I do enjoy a good horror game or two. Looking back at this years played games, the majority have indeed been of that persuation, and so when Anthology of Fear graced my desk, I figured why not add to the list. And you know what? I’ve been pleasantly surprised with the result.
Anthology of Fear comes from the school of ‘games inspired by P.T‘, being as it is a slow, tense, and combat free experience. The frights come in the strange noises, actually messed up visuals, and constant pokes and prods at the periphery of our vision. Even knowing there was no peril, I still found myself bracing when opening doors or going around corners, and rarely did this atmosphere let up.
It tells the story through several protagonists viewpoints, with our main man Nathan finding videotapes that contain the memories of others, at which point we take control. It goes to some pretty dark places (the second tape in particular was pretty intense as a parent), but it’s also surprisingly more-ish in the way I always wanted to push forward even despite the horror.
Most of the tropes used here have been seen many times before (rooms that shift as we turn around, mannequins and dolls, quick flashes of light and dark etc) but they are all paced rather well, and rarely is it too obvious what is about to happen. Occasionally OhDeer Studio will tease us with a face to face with an enemy, but again, this is nicely used to make it feel as though they might just make us fight after all.
It’s a pretty great looking game too. Certainly P.T shows through in it’s more realisitic rendering and lighting, but there’s also elements of Resident Evil 7 at times. Performance is a bit less ideal; we can switch between 4K30 or 4K60, but both suffer slowdown and can feel quite sluggish, especially when trying to interact with fiddly objects such as keys on a PC or opening drawers. Mouse and keyboard support is here, albeit not ‘officially’ supported, so we need a controller on hand for some bits.
After a long wait for a progress-halting bug to be fixed, I managed to finish the game off – only to find that there was roughly 10 minutes of gameplay beyond the bug. It seems to be a known issue (the game would crash on my Series X when loading a save) and while there’s been no mention of a fix that I have seen, I finally managed to sync my save to my Series S (something else that wasn’t working previously) and complete it. While hopefully this is the end of this issue, it’s worth bringing up in case you don’t have the option to swap to another console.
Conclusion
Delayed completion aside, I found Anthology of Fear to exceed my expectations, with a solidly build horror foundation complimented with genuine frights and tense moments. With no combat (and very little actual peril) it might not suit everyone, but if you enjoyed titles like Layers of Fear or indeed the P.T demo, then this is well worth a look.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox S|X review code, using an Xbox S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
