Mar 29th, 2007, 03:14 PM
Illbleed
I finally got a chance to play this little gem. It's so hard.
For those that don't know, Illbleed is a survival horror game based around an extremely scary theme park with six different areas, each one encompassing a different "type" of B-horror movie. For example, the first is called The Homerun of Death and is about Glen Banballow, a Minnesota Inn owner who went on a murderous rampage when his son was killed in a fire. You have to make it through his Inn, calming his fiery rage.
What makes the game so hard is that there're very few enemies to speak of; you die via "shock death", where your heart all but explodes. There are traps everywhere in the level (literally, EVERYWHERE) and if you don't find out where they are, you take some damage and your heart rate jumps up. It starts around 50 and raises or lowers depending on the character you choose, but usually it's around the 250 mark (a little bit over 4 a second, by the way) that you actually die. You can wait around and wait for your heart rate to calm, but it takes a while--about 15 seconds a beat--and before each level you're given specific objectives, like finishing within a certain amount of time, keeping your heart rate down and your health up, etc. The better you perform in the level, the more prize money you earn.
As said, you can scout the traps, but in doing so, you lose adrenaline. There are also tons of blank areas where you think traps MIGHT be, and it's entirely too easy to waste all of your adrenaline looking out for traps that aren't really traps, and then you're screwed. You DO get a substantial amount of adrenaline back if it ends up being a trap, but it's not enough to warrant the risk (about 75 points to scout an area, and you get back about 90 - 100 if it's a trap). What you end up doing is going through the level, doing your best to choose what you think MIGHT have a trap on it and what might not.
What makes this difficult are the meters. You're given sensory meters, ones for your eyes, ears, nose, and sixth sense. If one is going nuts, you're probably about to walk into a trap. The problem arises when your characters become somewhat paranoid. As you walk through a dissheveled diner, your character will be terrified of EVERYTHING, whether it's a real trap or not. You'll look out for more traps, and lose adrenaline, and have no way to regain it.
I haven't been playing it long, but I can definitely see this thing getting really, really frustrating. One of the most original games I can think of, no doubt, but time will tell if it's worth all the time I spent looking for it.
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Linear Mode
