Dawn of Fear Review: Dawn of Potential

Silent Hill 3 Style Long Ladder Climb

   This review takes a look at the unpolished game thats arrived on the PS Store. If you're a fan of old school survival horror; Resident Evil and Silent Hill alike. Dawn of Fear released on the PlayStation store on February 3^rd, for £15.99, seemingly out of nowhere. I can’t even remember how I heard about it, but despite being a little skeptical – I thought I may as well try it.

   It is overwhelmingly clear just how much the developer Brok3nsite both admires and was inspired by classic survival horror games. But does it work? Yes and no.

   The set-up for Dawn of fear is weak at best. After some brief on-screen text telling you what’s happened, you’re left to go wander around the mansion as Alex. After hearing a gunshot, forcing you to return to the main hall, you find your friend’s(?) corpse and a handgun – sound familiar? The rest of the story comes from brief, but confusing, conversations before boss fights. And from the documents you find throughout the manor, which are just difficult to read and don’t actually offer much.

   All of the in-game dialogue and conversations are frustrating and difficult to understand. Mainly because the English translation just isn’t good. I assume this is because the developer seems to be a Spanish company. Now I would never bitch or moan about the English of someone’s second language. After all, I can only speak English. Nonetheless, Dawn of Fear desperately needs some editing, script work, and voice acting. Before the first boss Alex has a conversation with what seems to be… the skeletal remains of his friend? Or someone on the other side of a door? Or maybe the boss itself? I’m still unsure of who was talking at what time, and who said what. The dialogue features repeated words, incorrect tenses, alongside overly formly and unnatural wording. This can easily be fixed, and I wouldn’t let it ruin your experience or put you off too much.

   Retro till the very end, Dawn of Fear Looks, feels, and has the bugs of a PS2 game.

The game desperately needs a patch and it needs it fast. I got stuck for over 2 hours trying to get the game to register that I had used a pair of shears to unchain a door. At one point I had to hard reset the game over 10 times in a row, because I kept getting caught in a never ending ladder climbing animation. Eventually I gave up and reset my PS4 and then it worked, so I still don’t know if it was about how I aligned myself to the ladder, or if the game just broke for a bit. In fact, most of the fear I got from this game, came from finding I had to climb a ladder when I hadn’t saved in ages.

  Dawn of Fear reminded me most of the game `Alone in the dark: A New Nightmare`. The character models aren’t exactly great – in fact they more look like clay figurines that were never intended to move. The protagonist’s movements look incredibly stiff, and the standard `zombie` enemies have basically one type of movement and not much variety.

The controls were a nice throwback. You can use the directional buttons to control Alex in my personal favourite way; tank controls. I know plenty of people despise them, and they can be hard to get used to, but I adore them. If you do hate them, you can use the left analogue stick to free move through the static camera angles. This does mean that you sometimes get stuck, or the controls lock when you change screens (a problem I’ve found in games like `Koudelka` and `Project Zero`). I found myself using the tank controls to make it easier and more fluid to navigate the manor, and the free movement during boss fights or tough enemies. I love that they give you the option, and despite it needing some fine tuning, I think it really combined the different styles to a good standard. The controls for aiming trying to copy the original Resident Evil games. You can't move while aiming, but you can turn left-to-right, up, and down. At some points I found that my shots did nothing unless the auto-aim had kicked in. Other times I couldn't get the auto-aim to work unless I was stood right next to the enemy. The knife is very over-powered, which is nice.

   While none of the enemies are in any way unique, they do have a certain charm to them. It felt like the enemies were a constant reference to other games, you have these metal creatures on all fours that reminded me of the `lethal injection` monsters from `The Suffering`, and a boss fight of clumped together corpses that looked like it came straight out of `Dead Space`. While this was nice, it just didn’t have any sense of originality to it.

   The actual difficulty of the game isn’t too hard – puzzles are fairly easy, but scratch an itch I’ve had since Resident Evil switched to action. The enemies don’t pose too much of a threat, but the bad aiming system and more than one enemy led to quick deaths. When I first started, I played for about an hour and couldn’t see any signs I’d taken damage, then when a `zombie` grabbed me out of nowhere I was greeted by an abrupt `Has muerto` and sent to the main menu. Frustrated, I loaded again and tried to find where my health was. The inventory system. Designed like a notebook, with sketches of your weapons and items. The more damage you take the more blood stained it becomes. At first this was sort of a “huh. Neat” moment, but it quickly became annoying. Alex shows no signs of damage, so you constantly have to open the inventory to check, which isn’t too bad and silent hill basically did the same thing. However, it forced me to heal when I didn’t want to. The more damage you take, the harder it is to see and read anything from the notebook.

Flooded with references, I’m genuinely shocked Brok3nsite hasn’t had any issues with copyright. One room is a massive nod to the first Resident Evil. After a `zombie` bursts from a locked room in an exact replica of the `lol nope` Chris gif, you gain access to a certain room. This room looks like it was taken straight from the Spencer Mansion. You can find a typewriter that when interacted with prompts the dialogue `Had I had an inkribbon` (no that’s not a typo, that’s how it’s written). There’s a beautiful item box that you can’t use, and even Chris Redfields jacket that you can see in the S.T.A.R.S office. Further, later in the game you enter an area which plays a constant loop of Moonlight Sanata

Music and All.

This both leans into the nostalgic feel of the experience, and completely pulls you out of it. Frequently I found myself confused as to why I couldn’t remember where to use an item, or how to get to a room (especially since there's no map). Only to shake my head and remind myself that in fact, I haven’t played this before. It’s not Resident Evil, and it’s not Silent Hill.

Overall, Dawn of Fear is painfully short and is only really prolonged by the clunky controls and game breaking bugs. Despite this, if you’re a big fan of classic survival horror then you’ll really get a kick from this. It’s frustrating, there’s practically no hand-holding, and it feels like an undiscovered gem from the past era of gaming. It’s pretty cheap and hopefully with some updates it will become a much better game. There’s potential for it to become a modern cult classic and I strongly recommend supporting it. Hopefully, if the developers put the effort into fixing it up, it can inspire others to create their own homages to the survival horror era.