Clive Barker's Undying

aka: Bu Si zhi Ling
Moby ID: 3457
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

There always was a curse upon the Covenant family which killed them all either with a painful disease or drove them into madness. At the end of the 19th century the father of the current generation of Covenants reopens their old but abandoned mansion and thereby uncovers strange standing stones on an nearby island. Possessed by this discovery, he locked himself up in the library and wanted to uncover the meaning of those stones. Out of curiosity, in 1899 his three sons and two daughters stole a book about the stones out of his library, went to the island and conducted a dark and powerful ritual which marked the beginning of the end. During the following 20 years almost every member of the family either turned mad and killed themselves or died from something else.

Now it is the year 1923 and the very last member of the family, Jeremiah Covenant, lies on his deathbed with cancer in his body but he is not alone in his house. The spirits of his brothers and sisters haunt the house, strange events happen and evil creatures stroll through the mansion. In a final attempt to not only lift the family curse but also to put his fellow ancestors to rest, he calls upon Patrick Galloway. Patrick was part of his squad in the first great war and after a fierce battle against creatures, they had never seen before, he had specialised in abolishing such powers from the earth.

You take control over Patrick and walk around like in every other first person-shooter through the several locations of the game ranging from the mansion itself over other earthly locations to Oneiros and Eternal autumn, which are other plains of existence. On your way you uncover the mysteries of the family by reading books and papers which lie around the mansion or by talking to the few people still alive on the island.

Also reading might help you understand what is happening here, it won't help you survive against all the strange creatures that hide in the shadows and attack you without asking. It's also impossible to defeat the ancestral spirits without some serious firepower, so besides your trusty revolver, you'll also find several other weapons during the course of the game like Molotov cocktails, your lovely shotgun or a freeze gun shaped like a dragon head. Since you are fighting the paranormal, you also have access to several spells which allow you to see enemies before they see you, revive the dead or shoot Ectoplasm. Since you hold all your weapons in the left hand and you cast your spells with the right hand, it is possible to use both at any time.

As the name suggests, Clive Barker, the maker of the Hellraiser movies, had great influence in the making of the whole game. He also wrote the background story.

Spellings

  • Клайв Баркер. Проклятые - Russian spelling
  • 不死之灵 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

141 People (103 developers, 38 thanks) · View all

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[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 84% (based on 43 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 112 ratings with 17 reviews)

Above average, story-driven shooter

The Good
Clive Barker's Undying is a well plotted shooter that loses its impact in the final 1/3 of the game. In Undying, you are Patrick Galloway, a man who's life has been touched by the supernatural. An old war buddy has called you to his estate to help him unravel a family mystery. The family story is revealed through journal entries that you find and through a scrye spell that shows how events unfolded in the past. The scrye spell was my favorite part of the game.

While the game plays as a first person shooter, the ability to use weapons with one hand and cast spells with the other is a distinct touch. Some spell/weapon combinations even complement each other. There is little inventory management and the linear design of the game means that you will have access to every weapon and spell.

I specifically liked how each weapon and spell had advantages and drawbacks. The revolver is powerful but has a long reload time; the shield spell is helpful but blocks your vision. Also you have the ability to "amplify" spells through power-ups, which offers a slight degree in variation of gameplay.

Graphically this game was impressive, I particularly liked the lighting in the outdoor areas. Characters looked great and sound was immersive.

AI was passable, the best AI comes from creatures deciding what attacks to use at what range. Also some creatures used cover for protection, but most encounters involve having creatures run straight at you.

The Bad
This game seemed to unravel towards the end. I really enjoyed the game up until the first boss (which was rather far into the game). Tension had been slowly building and I felt significantly challenged. Towards the end of the game, I was simply too powerful. I ended the game with 50+ health packs, most of my spells were maxed out, and I had tons of ammunition. This game lacked the bullet conservation aspect of most "survival horror" games.

This game is also very linear. Innumerable doors are sealed which prevented me from getting lost, but I began to wonder why the designers bothered putting doors in to begin with. I would have enjoyed exploring more rooms even though they might not have had any useful items or information. At the end of the game I felt like I hadn't missed any areas (unlike the Thief series) and feel that there is little replay value.

Finally, bosses were easy to beat. Like most game bosses, there is a method to beating them and discovering the method to defeating these was very easy. Often, I had much more trouble with the ordinary creatures leading up to the bosses rather than the bosses themselves.

The Bottom Line
This game is very similar to Realms of the Haunting but technologically light-years ahead. I really liked most parts of the game and was only really disappointed with the final level. Spells and weapons were great and there were several scary moments. Unfortunately this game sold poorly and it seems that no sequel will be made. Its strengths are its unique spell/weapon system, character models, and price. Its weaknesses are its linear design, lack of replay value, and a weak endgame.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2001

Great game, hampered by performance

The Good
The story line is fantastic, but who would expect anything less than something overseen by Clive Barker. From my understanding, the story was already worked out before Clive came on board, but I do know that he was responsible for redesigning the main character, Patrick, as well as providing the voice of one of the villains and designing some of the monsters.

The game starts off very strong, you are quickly pulled into the mystery of the Covenant family and their curse. The atmosphere is creepy and stifling - you feel like you can't escape the horrors that lurk in the Covenant mansion.

The game is powered by the Unreal Tournament engine, contrary to a previous review of this game which stated it was a quake 3 engine. It has been heavily modified to handle the shadows and characters and it really shows. The level design is, for the most part quite good and the monsters are unique and well designed.

I found the music and sound to be fantastic. No complaints here, I often listen to the soundtrack just to get into the mood!

The Bad
There was no cooperative multi player, something I always look for in a single player title. However I do think that Undying plays just fine alone, in fact it probably increases the fear and tension throughout the game.

I did not like the UT powered engine. The game struggles in many areas to perform, and brought my beefy machine to it's knees in many situations (single digit framerates). Also, the sound often popped/crackled, which for me destroyed a lot of the mood created.

I also was quite disappointed by the last 1/3 of the game, it moved away from the mansion setting and moved towards some bizarre areas, which I was not too impressed with. Lastly, the ending was vague and I found the story to be inadequately explained. I like open endings but this ending was so open the earth could have fallen through it.

Lastly I did not like the frustrating slowness of the save/load mechanism. It took too long and became a great hindrance to my enjoyment. I read that the game was being developed for a release on the PS2 (which was canned) - due to memory restrictions, the game has an increased amount of 'loading' screens, which gets quite annoying after a while and breaks the tempo. While I understand why they did this, it still is annoying and unrequired for the PC version.

The Bottom Line
A good title, worth your time and money and is guaranteed to scare your pants off in many parts. There are some great elements to this game, so don't let my negative comments discourage you!

Windows · by neko_ (5) · 2002

Why oh why did EA cancel the sequel =( why oh whyy!!?

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.

Windows · by Andreas SJ (21) · 2003

[ View all 17 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Spoiler-ish screenshots? Giu's Brain (503) Dec 30, 2012

Trivia

Cancelled sequel

The game had an open ending because the developers were already planning a sequel. Unfortunately, the sequel was canceled because of poor sales of the game.

Family portrait

A family portrait of the Covenants is displayed in several rooms of the estate (and on the box, and in the advertisements...). While it is a striking picture, it is also impossible according to the time lines presented in the documentation and story. The picture shows Jeremiah seated in his post-war infirmed state. Jeremiah did not return from the war until after Lizbeth's death and Aaron's disappearance.

Music

  • A good deal of the music files used in Undying are actually recycled directly from Dreamworks Interactive's previous game, Trespasser. For example, the music that plays during the boss battle with Ambrose in Undying also plays during your first meeting with a T-Rex in Trespasser. The music which plays during Undying's final battle is taken from the Town level of Trespasser when you find two T-Rexs fighting each other.
  • In the main theme song, you'll hear the choir sing "Spiro Spero, Spiro Scio." In latin, that roughly translates to "hope to breath, Hope to understand."

Player character

Originally, the hero of the game was supposed to be Magnus Wolfram, a large, creepy-looking man with a bald, tattooed head. When he was introduced to the project, Clive Barker suggested that the team develop a more human, identifable protagonist (which led to the creation of Patrick Galloway).

Magnus' character model still exists in the game, however. It's used for the creepy Trsanti shaman that Galloway fights in the game's opening cinematic.

In an E! Online interview, Barker actually said (about the main character):

Make him somebody I want to sleep with. (...) What we had before was this kind of big fellow with all these tattoos, but there wasn't any charisma there. I think we needed somebody who the player was going to want to be...It would be like having Regis Philbin playing Indiana Jones.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – Best Sound of the Year

Information also contributed by ClydeFrog, Scott Monster and Terrence Bosky

Analytics

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Related Sites +

  • Bill Brown - Music Composer
    Listen to streaming and downloadable MP3 music tracks from this title at the composer's official site.
  • Clive Barker's - Undying Fan Page and Walkthru
    Undying walkthrough, FAQ and enemy descriptions
  • Scary Creatures
    An Apple Games article about the Mac version of Clive Barker's Undying, with commentary provided by Aspyr's President Michael Rogers (August, 2001).
  • Standing Stones
    Fan site for Undying, with editing support. Currently running a contest (with prizes) for the best original map.
  • Standing Stones
    Undying fansite with walkthrough, cheats, maps and more.
  • Standing Stones
    An extensive Clive Barker's Undying fan site containing walkthrough, game guide, editing tools, community maps and more...

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 3457
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Matthew Bailey.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Alan Chan, Unicorn Lynx, Aapo Koivuniemi, Benjamin Slade, Apogee IV, AdminBB, Zeppin, Klaster_1, oct, Patrick Bregger.

Game added March 25, 2001. Last modified January 27, 2024.