Dreadout: Act 1 review: A short Indonesian Taste of Fear

Have you ever plan to go to Indonesia for vacation? If so, don't miss a good chance to visit some random abandoned town here because like Japan we also got some great memorable ghost that will guarantee to leave some mental damage to you. Alternatively, if you don't have extra money to go to Indonesia or you are too afraid to meet a real Indonesian ghost, you could also try this game called Dreadout to experience the similar lovely Indonesian taste of fear.

Dreadout plays similarly like the classic fatal frame/project zero as seen in ita last year demo. The demo shows good promises for some unknown Developer called digital happiness based in Bandung, indonesia. The demo managed to scare the living soul out of many players including me. So since that day, i had a great hope that this game will be good and it will be a breakthrough in Indonesian gaming industry. I even wrote some short preview for this game with all the wish list in it. So did the game delivers what i wanted? In short, dreadout delivers the scares in the way that is better than what i was expecting. Sadly, it was bogged down by many tiny little flaws.

You played as linda, a silent high school girl with a skirt so tight that you can hear her butt gasping for oxygen. She is trapped in an abandoned town with her friends and teacher after a wrong turn in the road. Using her cellphone camera to exorcist the ghosts and the puzzles in the town, it is now up to linda to uncover the secret behind the haunted town and saves everyone from joining the ghost parade in the cursed town.

The story of dreadout is anything but original since it seems to be happy to roll around with the usual horror tropes found in most horror game, albeit with some smart twist added to spice up the predicted parts. I usually dont like cliche but the cliches here seems to be intentional since i believe the games is trying to evoke the old survival horror feeling like Resident Evil. The voice acting and the dialogue are what makes me to believe so because they are super cheesy, like "the master of lock picking" cheesiness from the original resident evil. I believe that this is a double edged sword for the game. Someone who grew up with 90's and early 2000' survival horror might find this charming but the new generation who are used to triple A game quality might see it as bad.

"It's a camera. It's really powerful, especially against living ghost."

The old school feeling  doesn't stop in the story parts because it can also be seen in the game design and graphic. Dreadout graphic looks like it belongs to the PS2 era and the games difficulty, both in combat and puzzle, can be difficult to just plain annoying or confusing. Your phone camera will be the thing that you will use the most to solve the puzzle or to exorcist the ghosts but the main problem here are the lack of good information. you will spent quite a lot of time being stuck on puzzles or dying to a ghost that you can't exorcist because you don't know that it have a hidden weak spot. I appreciate the fact that they are not hand holding the players or making the game too easy but at least they can give a better hints for the players.

But for me, the main problem of Dreadout: Act 1 is that the game is super short, like it only last for 2-3 hours for act 1. It ends abruptly with "to be continue" slammed to the screen just when things are getting exciting. Luckily, the developer announced that the dreadout act 2 will be available free as future DLC with the free roam part as paid DLC. It is a good new but waiting for act 2 is still a problem for me, though.

With all that said, dreadout still manage to scare me. Despite the fact that the games graphic is outdated, the atmosphere is still pretty solid, especially from the excellent sound design. The game's atmosphere kinda remind me with silent hill in a good way, limited but it get the job done really well. I'm man enough to admit that Dreadout manages to make me sit in the edge of the chair all the time and even managed to make me scrams like 2 or 3 times even with it short length. The ghost design also worth a mention because they managed to make even the silliest ghost in Indonesian folklore to be terrifying. When the game want to scare you, it will scare you because Dreadout is unpredictable for a horror game.

Yeah, this is new. Even for Indonesian like me.

I got a mixed feeling about dreadout. The games is filled with a lot of good ideas and most of the scares are pretty genuine but there is a lot of minor problems bugging it down from being a good game. I really want to like it but act 1 just feels like another demo to me with all its problem and length. A good demo indeed, but it still feels incomplete at whole and it makes me crave for more. The best thing that i can say for now is that I hope act 2 can be a major improvement, especially in the content and it can be even more scary..

Initial El Review Score

6.5