An unashamedly mature title in a sea of family-friendly offerings on Kinect for the first time, Rise of Nightmares takes you into a cinematic world of horrific blood and violence.
The dark and baroque prince of twentieth-century horror H.P. Lovecraft once wrote that the "oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." At the moment, mature titles for Kinect are certainly an unknown quantity. With a few notable exceptions (well, Child of Eden anyway), Microsoft's motion controller has so far been confined to family-friendly activities.
Rise of Nightmares is definitely not family fare. It's a gory, grisly first-person horror adventure game that will have you stabbing and slashing, butchering and bashing the undead. Not tickling bouncy wide-eyed tiger cubs.
You play Josh, a recovering alcoholic, who has taken a trip with his long-suffering spouse Kate to Eastern Europe (wonderfully sinister this time of year). It's a last-ditch attempt to put things right with their faltering relationship. But during the opening train journey, your wife is kidnapped by a terrifying brute wearing a strange contraption on his face, while a mysterious man cackles in the background. (He turns out to be called Victor, which is abuot the least intimidating name imaginable.)
But it's when you reach Victor's brooding Gothic mansion that the screaming really begins.
The game uses Kinect in lots of interesting ways. You run, you climb ladders, you pull levers, you balance, you frantically brush leeches off your forearms after an unexpected dip in lake. At the beginning of the game, you even turn over Tarot cards one by one to learn that your future is damned.
As the game is not on rails -- I repeat, NOT ON RAILS -- Kinect is used predominantly to explore the environment and to despatch the dead. You move by placing your best foot forward. To turn, you simply angle your torso right or left. Take one step back and, unsurprisingly, you take one step back. At first it's awkward; you stagger around like a hapless drunk, making you think that Josh has fallen off the wagon. After a while you adapt, but it's never intuitive.
The combat is, though. There are no guns, with the emphasis more on 'stabby' weapons -- machetes, ice blades, combat knives, and the like. Later on, you'll get your mitts on more powerful two-handed weapons, like a petrol-guzzling, smoke-coughing chainsaw. When attacked by the undead, raise your arms, adopting a boxer's stance, and you'll automatically block any incoming attack; then, stab, slash, punch or kick to your heart's content. There's a slight delay in between attacks. If you slash frantically, it will probably only register one or two blows, which can be irritating. But the punch and kick mechanics work well.
Producer Satoshi Ito, who worked extensively on SEGA's beloved House of the Dead series, believes the removal of a controller increases the sense of vulnerability experience by the player. No longer can you hide behind the controller. Or so the theory goes.
Whilst the removal of a traditional controller does increase the feeling of insecurity to a degree, whether it actually raises the sense of terror is debatable. Especially when you remember that to use Kinect properly, the lights have to be on. I played the game in low-key lighting, and Kinect operated okay, apart from constantly telling me to move backwards, which might have been down to the lack of illumination. But normally when playing something like Resident Evil or Dead Space, my preference (one I probably share with others) is to turn the lights out entirely. The terror gained by ditching the controller is offset by playing with the lights on.
Like Stu and Billy, the killers in Scream, the game has been weaned on a diet of horror movies. It's set in an Eastern European locale seemingly mired in the Middle Ages; there's a mad scientist named Victor whose morbid hobby is to reanimate the dead; even the slouching, shuffling zombies have a nostalgic Romero-blue tinge to their rotting flesh. The gratuitous level of spatter and elaborate death-traps, meanwhile, recall the recent 'torture-porn' sub-genre, with movies like Hostel and the unending SAW being a strong influence.
But ultimately, it's an uneven concoction. In the opening sequence, there are plenty of crude stereotypes and some clunky dialogue -- "These old Soviet cars buck like Shropshire ponies" being one of my favourites. I'm still not sure whether Rise of Nightmares is a knowing compilation of all my favourite horror movies or a piece of shlock worthy of the late great William Castle. Based on what I've seen, it's fun, at least -- but only in a B-movie kind of way.
