REVIEW : Ray’s The Dead (PC)
Horror style plays can be a lot of fun, even if they’re not horrific or scary in any way. Just being enclosed by classic horror ingredients and immersing yourself in the Halloween spirit is a pleasant enough experience. Ray’s The Dead is one such game. Not a horror-game, but certainly horror-themed. It’s packed with trick-or-treating, zombies, and lots of different shades of the colour green.
Ray’s The Dead is an action plan game that tells the story of Ray, a recently deceased man who quickly finds himself un-deceased. On the way, you’ll eat brains, command armies of the undead, and normally do the sort of stuff that a newly revived zombie should do.
The main gameplay mechanic of Ray’s the Dead is rather uncommon. At least I haven’t ever come across another play that does anything like it. You control Ray straight and have to kill foes, then raise their bodies to form a horde of zombies. You then use these various types of zombies to solve puzzles and defeat groups of enemies. Each various type of zombie has its powers and vulnerabilities, and determining how to best utilize them in combat is the only way to ensure your endurance. You do also have an attack of your own, but beyond the first level, it’s very rarely used at all.
Ray’s The Dead controls acceptably for the most part. You can have quite a larger horde following you at any given time, but they sort of wander around in a loose clump. When you’re trying to avoid attacks, stealth your way through various areas, or squeak by burning piles of leaves or whatever it gets sort of irritating when your pack is being picked off at the edges.
The other significant issue with the gameplay is that it just seems too imprecise. In the initial stages of combat, you can surely control your horde and fling individual members at the right time to reliably take out your enemies. As the play progresses there are more opponent types to deal with and larger crowds of rivals at any given time and the whole thing devolves into a total mess.
If I could make one approach that would enhance both combat and puzzle-solving it would be to allow the player to point your zombies with the right stick. As of right now, you can only aim zombies in the direction you’re already moving in, so you have to be heading towards opponents to attack them. You can freeze yourself in place by holding the zombie-launch switch, but that’s hardly a fitting answer in my eyes. If I could move away from competitors while firing at them, and do the identical with puzzles, I might not have ended up getting so frustrated by the combat.
I can’t help but think that having a ‘group together’ button that didn’t cost anything to use may have been a more reliable bet. It’s already disturbing that 90% of the non-combat gameplay is that disturbing buzz wire game you see at crappy carnivals. The camera broke on numerous occasions, forcing me to either die or restart from the menu. The aiming reticule for where to send your zombies would get stuck constantly, which caused more than one fight death, and worse than all of that were the amount of times bosses would glitch out and force yet another menu restart.
The visuals are an eerie mix of 2D art and 3D rendering. All of the characters in the game are rendered in a hand-drawn popular art style, while the atmosphere and several bosses are produced using 3D graphics. The blend is something I’ve not seen done this well in a long time, and truly, it’s just nice to see a play trying something that seems so fresh and unique. It’s not like this blend hasn’t been done before, but rarely are the elements so well composited together. At no point did this feel like Roger Rabbit.
Moving onto the music, Ray’s The Dead gets another big tick there. The plot is very reminiscent of the 80s and 90s movies and TV, and the music has some very alike vibes to the music of those eras as well.
The final big bonus for Ray’s The Dead is the narrative. As I mentioned, you start the game with no memories of who you were or how you died so it does cling a little to the amnesia cliche. The tip here is that the play doesn’t go on about amnesia being a plot point, it just ignites up and you get on with things. You do begin to overcome thoughts straight away, and from then on the play is half set in the present with zombie-Ray and half set in the history with human-Ray. These flashbacks fill in the plot and help you open new abilities.
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