Clive Barker's Undying

The Good
Patrick Galloway started investigating the occult as an easy way of making a profit out of superstitious and gullible rich people. In Ireland, at the beginning of the 20th century, it was a fine business.
However, the more Patrick delved into the occult, the more he started to believe there are things beyond our understanding. Things no sane human mind should be in contact with.

Then the great war started, and Patrick was called to serve. He almost dies in an incident against the vicious Trsanti, but Jeremiah Covenant, captain of his unit, saved his life and left him at a hospital.

Years passed, and one day Patrick received word from Jeremiah, asking for his help to restore order in his estate. Patrick owed his life to this man so he wouldn't even think about declining.

At the fastuous manor of the Covenant family, the air is thick with premonitions. At the entrance, Patrick receives a vision, one of the Trsanti corsairs has been hanged from one of the nearby light posts, at some point in the past.
In the middle of the manor, a black tower with the appearance of an edifice older than time itself, rises defying. Mysterious lights flash on top of it.
Something evil can be sensed all over the place, lurking in the shadows, hiding inside the walls, watching from the other side of the windows.
Inside the manor, Patrick receives another vision. A ghostly man, dressed as a rich gentleman greets him. Suddenly he disappears and some hideous creature whose skin seems totally peeled-off, with chains hooked all over his body, stares at Patrick.
There is death in the air.

Jeremiah is no longer the strong and determined man he was at the war. He looks —and sounds— like a pathetic shell of a man, waiting for death to come for him... before something even worse beats it.
His words for Patrick are eloquent enough: "My siblings are dead, Patrick... but I don't think they're gone..."
***
Five Covenant siblings. One ancient damnation. There is work for the spook-hunter.

Despite the rather compelling STORYLINE —one to be expected from a product with the signature of Clive Barker all over it— backed up with a sheer amount of text and dialogues, Undying is nothing more than a first-person shooter (FPS).
Along with a number of more-or-less typical weapons you get to use some magic spells (both offensive and deffensive), each of which can be progressively enhanced, but the game is still far from a RPG or anything like that.
The story is more of a cosmetic resource to glue the levels together than anything else. Patrick will talk with the characters himself with no choices to make for the player, and the whole journey is a pretty linear ride. Even in the manor with all its labyrinthic structure, the only doors that will open are the ones you need to get through.
Soon enough, you will notice the game has an unspoken structure: you can tell there are several different levels, each one of which is ruled by one of the demonic Covenant siblings.
Anyway, don't take me wrong. We are talking positive here: the game HAS a pretty compelling story. I specially enjoyed the storytelling, the way the story is presented. Every time you start a level you will definitely know who you're up against, but along the way you will be fed information on someone else, letting you know for sure that there's much more to come. Along the way, through conversations and all kinds of text fragments, you will be fed information about the secret that hides behind the Covenant family, the manor, a circle of stones in an island nearby, an ancient monastery, and even a connection with Patrick's own past...

One of the strongest points of the game lays among the INTANGIBLES: it's the atmosphere. Every single one of the locations where the game takes place is conveniently horrifying.
The sheer-sized manor is of course a haunting place —specially with all those lightnings during night storms. So are the catacombs underneath the family mausoleum. Then you reach some surreal and twisted otherworld which looks just as haunting. Then you get back to the manor, and you go out, and even the daylight looks eerie somehow. Then you go to the ancient monastery, which has been abbandoned for centuries, yet not unhabited...
You get the picture.
Every now and then a cutscene suddenly fires off, the camera pans with long shots that really take their toll on your nerves, and then something happens.

CHARACTER GRAPHICS are pretty good, as it's the concept behind them.
The regular monsters are the most neatly designed creatures I ever saw in a video game. All the unhuman creatures are incredibly well done. They are gross, they are ugly, and they REALLY look menacing.
As for the Covenants, every single one of them has a strong personality and will introduce him/herself in a way that will make you think it twice before running heads first towards he/she. Even the poor Jeremiah will have his good 15 seconds. Every one of the siblings deserve being the main villain in their own story.

BACKGROUND GRAPHICS are a mixed bag: For one thing, the texture resolution is pretty low, so you can see clear texture blurs when you come close enough to a wall, a window, and what all not. On the other hand, not only the atmosphere isn't ruined at all by this, but also the design of the locations is really good. Both the real (such as the manor) and the unreal (like the wacky dreamland of Oneiros) places show a great work from the designer's part. Fine art and rich imagination, full force ahead.
On top of this, there are LOTS of fancy effects to enhance the atmosphere: foggy corridors, heavy-pouring rain, thunders that crack illuminating the manor with creepy flashes and deafening sound, et cetera. Later in the game, there is a given breed of creatures that stings and poisons Patrick, distorting his perceptions for a few seconds... you have to see the way the world looks for those five seconds. And try to aim and shoot while thus stunned, too.

The SOUND is very good. I'm not much of a soundscape freak —hell, I need walkthroughs to pass even the most silly sound-related puzzles— but this is one of those games in which the sound is definitely above average. Even I can tell so.
Both music and background sound effects enhance the suspense atmosphere to unbelievable levels. Several times I found myself ACTUALLY SCARED while slowly sneaking through certain lonely levels, with the background sounds, the eerie music, the distant howling, and what all not.
There is a given level in which, while navigating some dark catacombs, you will hear, somewhere in the distance, a harsh voice which can only come out of a corpse humming a lullaby. Enough said.
Voice acting is very good, each actor fits their character perfectly, they sound convincing enough and they all have a nice Irish accent: "Aeh owed hem meh life, though...", or something. Neat.

GAMEPLAY-wise, there is not much to say. Like I mentioned, the game is a typical FPS, based on the Unreal Tournament engine. This last bit, for one thing, assures smooth gameplay alright.
It's worth to mention that the combination of the traditional weapons and the magic spells (Patrick fires weapons with his left hand and casts spells with his right hand) can turn quite interesting sometimes, enhancing gameplay slightly. Not only you can use two different attack modes at once, but there are a few possible ways to combine magic and weapons so they complement one another. One of the coolest combinations is to charge the crossbow's arrows with the lightning spell, so whenever someone is hit in an open area with such arrows, he/she is immediatly struck by a thunderbolt coming down from the skies.
The effects of some of the spells are very imaginative, and amusing to watch, like the scrye spell, which distorts reality and shows things that are hidden to the human eye. Whenever there's something plausible to be scryed, you'll hear a spooky voice whispering "scryyyye", "seeeeee", "look aroouuund", or something like that. Brrrr.
Of course, among all the fancy spells, there is the always-praised resurrect spell, which brings dead enemies back to life to happily join our noble cause.

Finally, the game has a REPLAYABILITY ingredient in the form of bonus stuff that you can uncover through console commands, or by performing certain special actions in certain places.
Among others, you get to enter a shooting gallery, watch a disco coreography starring some of the game's characters (including a few monsters), get a huge scary monster to join sides with you through the whole game, witness a gigantic sheep coming out of a barn... go look around in the net for the cheat codes, some of these joke levels are really worth seeing.

The Bad
Like I said, Undying is just a FPS. Moreover, this is yet another game which at first sight makes you believe you got a lot of choices to make, but at some point —earlier than I'd have liked— reveals itself as the most linear thing. You will see lots of doors, but the only ones that will open are the ones that you need to go through in order to advance in the game.
In outdoor areas, a little wandering around will soon show you that these areas are not as 'open' as they looked like.
The game is indeed yet another FPS, and nothing more.
Even though it looks like there is much more inside at first sight, soon enough you end up finding out that it would be the same if all those cinematics, the diary notes, the kilometers worth of text, and the dialogues just weren't there. The game itself consists of running through that door that opened, kill everything that moves towards you, run through the next door that opens, kill some more stuff, run through yet another door, and eventually meet a boss character, and whack the beejezus out of him/her.
Rewind and start over. And over again until you see the credits roll.

The game deserved more from the developers. The strong storyline, the appealing characters, the haunting atmosphere —everything was there to make a way more ambitious project out of this.
I'd have loved Undying to be some sort of the early-1900's horror-story version of Deus Ex, so to say.

The Bottom Line
I think Undying is a great game.
If you enjoy horrors, and you can live with the fact that this is yet another FPS with little to none interactivity with either characters or background (unless you count beating up as interactivity, that is), you won't be disappointed by it.
I don't think you can possibly get bored with a game with such a strong atmosphere as this one. Every time you might think the ride seems to get too long, something will happen that will keep you interested.
And as a FPS, it's a funny game too.

I said the game deserved more work from the developers, but I also think it deserved more attention from the public. Apparently it wasn't well received, and official word is that the sequel (which the ending lets open doors for) will never see the light.
Another shameful unfair chapter in videogaming history, and counting.

The Good
This is the hardest part, figuring out where to start. Undying had me by the balls within moments of starting it up, and didnt really let up until way later near the ending during a rare dull stretch. The storyline, crafted in part by Clive i've-quit-doing-horror Barker, centers on a family decimated by a curse unwittingly unleashed on them by one of the children, and its subsequent demise. The player joins the last surviving member of the family, Jeremiah Covenant, as he attempts to gather up the threads of his ruined family and make sense of it all, and finally to put a stop to the curse. Jeremiah is sickly and dying, and the player, taking the part of an old war buddy who has had more than a slight run-in with the occult, offers to repay a wartime favor by searching the Covenant estate for clues. Shortly after his arrival however, he learns that a rival from his youth is also present at the manor, and seriously messed up stuff start happening.

The plot basically takes you chasing down the spirits of Jeremiahs siblings as they go after his life. You learn the way the family unravelled and you trace the evil that has tainted their blood back to the very source. During the game you visit some truly interesting locales; EA must have paid their level designers way too much for this one. The Covenant estate, complete with lighthouses, pirate caves, cathedrals and underground tombs is amazingly detailed, and the other two dimensions you visit truly feel.. different. It's hard to explain, but whoever came up with these ideas, EA best not fire them. The gameplay however is fairly basic. The plot can be seen as a simple reason for the player to shoot his various guns and things at a varied list of monsters in lots of different locales, as well as use some spells to blow up stuff and solve some puzzles while looking for the occational switch or key. Mind you, i'm not complaining. Hell no.

Some feel the gameplay was overly simplistic for the subject matter, or rather, that that quality of the subject matter was too good for a shooter. To me however, Undying represents what any action fps should strive for; total game world immersion that doesnt catch onto annoying quirks of game logic, lets you simply play the game and poses you with a storyline that doesn't make you feel like an idiot. Undying is relentless, frightening, intriguing, moving and at times, astonishingly impressive.

Impressive. Undying was the first game in a very long time to make my jaw drop. There are certain key moments to the game that really made my day. To this date i still have saves right before these points so i can show my friends. Some moments are technically impressive, others are just impressive in their brilliance. Here are some highlights:

A well filled with water. When an incantation is invoked an Abyss-style water tentacle forms a bridge between two platforms. I have never seen water behave like this in any other game.

Invisible floors. In the demon dimension of Oneiros, certain parts of the game force you to take leaps of faith over yawning chasms to segments of floor that materialise out of thin air. This needs to be seen.

A certain spell you'll use quite heavily is the Scrye spell, a spell letting you take a glimpse beyond time and space, or rather at what is, what was, and what can be. The game uses this spell to show you some truly grisly things. At the very beginning, scrying at a lamp post will show you a man hung, rats drinking from the pool of blood gathering at his feet. Other places paintings on the walls will take on a demonic quality: A man in a chair appears surrounded by hungry demons, a horse on green hills becomes a horse on dying burning fields in twilight. A moment that really struck out for me was scrying a statue, having the statue tear his chest open and display his beating heart, begging you to kill it. Savage stuff.

The moon door. Seeing the reflection of a run down cathedral in a pool of water change to its image hundreds of years earlier, in full splendor. Again this needs to be seen. I couldnt believeit.

One of the siblings is a mad painter. Upon uncovering his barnyard studio, he gives you a demonstration of his skills. He paints an image on a wall in front of you. Slowly you realise its a picture of you - with a huge tentacled demon behind you. You turn around, and there it is. The game sets you up in ways that can be truly chilling.

The tomb. As you crawl through cramped dusty fogged corridors, with the rattling of bones all around you, visibility is near none. And somewhere in far distance you hear deranged singing, coming closer and closer. This is one of the defining moments of the game for me.

The design team behind Undying have every ounce of my respect. What they have done with the setting is truly amazing. Clive Barker needs proper credit for the aspect of the game he really touched on, and that's character and monster design. This guy should be on EA's permanent payroll. What he's done here is magic. The many creatures you encounter in the game are truly menacing. Not one of them made me laugh, which is rare for a horror game. Blood drinking cloaked and tentacled sorcerors, horned head eating half-men, waving squid faced cthulhu-style assassins that literally come out of shadows.. This is gold. Another thing well worth noting is the death sequences. Every time you die the camera pulls back to give you a full view of the offending monster giving you the coup de grace. Some of these animations are truly gruesome and often i found myself deliberately dying just to see them all.

I think one of the truly crowning aspects of the game is the sound. There isn't much else to say than point out the fact that next to the Thief and System shock games, no other game i've played has even nearly touched on the brilliance of Undying. The voice acting is bearable to brilliant, the music is always fantastic (Bill Brown working his magic), and the creature effects are mindboggling. Apparently the sound of a certain creature slithering was a mixture of a vacuum cleaner and a banana being peeled or something. Another cue on the ingenuity of these people.

The Bad
Sadly, there are problems, although i never thought they were PROBLEMS in the first place, merely issues that could have been adressed to enhance the experience. The story loses its drive at times, particularly when the player leaves the manor and the previous wealth of visual cues and hints at the family demise give way to weird alien constructions and landscapes. Oneiros and Eternal autumn, both realms featuring heavily near the end of the game, are fairly straightforward shooting segments, and its been noted that these segments lifts the veil from the players eyes somewhat and belie the actual simplicty of the gameplay. A while after this revelation, the gameplay can seem rather samey, although, i must say, i truly enjoyed just drinking in the atmosphere of it all.

Another issue, strangely enough for a single player game, is related to game balance. At a certain point in the game you acquire a melee weapon known as the scythe of the celts, and from there on there is little reason to use any other weapon. This is a weapon that kills most things in one or two strikes, and actually heals you. The pure strength of the thing is pretty depressive, considering the varied and interesting weaponry you can get your hands on.

A third niggle has to to with the final boss fight of the game. Suffice to say, i thought the game could have been a little cleverer here rather than just pit you against a huge monster that takes a ton of damage. The other boss fights had been superb events, and the last fight simply came off as slightly... Lame. The ending however, chillingly, left room for a sequel. However, now we know there will be none. I'm going to lament this fact for a very long time, as Undying represents some of the best horror FPS action i have ever seen, and probably ever will.

The Bottom Line
A fast paced, deeply disturbing trek through the true heart of hard core horror fiction. Dreadfully impressive, and downright intimidating in it's amount of polish.

The Good
Story is just awesome. Journal entries was written by Clive Barker himself. It's intriguing, and finale is quite surprising. Game is really fearful. Especially when you play it first time. Rooms of the manor are so dark and creepy that you will shit bricks from every noise). Another cool feature is several different death models for every monster.

The Bad
Nothing, really.

The Bottom Line
This horror shooter will scare you to your bones. Sound, graphics and story is just perfect. What does make this game so special? It's style. There is something from Lovecraft and Poe, and there is a lot of text that create this gothic, dark atmosphere of unspoken horror.