Betrayer
Blackpowder Games
Initial release: Mar 24, 2014 (worldwide)
Platform: PC
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| images c/o Mobygames. saturation all the way down. |
In the months and years following the release of DayZ, the hit zombie mod for the ARMA II military sim, a number of open world survival horror games would be churned out, of varying quality and styles. There's been some good ones, some bad ones. Betrayer, a colonial folk horror adventure by a team of former Monolith Productions staffers, is at least one of the more visually striking ones, black and white and red all over, standing as one of a throng of attempts to redefine how survival horror games are designed; gone are the narrow mazes and tightly-wound gameplay, instead you are dropped at the foot of an open world and told to survive.
Let's get into it.
The year is 1604. You wake up, cold and alone, shipwrecked on the shores of colonial Virginia. The nearby colony is deserted, reminiscent of the Roanoke disappearance; monsters roam the countryside, monsters who were once men, monstrous, red-eyed Spanish conquistadors and the walking corpses of the native tribes, burning and charred but ever hunting for prey. Your only companion is a mysterious woman in a red cloak.
The game is short and pretty simple. You can expect things to change very little from start to finish. Most of the time you'll be trying to manage your ammo stock while dealing with roaming monsters dotting the wilderness as you try to piece together the narrative. While Roanoke's fate may have been as simple as the colonists integrating with the local tribes for survival, nothing so mundane has happened with this colony. Past the obvious question of why Spanish conquistadors, undead or not, are in Virginia, there are plenty of ghosts to tell their story.
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| full color. |
Where Betrayer falls short is that it’s a very visually busy game, and it can often be hard to differentiate objects in the foreground or background. Most items and enemies are painted a stark red to help draw the eye, but ultimately the player is better served using color. That’s not to say that a bright, colorful image is the only other option. How much color, and how washed out it is, is entirely adjustable; I was reminded, aesthetically at least, of films like The Seventh Seal, and so I chose a washed out, desaturated look reminiscent of 40s and 50s films. Using a bit of color will also help differentiate from a major gameplay element where the game forces the black and white regardless of your color options: the “otherworld,” accessible by ringing large bells found throughout the seven (or eight, counting the tutorial) large areas the game is broken up into. Here, skeletons and be-skulled dark spirits roam around. You can swap between the two at will using the bells, and you’ll need to do so in order to advance the game's plot. You’ll have to play detective, hunting down clues and speaking to the ghosts associated with all manner of woe.
Unfortunately the game relies on some serious padding; short of the small villages and wide places in the road, there really isn’t much to see. So most of your time will be spent chasing down map icons out in the wilderness, mostly chests with money or items in them. You’ll also be bartering that money with an absent shopkeeper (who insists that you’re on the “honor system” while he's away from the counter) to maintain your arsenal and supplies. Unfortunately the economy is such that you spend most of the game desperately poor, and then suddenly too rich for money to matter. However, careful management of your resources will make combat relatively smooth, provided that you’re good with the bows. The guns are true to history, requiring lengthy manual reloads after every shot; my typical strategy was to use the musket at medium range, then follow up with the pistol at short range if needed.
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| slightly desaturated. I think the game looks best this way. |
The sound design is probably one of the more subtly done examples I’ve seen lately. The only music is at the title screen and during the credits; the rest of the time, you’re left with only the wind and your footsteps. What’s brilliant is the way the stealth system uses wind to cover the sound of your footsteps. This makes up somewhat for the semi-clairvoyant AI… somewhat. You’ll still be having enemies charge at you because they saw you before you saw them.
All in all, Betrayer is a valiant attempt to live up to the horror legacy of Monolith’s Blood, F.E.A.R., and Condemned, but beyond its visual gimmick, annoying otherworld mechanic, and historic weapons, it doesn’t really have much to offer fans of horror, Monolith Productions, or survival games. But you know what? That's okay. It's not the worst game in the world, and what it does offer is pretty decent if you have a few hours to kill.