to reflect on van Dyke’s crimes against voice-acting on more than one occasion while “playing” Huntsman – the Orphanage. I put the word ‘playing’ in quotation marks in that preceding sentence as this is more akin to a Japanese interactive novel, such as Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward than it is to, say, a story-focused exploration game like Silent Hill. I spent a great deal of time in Huntsman listening to narrated exposition. And the remainder of the time trudging about between hedges.

I seem to be on a roll as regards games where I start without the faintest clue as to who I am. In fairness to Huntsman, this is because I didn’t notice the ever-so-clever, game-industry in-jokery on the title screen. In fairness to me, this didn’t really help. Retreating to the title screen, there is a portrait of a lady named Scarlett, and next to it, a portrait of….oh, I don’t really remember. Some bloke. After I listened to Scarlett, I clicked Some Bloke and got through about two sentences before shutting him off for being irredeemably boring. Not that Scarlett was much better, but at least I’d already listened to her guff.

Right. So. I get it. This is meant to represent avatar selection. I had listened to Scarlett as she was furthest left (I do left-to-right by default). I had got an earful about her career as an indie game developer (how clever, daaaaahling), and even about how having exposition in a horror game through a mobile phone was trite, and how she had decided to take a break from being an indie game developer to go to some place to investigate a mystery, and then maybe make a game out of it! And then I entered a game which uses exposition through a mobile phone. Hmm? Is this meta? Did the game just review itself?

I proceed, therefore, worried I might be wasting my time. I have established who I am as the main character, but I’m not entirely sure why ghosts keep appearing on my mobile phone screen, and why my character doesn’t have any issue with that. Then I get into the Orphanage, and I encounter a picture of a dead person. Who also speaks. And my avatar is also quite fine with this. And this character, Croad the caretaker, blurts out the entire premise: he’s a bit of a cowardly fellow who sacrificed the lives of the orphans in order to be spared himself. I’m less than five minutes in at this point. Right then, game, what do you want me as the player to do now?

Oh. You want me to listen to a lot of narrated history by clicking portraits, then figure out what object to put on which orphan’s grave. Not too much of a mystery, and if there was a scale between “show” and “tell,” Huntsman would have “tell” not so much as a result, as a defining characteristic. And this is why the script and voice-acting are so relevant. For example, there is Willie, whose voice-actor reads his lines as though he had never seen them before he was required to read them out loud, and all that punctuation is an inconvenience to be ignored in favour of getting the reading out of the way as quickly as possible. Then there is Rupert, whose voice-actor so energetically chews the furniture it’s as though he feels our orphans must be starving in rather Dickensian fashion and a bit of scenery would be quite nutritious right about now.

And in the end it was Rupert’s exposition that did it for me: this is supposed to be the once-human antagonist, yet his script has every characteristic of a villain in an 80′s straight-to-video feature. The overarching theme of this clichéd ‘Villain’s Superiority Speech’ is “you don’t really think good will triumph over evil do you? MUAHAHAHAHA”

This then involves a delivery riddled with adverbs (naively, inextricably, eternally, slovenly, desperately), which, as anyone who has attended college writing 101 knows, is the first thing you excise during the editing process.

It then “amuses” Rupert to “mock” me (MUAHAHAHA), and the words ‘pathetic,’ ‘ignorance,’ and ‘futile,’ are actually repeated several times during the same speech (I counted). And then the actual specific phrase “you misguided fool” is repeated. That entire phrase. I understand this is an indie effort, but did no-one proof the script?

When the player is not listening to this hackneyed nonsense, you are finding objects which you put on graves. This only takes time because there is an unmapped maze where the target graves reside, and you can only carry one object at a time. Now, I understand not all games are required to have HUDs, ability wheels, mini-maps and respawn points. However, eschewal of such should be a thoughtful choice by an independent minded designer – not a way to extend the play time. Dragging the game out in this manner is not going to justify fifteen dollars.

Oh and the Huntsman! Tick tock, tick tock. The sound of his watch is, I suppose, meant to give a heightened sense of fear. You hear the watch, he must be close by. Except if he cannot catch my slothful character repeatedly schlepping the same route back and forth, he’s not exactly top of the predator food chain. If I was the Huntsman, I’d just wait by the maze entrance and nab the hapless protagonist as they came back out from their latest grave hunting trek.

There are also lots of bricks in this game. Sure, I know that in making a game, you don’t make an asset to use just the once. But once I had noticed the prevalence of bricks, I couldn’t un-notice them.

I know this is a labour of love, and it is indie so some grace should be given. I also see the game gets free updates, such as better textures which are inbound as I write this. But intent is not enough; wanting to make a great game doesn’t mean you can.

Huntsman: The Orphanage (Hallowe’en Edition)
Story	Uninspired and poorly acted
Gameplay	Mediocre visuals. Simplistic controls work as there is little to do
Frustration	Medium. To release the orphans’ souls you must navigate a maze, carrying a single object at a time, and the relevant location is different for each one. That is padding, and frustrating accordingly
				Listen to a poorly acted rendition of a terrible script, then wander through a maze. For 15 bucks? No.  Avoid.

This review was originally published on Fextralife.com. Used with permission