While countless video games are always released throughout the year, October is naturally the month where survival-horror fans get their moment in the sun (or spooky fog-covered moon). Big-budget survival-horror games have had a pretty good year from the remakes of Dead Space and Resident Evil 4 to the recently released Alan Wake II. But what about indie horror? In walks You Will Die Here Tonight, an indie survival-horror game with an arcade flair developed and published by Spiral Bound Interactive. You Will Die Here Tonight offers a fun albeit brief survival-horror experience, but it stumbles in a number of ways that hold it back from being truly great.
From its aesthetics to its gameplay, You Will Die Here Tonight wears its influences on its sleeves, a primary one being Capcom’s original Resident Evil. The game follows a group of elite operatives working for a special task force that is infiltrating a spooky mansion filled with creatures that go bump in the night. The mansion has its own history that you will unravel by finding a number of diaries left around its various halls. But there is a more interesting story surrounding the Aries Division that begins to reveal itself as you play further into the game. You Will Die Here Tonight is a pretty short game taking 6 hours to finish and as a result, it isn’t a very story-heavy game. Character dialogue is delivered via text boxes, and despite the lack of voice acting, the characters are written well enough and feel unique from one another. But it’s the mystery that ends up developing that will keep you engaged enough to see it through to the end.
What immediately struck me about You Will Die Here Tonight was its interesting visual style. As is popular with many games attempting to evoke a retro style, the game has a pseudo-3D pixel art look that reminds me of games from the mid to late 90s like the original Fallout. However, the most interesting part when it comes to the visuals stems from the decision to shift perspective during gameplay. You Will Die Here Tonight is primarily played from a top-down perspective as you explore the environments, but as you engage in combat, the game switches to a first-person camera perspective that has the feel of a light gun shooter akin to House of the Dead. In this first-person perspective, the game now uses low poly 3D character models and environments that are drenched in shadows and dramatically lit by distant torches or flashes of lightning. Seeing the different areas of the mansion in these two differing perspectives is one of the more engaging elements the game has going for it. While the game certainly takes notes from the art direction of the original Resident Evil, the perspective switching gives the game a unique identity compared to many other indie survival-horror games out there. The first-person perspective sets the spooky vibes so well that I wished I could explore more of the game from that perspective as opposed to the uniformly lit top-down perspective.
You Will Die Here Tonight may have a cool visual style and an intriguing mystery, but how does the gameplay shake out? While the core gameplay is fun enough for the game’s runtime, some design decisions feel conflicted with others and as a result, the game feels like it oscillates between wanting to be too many different things at once.
Upon entering the mansion for the first time, the Aries Division becomes separated. You get to choose which of the 6 Division members you want to play as first, which leads to them waking up inside a lab room that has lost power. You are free to set out and try to restore the power to the lab and start enacting your escape. For the most part, each member plays similarly to the others, with the main immediate difference being slower or faster walk speeds. As far as I could tell, there are no recognizable differences when it comes to combat. As you play, each character has a specific task or subquest you can complete as that character. For example, the weapons specialist is able to find parts to upgrade everyone’s weapons at a workbench. Some subquests unlock upgrades for characters while others have more story-related subquests.
As the title would lead you to believe, dying is a concept the game wants you to get familiar with. The game has somewhat of a looping structure, however, it isn’t a roguelike game where things are randomized every time you play. If you die with one character, the previous character’s progress is carried forward and accounted for when selecting the next character. So let’s say while exploring the basement of the mansion with your first character, you cleared out a bunch of enemies but you accidentally fell into a deadly spike pit. When you select the next character to play as, you will awaken once again in the lab, but all the areas full of enemies will still be cleared out, making for an easier time exploring. This can lead to some fun interactions with characters discovering their dead teammates and commenting on their demise or even coming across a teammate that’s turned into a zombie that you can fight, usually rewarding the supplies they were carrying on defeat. There are a lot of different “death” scenarios you can stumble upon which are always a morbid joy to discover.
One aspect of the central death mechanic that isn’t as fun is a result of the deaths coming quickly and feeling like they are unavoidable. During combat, there is a mechanic where if a zombie grabs ahold of you, you must rapidly press a button in order to escape, and the more times you get grabbed, the more button presses it takes to escape. A fine enough system on paper, but there were a few scenarios where due to the enemies that surrounded me, I basically got locked into this grab animation without any time to react until I took too much damage and perished. There are some traps in the mansion that have puzzles associated with them. The puzzles are pretty vague throughout the game and it can get a little frustrating when you are trying to work through a solution only to have your character instantly killed and have to run all the way back with a new character just to try again. If all of your characters die, then you start back from the beginning. There are tokens you can find that allow you to restart a “loop” without starting from square one which are a nice addition, though these are limited in quantity so you can’t always rely on these as a safety net. So while the death mechanic has some interesting gameplay implications, the un-telegraphed nature of some of the deaths can result in frustrations.
Let’s continue talking about the puzzles. Puzzles in survival-horror games are very tough to get right. Often many are so abundantly clear they don’t even feel like a real puzzle, whereas others can be so obtuse that they don’t make any logical sense. Puzzles in You Will Die Here Tonight land a bit on the obtuse side. Many of them are tied to a riddle of some sort, like shifting around mounted animal heads or activating switches connected to specific paintings in a room. The challenge comes from interpreting what the riddle is trying to suggest, but many of these riddles will swap terms around in how they are written which makes discerning what it is you are interacting with that much more of a challenge. I eventually just ended up brute forcing my way through many of the puzzles by process of elimination because trying to wrap my head around the riddles was proving to be fruitless. Some players might enjoy the challenge of trying to decipher these riddles and puzzles, but for me, the process was just a bit too vague for my enjoyment.
Exploring the mansion is a relatively straightforward affair. As is typical with many survival-horror games, you explore the various rooms and halls like a rat in a maze, fighting enemies, coming across locked doors, and finding items like health kits and ammo. Eventually, you will find key items and secret passageways that open previously inaccessible areas as well as shortcuts to make getting around much easier. The mansion has a few large areas to explore like the basement, the mansion proper, and the gardens. Each of these areas is thematically distinct which makes exploring them much more fun. One nice addition is the ability to peer through the keyholes of doors. You get a small vision cone that you are able to move around slightly in order to see if there are any immediate dangers that await in the following room. This was helpful in making decisions on whether I felt equipped enough to take on any of the awaiting challenges, as well as offering a carrot on the end of a stick when you could see a new weapon behind a locked door.
One issue I had when it came to exploration actually came down to the camera’s top-down perspective, and that is the issue of depth perception. I typically don’t have issues with depth perception in games but specifically, I found it difficult to spot where doors were placed in You Will Die Here Tonight. Some doors placed on walls along the top of the screen were easy to identify but the camera perspective hid doors on the left and right of the screen and occasionally the bottom. You can see doors highlighted on the map which was useful, but exploring some areas would be bogged down by constantly checking the map screen when I couldn’t see the door. Perhaps adding a highlight when nearby doors or adding something to the floor of the environment to denote where a door was could alleviate this issue. It’s not a huge issue mind you but something that kept popping up while I was playing.
Combat is the other big pillar that needs to be discussed. Initially, the combat is pretty fun. You can choose to engage in combat when you pull out your weapon and aim at an approaching enemy, or if an enemy gets the drop on you they can pull you into combat with a grab. When you are in first-person combat mode, you are stationary in one spot. You are able to look around at your surroundings as enemies can come from all sides. You can fire weapons from the hip, or you can hold the aim button and after a short window, your crosshair will shrink to give you more accurate shots. It becomes this balance of timing shots, conserving ammo, and enemy management that’s a lot of fun. The feedback of shooting from punchy sound effects to the way zombies recoil when hit makes it all the better.
The issue with the combat is that it doesn’t evolve much over the course of the game and it starts to feel a bit robotic towards the end. Enemies of a specific type seemingly have the same amount of health, meaning they will always take the same amount of shots to take down. Zombies in the basement could normally be taken out with a single well-timed headshot, while zombies in the mansion would take around 6 shots. Once you recognize this, it only takes a short while before the combat feels formulaic, rather than a tense battle that can push and pull on the fly. There are different enemy types throughout the game, but the main thing that changes is either their movement speed or the amount of health they have. Some enemies have axes you can shoot out of their hands but that’s about the extent of combat dynamics. It would have been nice to see a bit of variability in this area in order to keep the combat feeling fresh or keep the player on their back foot in subtle ways.
The issues with the combat are also highlighted in the game’s boss fights. Visually speaking, the bosses are cool-looking and unique from all the other enemies in the game. But mechanically they operate differently from the rest of the combat. First of all, the amount of health these bosses have is significantly larger than any of the other enemies, which is to be expected to a certain degree. This gets to be an issue when you die with 2 or 3 characters working on taking down the same health bar for a single boss. The bosses have a variety of attacks that are interesting to discover, but while they telegraph the attacks well enough, it isn’t really clear if the bosses have specific weak points. I saw certain attack animations get interrupted and I was able to stagger the bosses at certain points, but I could never reliably tell how exactly I was pulling it off. Your pistol during boss fights gets unlimited ammo, which is fun and really plays into the arcade-feeling side of the game. On the other hand, it calls into question why ammo pickups and conservation during normal combat are even needed. The boss fights I feel are the central part of the game where the two styles clash and feel at odds with each other. Part of the game wants to be survival horror with resource management, while the other part wants to be an arcade shooter. Each has good elements and drawbacks, and I think the game might have worked a bit better if one style had been chosen as the focus.
The last thing I want to touch on is the “looping” nature of the game I mentioned earlier. This structure of repeating the mission does play into the overall narrative of the game, but from a gameplay perspective, it feels a bit out of place. The main reason I say that is because not enough changes in the mansion between loops to feel impactful. There are certain things you need to do in order to get the true ending of the game, but outside of those activities, the game largely feels like you are just replaying stuff you have already completed. This came to a head when I had to start another loop to have a certain character interact with a chessboard in the lab. But at the start of the loop, the lab didn’t have power, and if it didn’t have power, I wasn’t able to interact with the chessboard which meant I had to spend the next 15 minutes going through the process of getting the power on just so I could interact with the chessboard. On top of that, there is no way to end a loop prematurely, so I either had to spend another hour doing the same tasks I had already completed a couple of times to finish the loop or spend a couple of minutes killing off all the characters to end the loop. Having some sort of option to end the mission early would be nice, especially when there is a specific puzzle that requires certain actions to be taken during the mission itself.
While I described a few criticisms of the game, overall You Will Die Here Tonight is still a decently fun time. The gameplay may have its flaws and it may feel a little familiar to survival-horror fans, but the style is unique and the narrative is interesting enough to where you want to see where it all leads to. And the game is the perfect length for what it is, some of my criticisms may have been worsened if the game overstayed its welcome, but if you are looking for a bite-size horror-action game, You Will Die Here Tonight is a solid choice. You Will Die Here Tonight is available on PC via Steam. A code was provided by the publisher for review.
