Recently I spent some time on my PC playing a new survival horror game. In a genre where I believed everything that could be done has been already, I found myself walking away from this with a chill that still hasn’t gone a way. Gravewood High by Evil Corportation Games is showing a lot of early potential.
From the start, there’s no feeling of safety. As a young student, you find yourself in an eerie high school that I imagine someone like Freddy Kruger would be the gym teacher of. The neon in the color pallet of the setting is deceptive, the emptiness of this school and creepy details all around you jar any warm false sense of security you’d get.
It’s narrative is simple. Several students have gone missing at Gravewood High but none of the adults seem to have noticed. The school is a trap and your task is to get out of it. Alongside your friend Erin, the two will need to navigate an elaborate series of traps, puzzles, and just nightmares to escape.
Much like Remedy’s Control, your surrounding shifts and changes the further you progress. This labyrinth isn’t in complete rule as nearly everything in the environment is destructible. So smashing through floors, pushing over lockers, breaking windows, all come into play as you decide the best actions to take. While this might not sound like quite the Saw death trap, there’s one catch. You’ve got a Mr. X of your own chasing you.
This nightmare tyrant is known as The Teacher. It’s an enemy that transforms physically and develops new abilities, becoming smarter and much more dangerous. Simply hiding is not enough. In order to win, you must outwit the Teacher by finding and destroying objects that he holds dear or by luring him into traps. There’s a freedom to how you deal with this nemesis each time. One of my favorite scenarios was being trapped in the chemistry lab, in my first playthrough I’d used chemicals to attack the Teacher but I found later it was more fun to use them on the environment and evade the enemy.
That’s one of the quirks of Gravewood High, each time you play it the landscape changes as the game features dynamic level generating code. You can replay the game dozens of times without running into the exact same enviornments as before.
For all the fun you can have with the game there are some weak points. Gravewood High’s story is a bit too try-hard in terms of the world its developers are aiming to create. There’s too much mystery spanning several decades of lore that it really loses focus on balancing character against setting. By the time I was done, I’d forgotten all about my characters’ motivations beyond survival. In my opinion, it could have used some more banter or levity between your character and Erin. The other distracting thing about Gravewood High is the audio choices. Audio design is serviceable and keeps tension levels up but the gameplay could have used a score that was somewhere between a Tim Burton film and John Carpenter classic.
The game is currently in Alpha build where you can play through the first level. It’s a long one which gives you an idea of the ambitious road map laid out before you. This also means there’s potentially more detail being added to the polish bits which will benefit it greatly. By the time a full release of Gravewood High comes to PC, we could be looking at one of the most fun scares of the year.
You can play the alpha build for yourself by visiting the game’s website here.
