PEGBRJE: You Died but a Necromancer revived you and PARANOIHELL
Welcome to page 12, grab your hats cuz it’s a wild ride.
‘You Died but a Necromancer revived you’ is a cheeky colourful title made by BolHut, an indie studio that originally created this title as a Game Jam title. Fast foward to 2019 and the full title is released, complete with an array of characters all being resurrected by a pesky necromancer that refuses to let them die in peace until they can reach the top of this nefarious tower. What did we do to deserve this?
Reaching the top of the Necromancer’s tower is no easy feat, especially as the player character has no special abilities outside of simply walking. The Necro hasn’t made it a cakewalk either, as they’ve been playing a bunch of Dungeon Keeper based on the sheer number of traps possible per level. There are rotating spiked clubs, periodic spikes, giant stampers, giant spikes, fire, buzzsaws, a spiked floor, spears, and more — to top it all off, there is only one path to be funneled through, and after a certain amount of time the path begins to explode. The rate of tile destroyed varies per level, but that doesn’t change the fact that even without realizing it, our resurrected skeleton is on a timer upon entering each floor. Make it to the ladder, and the next level is revealed to repeat the same thing again. Failure, however, causes players to return to the checkpoint which can differ depending on the difficulty that the players set.
It’s the customization that makes this title the most interesting, especially in how it approaches difficulty. Normal has players only able to checkpoint when clearing zones, meaning that messing up the fourth floor of the run will send our little skeleton back down to floor one. I found this irritating to say the least due to various reasons, so I turned it to easy — aka having checkpoints at every floor rather than area. It’s only at higher difficulties (Hard and Ultra) that more traps appear to make things more challenging, which I found quite interesting. Rather than bank on the idea that removing traps was the way to make it easy, ‘You Died but a Necromancer revived you’ rather made it easier to do repeated runs of an area in order to move onward and upward. Granted, the areas are procedurally designed so brute-forcing through repeated attempts doesn’t necessarily work, but the point is there.
This doesn’t cover the plethora of cute dead characters that players can be as they tear through the tower. There are no benefits to each avatar besides aesthetics, which is enough for me to choose the one with the massive hat. There are also multiple game modes, from co-operative 4 player mode in which the first person to the exit drags the rest of them up to the next floor, to versus which means whomever doesn’t make it dies. Or at least, dies as much as a constantly resurrected person can.
Combine this with a clean aesthetic and the ability to use dozens of different configurations to move (even the face buttons on a controller! Who would’ve thought) and you’ve got an adorably heart-racing adventure to the top. If you’re looking for a flexible yet simple game to play, this might be what you’re looking for.
PARANOIHELL is a horror adventure made by lum, solo indie dev and fellow Ontarian (that word feels weird to say aloud) with a history of bizarre horror in a PSX graphical world. In this unsettling tale, players will follow Erica Yu, local bartender in an undisclosed city, who finishes her shift at 3am only to be approached by a strange man who claims to know her. With his sudden disappearance, Erica is left trying to get home only to find the dark city doesn’t look as familiar as it once did.
Erica is left with a single goal: make it home and hope that encounter was just a coincidence. Instead, however, the city itself has turned on her, and soon enough cops and other monstrosities are attempting to kill her. PARANOIHELL’s gameplay revolves around Erica trying to find her way without drawing their ire, resorting to violence when she has a weapon that she found in her travels. Unfortunately, these weapons have some serious degradation issues, and every successful hit will whittle away their durability before they are destroyed. In the event that her pursuers haven’t died yet, there are dozens of bins, closets and doors to hide behind to weather the storm as her assailants do not know how to open anything and will eventually walk away. Killing them does give money, however, which is needed for goods that are sold by… somebody, I’m not entirely sure. There’s usually a red individual standing by the goods, but not only are there hundreds of these people throughout the game but they can all be moved so who knows who guards the weapons and health upgrades. Once dealt with, Erica can continue on her journey of locating different pathways that reveal possible routes to get home, seeing as much of the city has massive red holes in it. Many of these doors are suspiciously locked or even chained, so finding the proper keys (or bolt cutters) to continue to search is imperative. I’d say it’s a mix of horror and survival, but in all fairness I have yet to come across a horror game that wished for me to not survive.
This all sounds relatively straight forward, but a horror title is built on how it’s atmosphere builds the simplistic moments into nerve-wracking encounters with absolutely nothing. PARANOIHELL does this in spades by focusing on a singular, unanswered question: “Are you afraid of the dark?”. The entire game’s basis is on how terrifying a simple walk home can feel, how nothing appears the same as it did when the sun graced our land. Long hallways with little vision slowly feeling like they’re enclosing upon those that walk them, building tension simply by the feeling we all get that ‘this would be the place I get jumped’. Yet nothing happens. Pictures and images appear on the ground, moving and blinking, but those could just be our imaginations and a trick of that one dim light that flickered a few times. People walk by, and we know that they’re all individuals just like us yet they all look the same because we’re focused on getting home, not worrying about them. This, of course, is then cranked up to 11 by the fact that there is actual monsters roaming the world, ready to pounce. Eyes blinking, mouths smiling, moths fluttering in the floor. Constant sounds nestling in ears without explaining where the source is, pieces of newspaper articles highlighting bizarre past events including the murders of many others. And all the while, that person appears, lurking in the shadows, only to disappear just as soon as we feel like we’ve caught him.
Is there a pay off to all this, to know that Erica makes it home safely or that the city makes sense? Well, that’s not really up for me to say — I try to keep as many spoilers out of games that rely on atmosphere as knowing what the ‘point’ is usually ruins the tension created. Let’s just say that the most burning questions one may have don’t need an answer, because the scenarios created by the darkness never makes sense, nor does it have a conclusion. For us, our fears are usually unfounded and we make it home, breath a sigh of relief, and hopefully unwind after the creation of unnecessary tension. For Erica, unfortunately, there are a few more steps involved — and these ones don’t involve a herbal tea to calm down.
I will say, as someone that is extremely anxious and usually cannot finish a horror title, I was able to reach one of the three endings. I missed much, but I don’t think my heart can take another run. If you are looking for a horror title to unnerve you for a few hours while building a world that actively wants you to explore it against your better judgement, this might be a title worth trying.
Note: Do be careful, however, as unnecessary wanderlust can lead to excess backtracking, and this is coming from first hand experience. I spent much of the latter half of the game looking for something I’d already done or pursuing a key that would inevitably be used at a later time. It got harder to figure out when I was backtracking for no reason vs backtracking for something I’d actually found. This can be a toss up depending on your personal preferences, as the fear of returning to an area can be quite effective — unfortunately, I found even the dash too slow when traversing safe zones. I think my best description of this game was “I’m not sure I’m having fun, but I can’t put it down so it must be doing something right — that or I’m so engrossed in getting Erica home because I’m scared to find out what happens if I don’t.”
