REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

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REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

The monumental residential complex is struck by a strange misfortune – bloodthirsty humanoid monsters have filled it from top to bottom. Nevertheless, Harry Thompson stubbornly wanders the deserted floors: hiding from the creatures, collecting scattered junk, climbing through ventilation and technical rooms, bypassing idle elevators. He is looking for his missing daughter Agatha, and no evil spirits can stop him. It is not clear only why what is happening so strongly resembles a prolonged nightmare …

REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

Skyhill: Black Mist shares with Skyhill’s simple step-by-step “roguelike” one universe, but there is little in common between these games. The new project of the Russian studio Mandragora – isometric “horror”, forcing you to walk on tiptoe and save ammo.

Harry and Agatha recently moved into a stately building owned by the Skyhill Corporation. They did not have time to live in the luxury apartments – the “incomprehensible catastrophe” traditional for the genre happened. The culprit is either a pandemic of a mysterious disease called Black Mist, or not very ethical experiments of the corporation, or all at once. Perhaps the poor fellow, who recently lost his wife, simply lost his mind. One way or another, he woke up on a night and saw a terrible picture: the inhabitants of the complex turned into monsters, some of the premises are filled with an incomprehensible poisonous fog, all this is somehow connected with hefty obelisks of unknown origin … And the worst thing: Agatha, who had gone to a party with a friend the day before, under the guise of kidnapped by some psychos. Naturally, a loving father does not intend to sit idly by. Emphasized schizophrenic gives the situation a piquancy.

REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

The imposing house is similar to Nakatomi Plaza from Die Hard, although it has a different purpose – to provide employees of the corporation with the most comfortable living conditions. In addition to apartments of various sizes, it has a museum, a school, a nightclub, restaurants and parking lots … The locations are connected by a pair of paths, and we are free to walk back and forth, only the shortest road is regularly blocked by rubble and blocked doors, to overcome which special items are needed. Also, the route set by the script is very linear, and there is nowhere to get away from it. Despite the formal signs of “Metroidvania”, in fact, Black Mistrather close to the numerous Resident Evil.

The influence of the famous Japanese series is noticeable in other details: the modest size of the “backpack” forces you to shake out the finds into a dimensionless chest, resources must be saved … There are many weapons here, but there is almost nothing to shoot from them, medicines are always scarce, even knives instantly become unusable – ” fog “, they say, has a bad effect on steel. Partly helps out “craft” and our main trump card is, of course, stealth. The only sensible way to explore the area is to step silently, avoid attention, and open fire only as a last resort.

Alas, stealth in Black Mist– prohibitively tedious primitive. The vast majority of enemies are slow, blind zombies wandering in droves around rooms and corridors; maneuvering between them is mortally annoying already in the first hour, and this is almost the main occupation. To diversify it, the sound propagation is changed depending on the room: echo walks in large halls, small offices, on the contrary, “dampen” footsteps, and screaming speakers or howling wind can drown out any rumble. There is no sense from a non-standard idea, since there is nothing at all noisy places, in the rest, it is still desirable to crawl.

REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

When creatures with eyes appear on the way, it would be great to throw empty bottles, hide behind shelters and kill on the sly, but the system does not work well. As a rule, the sighted are placed so that it is easier to spend a little precious ammunition – the game does not want to give us room for cunning manoeuvres at all. But it allows you to wait out the danger in wardrobes and under beds; this is funny because where there are monsters there are usually no closets.

Open combat is deliberately inconvenient, even if we take the shortage of cartridges out of the brackets: the hero does not know how to avoid blows, runs slowly and for a short time, and reloads the weapon slowly. Also, enemy claws can leave an open wound – then you will have to urgently get dressings. Bleeding is just one of the “survival” features; Harry is also capable of starving and getting nervous. True, what the same hunger does to him is difficult to understand, I’m not even talking about states like “stone calm”.

REVIEW : SKYHILL: Black Mist (PC)

I must say that Buddhist calm is quite understandable it is difficult to feel fear here. The authors do not use uncomplicated sudden attacks and screams, trying to put pressure on the psyche with music, darkness and notes, but the irritation from encounters with monsters outweighs all their efforts. In theory, the duty to build up additional stress lies with the disease. If you walk for a long time without injections, a local “Nemesis”, an invulnerable miracle Yudo, looks like a classic “death with a scythe.” From him, you can skedaddle, but the sad outcome of such a chase will not keep you waiting. Alas, medicinal syringes are so desperately lacking that the periodic phenomena of the bony monster soon begin to be perceived as an inevitable evil, in vain delaying the passage.

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review-skyhill-black-mist-pcThere is no end to the oddities: it is impossible to stab a blind enemy in the back, the "perks" picked up in the hidden corners have a near-zero influence on the process, the damned special forces do not want to die in any way ... Black Mist not that it is unfinished, it looks like an ill-conceived concept that has grown into a game through a misunderstanding. No "patches" will help here.

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