My idea of a good horror game is one that paralyses me with fear. It’s a game that is so terrifying I can’t get out of my chair to perform basic functions like visiting the toilet, or getting a drink. These are games so frightening that you can hardly face them, but so compelling that you will want to see them through to their grizzly conclusion. Those Who Remain, sadly, is not one of these games.
Those Who Remain takes an interesting but well trodden theme that borrows more than just a little from the likes of Alan Wake, Silent Hill and countless others. The basic premise is simple — we control a guy on his way to a motel to end an affair. Within minutes of entering, however, things turn awry and we quickly learn that stepping out of the light will have immediate, fatal consequences.
Whilst that might sound exciting and intriguing, I should curb your enthusiasm by mentioning that Those Who Remain is one of the slowest, most ponderous walking simulators that I’ve ever encountered. There are a few sections that rail against this — including an early scene that involves a frightening sprint from one light to the next — but in the main, you’ll simply edge around corners looking for a light switch.
Let me take a step back though and set the scene, because it’s not all bad. Those Who Remain has one other trick up its sleeve — the ability to travel between dimensions to solve puzzles. Yes, whatever is going on here that fills the darkness with murderous shadows, it’s also throwing you a lifeline.
Go through a doorway from the human world into the other realm and you’ll be in the same place, albeit slightly changed. There might be a pallet you can move out of the way now, or a switch you can pull that will affect things on the other side. This introduces a few neat puzzles that almost always feel more interesting than navigating your way through a dark house or office that can almost always be solved by finding the light switches (assuming you don’t accidentally put a toe into the darkness).
Another product of this other realm is the only monster that you’ll ever face outside the shadow. This creature is a hideous thing that is genuinely frightening, mostly because you can neither fight it, nor easily escape it. Most sequences where it appears involve solving a puzzle to escape, and that can lead to some tense moments. On the downside, its behaviour is unpredictable and its line of sight impossible to fathom, so random deaths will frustrate.
The worst thing about Those Who Remain is how it repeatedly shows glimmers of exactly this kind of promise, but ultimately feels like a huge drag to play. Whilst I enjoyed a few of the smart puzzles (often involving creating light, or manipulating the other world) and outsmarting the monster, the rest of the game is just incredibly boring.
Those Who Remain is one of the slowest and most ponderous walking simulators, offering very average graphics, copy and paste locations, and enemies that rapidly lose their threat when you realise they just stand in the shadows waiting for you to accidentally nudge the stick too far.
Similarly, the storyline — which begins as fairly intriguing — is far too minimalist to matter. Material updates to what I knew about the main protagonist, his wife and his mistress were so few and far between that I frequently forgot the last update I’d had. You can read what you like into some of the abstract elements in the game and how they relate to the story, but for me, that was never enough.
Those Who Remain is a walking simulator with some promising chiller vibes, and a monster that makes some frightening — but all too infrequent — appearances. It has a plot that suggests some form of interest, but the writing tails off almost instantly and you’ll wonder where it went. Those Who Remain is frustrating not because of what it is, but because of what it isn’t.
This is a game with sequences of perhaps five or ten minutes that gave me the experience I wanted. There’s a chase through an old library that terrified me over and over again as I solved a puzzle that required me to face my fears for what seemed like hours. But, there are also entire swatches of the game that I can barely recall, since each one involves the kind of meaningless meandering that I’ve seen in countless other games.
So, what’s the verdict? Well you could do worse. There are a few “horror themed” walking simulators that are less interesting, if only because they are much the same but lacking in the monster encounters and inter-dimensional puzzles. There are certainly better however — Amnesia, Outlast and Layers of Fear to name just a few, so if it’s horror you want, then you should only look here once you’ve been through the best of the breed.
You can find Those Who Remain on PC, Xbox One, PS4, and Nintendo Switch.
