I formerly held the belief that going back to VHS was dumb, because it has been superseded by newer technology. These days, the amount of shit out there is overwhelming, and it’s nice to go back to days when the amount of shit was more comprehendible. It’s the same with video games. I can wrap my mind around the 800-ish games in the NES library, but not the jillion that come out every week on Steam these days.

So, I’ve considered borrowing my parents’ old VHS player, just to see if I enjoy it. I mean, I already have a tonne of vinyl, but that’s a bit different.

Anyway, fans of the horror genre, in particular, seem to love the VHS. I’m not entirely sure why; that might vary depending on the individual. Maybe it reminds them of the days of slipping into the back room of a video rental place to view the forbidden cassettes, or perhaps the unpredictability of the tracking fuzz adds to the terror. Whatever the reason, many small-budget horror games embrace that aesthetic, right down to the grain.

And then there’s Dead Format, which takes it a step further.

EVERYTHING IS BETTER ON LASERDISC

Dead Format is practically a love letter to films and VHS. You’re cast as someone in the ‘90s, who is visiting their brother’s apartment. He’s missing, but he’s left behind his horrifically displayed GHL player and a single video cassette to go with it. Upon slotting the historic silent film, a doorway opens to its world, and you’re brought into a mystery surrounding the strange format.

GHL (pronounced “ghoul”) is positioned in the story as an obscure rival of VHS and Betamax. It boasts better visual and sound quality, but is also haunted, so, you know, pros and cons.

You only venture into three genres (Silent, ‘80s sci-fi body horror, and Giallo), as well as one final film to round things out. It’s a bit Metroid-esque, since you’ll often venture some distance into one before you find an item that you must take into another film to get through an obstacle. The apartment serves as sort of a hub for all the films, with backtracking shortened by copious shortcuts in each area.

TRASH, AREN’T WE ALL?

The biggest length of pipe that Dead Format wields is in its visual style. Each GHL world that you reach is introduced by a short, live-action video shot by the developer, which is such a fun touch. 

Inside, the ambiance is set to emulate the style of video. The silent film is in black-and-white, the ‘80s sci-fi is fuzzy with a lot of high contrast lighting, and the Giallo has each room lit in bright colours. Even if I’m not exactly a film buff and I don’t know the ins-and-outs of cinematography, I can at least appreciate how striking the effects are.

Likewise, I was often impressed with the staging of each scene and the attention to the player’s line-of-sight. The environments are very detailed, and opportunities are taken to throw in flourishes that just heighten the scene. The layout of the levels themselves are fine, but you often find yourself walking into a new area, and the entryway is carefully configured to set the mood. It’s a very screenshot-able game, even if one of the films takes place almost entirely in a sewer.

GRIND YOUR BONES TO MAKE MY BREAD

This may sound a lot like a walking sim, and maybe it should have been. It’s not long before you get a gross gun that fires teeth, which allows you to start killing movie denizens. However, most of the standard enemies are found in the ‘80s sci-fi. There’s a second weapon that seem to be a hark to one of Katanalevy’s previous games, Symphony of Seven Souls, and I’m not sure why because this is not a shooter and the tooth-pistol works fine.

However, your main obstacle in Dead Format is an old lady-vulture. Er, auld lady-vulture. It’s this big monster that crawls out of fleshy TV screens and stomps around looking for you. You can’t be too loud or the sounds will draw her to you, and she can kill you in roughly two swipes.

It sucks. The easiest way to avoid dying is to hide in obvious places where she can’t get you, then just wait until she leaves. I think that the intention is that you try and sneak away from her and only use the hiding spots when she’s right on your ass, but…

Listen, you really don’t want to die. The only save point is in the apartment, and even while sprinting, your character moves about as fast as a work-shy glacier waist-deep in tar. It maybe doesn’t take that long to get back to where you were, thanks to the shortcuts, but it feels like an eternity. You have to re-slot the GHL, wait for the door to slap open, and then trundle your way back to wherever it was you died. I get the intention in wanting to make the possibility of death actually scary, but this isn’t it. If you could take another hit or two, that would be swell, but you can’t take more healing items because the inventory is so small.

SNEAKY SNEAKY

I appreciate that horror isn’t supposed to be comfortable, but being so harsh incentivizes using the invincible hiding-spots. I’d sit there as she paced around waiting for a T.V. portal to open, and then I’d continue on to wherever I was going. It takes like, I don’t know, a minute for her to get bored and leave, so I’d just sit there. I repeatedly mixed and solved the Rubik’s Cube on my desk, just to stay sane.

My guess is that the intention was for the vulture to be like the xenomorph in Alien: Isolation, which was maybe too ambitious. The xenomorph was programmed by a team of people, and the environments were designed by another team. Dead Format was developed by roughly one guy. It could only amount to a pale imitation, so focus should have been put into more creative solutions manageable by a single person.

The hide-and-seek approach to horror has been done successfully by small studios and single developers, with games like Stay Out of the House, but a lot of that has to do with how things are build around the monster.

BE KIND, REWIND

And that’s what kills me when it comes to Dead Format; I can clearly see that Katanalevy is a curious person who wanted to see what they could accomplish. And they find a lot of great success when it comes to aesthetic. Even the way the edges of the door illuminates before it snaps open after you slot a different movie, I could watch it repeatedly – and I did. And the live action movies are fantastic, and I love to see that kind of mixed media.

I just wish I loved the game itself more. It’s not entirely joyless, it can just get extremely annoying. The tiny inventory and restrictive saving shows an appreciation for the grounding facets of some horror games, but not the understanding for why those things work. It instead just creates unnecessary travel, which Dead Format just isn’t built for.

It’s an interesting experiment. There are glimmers of brilliance in Dead Format, and a lot of it shines through. Unfortunately, the whole thing is uneven. Parts of it needed more refinement, or rather, needed to be rethought. Just brought entirely back to the drawing board. It’s breaking my brain trying to reconcile the high highs and low lows. I’d like to compare it to a B-movie, but it’s difficult. It’s mostly like Street Fighter: The Movie where I’m glued when Raul Julia is on-screen and then pull out the Rubik’s Cube every time he isn’t.

5/10

This review was conducted using a pre-release digital version of the game. It was provided by the publisher’s PR.