Dusk Golem
A 21st Century Rockefeller
Okay... Why have I almost never heard about this game?
This is a 2006 Turkish PC horror game that had an updated re-release (mainly to add Windows 7 support) in 2012. I usually know things about even the most obscure horror games, but I knew very little about this title going in. Because I never heard other people talking about it, I just kind of always assume it was crap. The horror fanbase is dedicated, usually even the most niche titles have some sort of cult following. This one's almost non-existent. It's also never been talked about here on GAF.
It was apparently made by five people over the course of three years, and I find that highly surprising as i would actually say this is up there so far for the five hours I've played it as one of the best Resident Evil clones I've played. It doesn't seem like such a small team indie effort, either as a compliment or not, it legitimately feels like a better B-Tier survival horror game from the late 90s/early 2000s. Now, it doesn't match up to Resident Evil REmake or Silent Hill 2 or anything, but of the B-Tier horror games and clone games, this is actually one of the best in my opinion, so far at least.
I had it in my collection for at least a year, but decided to try it as I found out yesterday apparently the game was greenlit and is coming to Steam. As I found very little in terms of discussion or impressions on the title, I decided I'd play it to sort of give SteamGAF a heads-up of my thoughts on it whenever it came out.
Even though it's Turkish, it has an English and Turkish dub over and English subtitles. I went with English dub and sub, and can tell you my first impressions of the game is that the voice acting is cheesy and hilarious. Some lines are delivered as if the people are forcing their last breaths and choking on their words so they try and hurry the line and make it almost incoherent. A lot of the actors are also either monotonous or over-acting, or don't know anything about delivery. But for the genre I did end up enjoying it.
Also for being Turkish, it has the typical typos and weird grammar errors you might expect, not close to the worst I've seen, but they were definitely present. Also some of the text on the files was sometimes a bit hard to read.
Story has to do with a new cult rising to power and it leading to the end of the Apocalypse, which we find ourselves in as three different characters (who you switch between during story moments). Notably the main character looks and move suspiciously like Chris Redfield from Resident Evil 5 (just a bit less bulky), though this game came out 3 years earlier.
And I at first started out thinking it was pretty standard. The tank controls actually are not bad for a small-team effort, the locations are rather detailed for this sort of game old-school look to them), and as the game has gone on I've been impressed with the number of and variety of locations.
The first thing that stood out to me about the game was the enemies. There's a lot of them, in the five hours I've played the game I've so far have met eight unique enemies that all function very different, and they've been introduced at good pace. More than this, most of them are very unique for a fixed-camera horror game. There is no typical 'zombie' enemy, the 'basic' enemy are these weird long-armed flesh monsters that quickly turn invisible and pop up surrounding you. The second type of monster is this weird miniature shadow man that makes this ringing sound, who moves slowly and not really at you but can suddenly start running around insanely fast at a moments notice, and when he touches you the whole screen starts becoming staticy and your character starts to violently shake around like the creatures from Jacob's Ladder. They've been unique, and have continued to surprise (though not all are winners... The flying enemies on the island section can right fuck off as I have not figured out how to dodge their attack at all).
There's item collecting, back-tracking, puzzles, and it's mostly been enjoyable so far and not too tedious. No big brain teasers yet, but there's been some fun puzzles and they have been slowly escalating in difficulty.
The game also has scared me on a few occasions, in fact the amount of times it's startled me (while not cheaply most of the time), or made me do a double take on something has surprised me on how often it's happened in the five hours I've played so far.
The game also has a good habit so far of mixing things up when it's needed, having the different locations feel and work very differently, and having just small things that really add to the experience. Like right now I'm in this underground temple or something, and I'm collecting Stone Plates from rooms, but each room is very different where you get the stone plates are are strangely abstract and artistic. The sort of small changes between things and oddities that make games like this interesting.
It's not perfect, it's definitely got it's flaws. I somewhat regret playing on hard difficulty as there's a few sections I think I've enjoyed less because of it, there's a few times the camera has gotten in the way of me doing well, and one or two annoying sections, and there are a few elements that could be refined a bit more, but as a while I'm actually very impressed so far. I think it's a good entry for fans of the genre.
I'll post more, and a sort of more in-depth thought process on the game a bit later, but just kind of wanted to mention this game as I think this might be one of the most underlooked Resident Evil clones ever. Might be fixed when it comes to Steam, though.