It’s common knowledge that horror is a great genre for young filmmakers. It offers a lot of room for creativity with completely deranged stories, and you can come up with a surefire hit (or at least turn a profit) with very little budget and vision. I don’t think the same can be said for horror games. I appreciate when a single developer, or a very small team, decides to make a low-budget indie horror, especially one with a retro influence, but the results aren’t always impressive. For example, let’s talk about Don’t Let Him In. A very bad game, but one I can almost respect.
I’ve reviewed many bad games over the years, and I believe I can now easily distinguish a bad game with vision from an “asset flip” designed to make a quick buck with minimal effort. Don’t Let Him In falls into the first category. It’s a bad horror game, that didn’t scare me or engage me for long, but it had original elements, a unique vision, and, as bad as the story was… they tried. They failed miserably, but still, they tried.
To be fair, the premise itself isn’t bad. The game revolves around three friends who are driving on the road on their way to a rock concert. Things get weird when they pick up a hitchhiker and let him in the car (there’s the reason behind the title). Hallucinations, bad dialogue, terrible fight sequences and rushed editing accompany the plot, but the premise itself is almost acceptable. It’s clearly inspired by Silent Hill, and tries to convey the feeling of being trapped in limbo, where your inner thoughts begin to haunt you in the real world… at least at first.
I don’t want to give away the final acts of this hour-long experience, but it stops being a psychological tale in favor of a couple of (really bad) fight scenes with Scooby-Doo-esque twists and revelations. The game almost became interesting when it tried to be about inner demons and such, even if that meant the first 45 minutes of gameplay consisted of walking around very small environments, collecting half a dozen puzzles, and enough drugs to entertain Lindsay Lohan from the mid-2010s for one afternoon.
I think this could work as a low budget indie horror film. The plot is not hopeless; it would just require a massive rewrite and a bunch of revisions. The duration is almost ideal for horror, and given the few supernatural elements involved in this story, a large special effects budget would not be necessary. As a game, however, this just falls short of expectations. Even if the PS1-era inspired graphics are somewhat charming, there’s no fear, no tension, nothing. You’ll last her for an hour, get the platinum trophy, and never worry about her again.
The best I can say about Don’t Let Him In is that, yes, there was an honest attempt to make a Silent Hill-style indie horror on a very low budget. Unfortunately, this would be a more acceptable attempt if it were a movie and not a piece of interactive “entertainment.” Even if there were microscopic hints of hope in the premise, the game is plagued with terrible controls, with only a couple of bad fight sequences, minimal duration, and really poor execution. You can get the platinum trophy in less than an hour, but you deserve better than that.
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