Macabre is a four player “extraction horror” that pits you and your friends against a creature that learns as you play. The main idea is to go into the environment,complete a main task (and optionally a few others) and get out with all of your limbs intact and attached.
For my merry band of men our first impressions of Macabre were a little confusing. We joined a lobby, checked out the rather odd looking offerings for gear in the shop, realised we couldn’t buy anything and then readied up to get straight into it.
The world of Macabre seems to be covered in a dense fog, which made it hard to see whether it was night or day (for us it was night), so after we’d received an in-game crash course on how to play we all set off to find out our objectives. Collectively there is one overall objective: It could be to find a certain item or to do a certain action, but for some reason the objective kept fluctuating to being complete and not complete which made it hard for us to gauge how we were progressing.
The monster of Macabre was weirdly distant in our first experience, music starts to get a bit tense whenever the creature lurks nearby but he spent most of his time just brushing by us and wandering around which let us have free reign of the map for the majority of the session. After about fifteen minutes of gathering loot and completing the objective we all eventually got out.
Macabre offers five difficulties and we had been playing on the easiest one (marked as “scary”.) You gradually unlock more difficulties as you complete more missions. When I ramped the difficulty up to its third setting things properly started to heat up, incredibly quickly. We were expecting things to simply get a little bit more tense and maybe give us more close calls but it seemed like the monster just became a heat-seeking missile and the difficulty also reduced the number of times we could be hit. We got butchered very quickly.
I did enjoy the interesting, anachronistic set pieces that have clearly travelled through time to get into this world. At one point I think a pirate ship was just floating in front of me which certainly grabbed my attention. Sadly, I couldn’t explore it.
There is something off about Macabre in its current state, it’s hard to put your finger on what it is but everything is weirdly floaty — Some of the animations are unfinished and there’s not really much in-game reason to be doing anything. In addition to this, not a lot is explained within the game itself. Thankfully, I had watched the trailer, but without that prior knowledge you really are just sort of dumped into this world and expected to just get on with whatever the task is.
The extraction part of Macabre seems almost entirely unnecessary and serves to either just set you off to complete objectives focused on the use of your ray gun, or seeking out bits of anomalies found in bushes or other random objects or to gather money from bits of junk when you extract.
I think in its current state it would need some reworking to either make looting a core part of the experience — such as with Lethal Company where you are solely there to gather gubbins in the hope you make quota — or shift the focus more on the enemy that hunts you and make it that much more dangerous.
One particular part of the description found on Macabre’s Steam page is that “the rift is never the same twice”, which at first sounds really interesting but in reality has you playing the same map over and over again which is highly recognisable due to the big river splitting the middle of it up. In reality it’s only the sub-locations, objectives and collectibles that are moved around which was a bit of a let down.
The trailer also seems to highlight a lot of animation kills leading to tense and gruesome deaths, but I died quite a few times and each of them simply led to me ragdolling goofily.
If you are looking for a different style of horror — complete with mannequins and a convenience store — that’s also made by a small Australian dev team then take a look at The Night Shift where you try and survive your shift as it turns on its head, or rather things start to turn their heads.
One thing that would definitely help Macabre’s case is the in-game communication. For some reason you cannot jump in this game and the button to talk is — by default — bound to space leading to a lot of hot microphones and accidental chats. It is also incredibly quiet, leading to my group just using the radios for the entire session due to the inconvenience. It might be an idea to make radios an item to find rather than just have from the beginning to make it a bit more tense but at the same time… the current format of Macabre requires you to talk regularly from the get-go.
I love the concept behind Macabre and I really think that given a bit more time this could really bloom into a real gritty, horror experience but it just needs a bit more time in the oven.
Macabre is available now for PC.
