Go! Go! GOTY! ~Day Thirteen~ (Kraven Manor)

Day Thirteen

• Game: Kraven Manor
• Source: Bundle Stars's Killer Bundle
• Start: 13/12

Since it's the thirteenth today (though a day off of Friday the 13th), I figured I'd go with the singular horror game on the Go! Go! GOTY! docket. Kraven Manor is a student project made with the Unreal Engine that does a lot with a little. The best horror games keep you guessing, and thus keep you in suspense throughout. Kraven Manor also tries new things with the gameplay, a feature obviously unique to horror games in particular and usually underutilized; the gameplay side of this genre is traditionally fairly weak, usually serving as a foundation upon which to build the horror beats, most of which are common enough features in other horror media. It's easy to think of the genre as being this place where developers throw together some basic first-person exploration and then go nuts with their film studies liberal arts degrees and experiment with presenting horror movie tropes from a first-person/viewer-driven perspective.

"Nethermancy"? I think that's just called urology these days.

Kraven Manor is very much built on the standard "walk around in first-person, get spooked out by things" Indie horror template, the sort of thing that gets cloned endlessly by hacks for the sake of PewDiePie affiliation lucre, but Kraven at least explores a bevvy of ideas before quickly but steadily building to its fairly ludicrous (but still fun) conclusion. The player travels to the foreboding Kraven Manor for reasons that probably exist somewhere, and finds that there's an odd mechanical secret to the manse, as well as a far more diabolical supernatural one. Upon finding dioramas of areas of the mansion, the player can connect them to a model of the main hall to open new areas as parts of the building shift around to accommodate. It's a modular level-building device that I've seen utilized in the barest handful of games, and it's something I'd love to see more often. Each area is a self-contained spooky set-piece, gradually presenting the game's antagonist: a bronze statue that the player spots as soon as they first step into the mansion (though, of course, there's no way they're cognizant of its significance, despite the fact it switches positions to look at you).

The antagonist cannot move unless it goes dark, or the player turns their back on them, after which it moves very quickly and can take you down in seconds. It's very much taking a leaf from SCP Containment Breach's book (or the Weeping Angels of Doctor Who, to go further back), but it's effective, and the game starts to do clever tricks with the premise once it's been introduced. For instance, the game sometimes "glitches" and lets you see the statue animate for a split-second once the player focuses the light on them despite it breaking the "rules"; a very deliberate design decision. Eventually, it starts to ignore this rule all together, as it grows more powerful with the player's inadvertent help.

See? This is sorta neat. I wish I could remember some other games where you could build your own base with models/modules like this.

Most Indie horrors are content to be a pale shadow of Amnesia: The Dark Descent, with the same first-person views and eerie sound and visual effects that do all they can to unsettle the player, but it feels that the developers of Kraven Manor (who I believe were a baker's dozen of university students) are at least eager to try new ideas. Whether it's the modular level-building or its gradual (yet expedited) process of introducing and establishing its nemesis and his burgeoning new "powers", it certainly uses its short running time to decent effect. (If you're not a fan of horror games or, rather, you are a fan of horror games but not a fan of actually playing them yourself, you can either watch 2BFP (one of the few LP teams I can still tolerate) play the whole thing for their 2014 Halloween feature, or drop a line to one @patrickklepek to feature it on Spookin' With Scoops someday.)

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