It’s difficult to say what makes something scary. It’s like trying to make people laugh. You need something spooky, and then you need to deliver that spooky thing in the right way. To continue the comedy comparison, you can have the best joke in the world written down on a piece of paper, but if you deliver it in the wrong way, it’ll bomb. There are subtleties to it. You need to pause at the right time, put on the right inflections, and inject some cheer into the delivery. Horror is the same way. Scary things become silly when they’re just thrown directly at the player. The essence is in subtly, which brings me to Abyzou Rituals.
It is not subtle. The Manson in the title should give that away. In fact, let me spoil up front that this review is going to be heavily negative, for a number of reasons. It’s not for a lack of spooky ideas, but they’re fundamentally mishandled. You know when you’re watching a comedy with friends, and sometimes you’ll just find mundane things funny, because you’re all giggly already? That’s atmosphere, and it’s key for horror too. Building atmosphere is quite straightforward, but once it’s broken then it’s hard to get it back. Abyzou Rituals, unfortunately, breaks it almost immediately, and is left with little more than a handful of massively clipped MP3s.
Ghostbustin’
Abyzou Rituals: The Manson Case puts us in the shoes of an online video creator, whose channel is going down the toilet and they need something to spark it back to life. They decide to explore an abandoned house, where a horrific killing happened. There was a lot of satanic stuff going on, and it led to the parents of the house killing their kids. Perfect YouTube fodder. As soon as we step over the threshold, however, the doors all lock and spooky things start happening. It’s a tried and true horror story. Slowly uncovering a horrible story and realising that we’ve blundered right into the middle of it. Unfortunately, the key word there is ‘slowly’. We need a slow boil to build up the atmosphere, and allow the big scares to sucker punch us.
Abyzou Rituals‘ first jump scare comes about five minutes in, and it’s a static model of a rat sliding across the screen as someone slaps a few piano keys. Atmosphere broken, and it absolutely sets the tone. There are constant jumpscares and the monsters are constantly sliding around under the spotlight. Even good scares, like looking out of the window and seeing someone standing under a streetlight, are almost immediately ruined. Its main trick is just to throw static images, or static models, at you while playing an incredibly loud, blown-out sound cue. It’s cheap, boring and stopped working after the first couple. I am legendarily susceptible to jump scares, and I was barely even reacting by the end. Not great.
Blundering About
Let’s dig past the cheap scares and look at Abyzou Rituals‘ gameplay. It’s a light puzzling affair, with the main loop being wandering from room to room, finding keys and codes for locks. There’s only one puzzle, really, where you count a number of elements in a set of paintings and pop it into a lock. At all other times, we’re just looking for the scares. We don’t even record anything – our camera battery stays fixed at sixty. The spooky versions of the family are all over the place, staring through windows and popping up behind you. So, every time you do something, you quickly look around for whoever’s popped up this time. The crowning moment for me was turning around to see a demonified man standing there. But he hadn’t activated yet, so we just politely looked at each other until I moved forward to set him off.
Which brings me to the next nail in the coffin: Abyzou Rituals is very poorly put together. The scares we’ve been through, they are indeed poorly put together. But it’s poor on a fundamental level too. For instance, one of the key items we look at is a book that talks about a ritual. Except the text goes off the bottom of the book and, indeed, off the screen. A lot of the sound effects are unintentionally hilarious, too. Then there’s the fact that the final objective is to get on your bike and leave. But I had no indication of where my bike was, and every exit just told me to get back to ‘recording’. Turns out I needed to push my face into a section of caution tape. Go figure. It all feels very amateur and poorly tested.
Abyzou Rituals – Certainly Horrible
Are there any positives I can rake up here? Well, there’s always the reviewer consolation prize: it had potential. This is a tried-and-tested plot for a reason. Cockily wandering into a haunted house and getting punished for your hubris is a good story. I even liked the small scares, like the aforementioned street-light stuff or the ambient noises that constantly play. But Abyzou Rituals has absolutely no time for slow burns and just throws a handful of cheap scares at you and calls it a day. So my opinion was pretty sour right out of the gate. It’s the same trap that a lot of small horror games fall into it. One single, choice scare is a million times more effective than a constant parade of them. Jumpscare saturation is very real.
The thing is, the other games I’ve played that do this are free games on places like itch.io. I can forgive a lot of things when it’s clearly a new developer putting something out to learn new things, and get some feedback. I’ve got a lot of time for people trying to better their skills. Abyzou Rituals, however, costs £12 for a game you can beat in under an hour, and has no replay value. That’s taking enough piss to cancel all the drought alerts in the UK. With that knowledge, my goodwill dissolved and I was left to endure a succession of cheap, poorly handled jumpscares and a game that seemed to be falling apart at the seams. Avoid at all costs.
