[Review] The Beast Inside

[Bandolero -]

 

Game title: The Beast Inside (Demo)

Studio: Illusion Ray

Score: 3.5/5

GS Reviewer: Ric Crossman

 

   

 

 

The sign of a good scary game is that you can type its name into YouTube and you'll see a thousand thumbnails of people making scared faces as something spooky comes on screen, and that's exactly what we have with the recently released Steam demo for Illusion Ray Studio's The Beast Inside, a Kickstarter horror game that's looking to bolster its fundraising efforts with a small teaser of what's to come. Far be it from us to turn down a scarefest, and so we dived into the demo headfirst to see whether we could experience the horror for ourselves.

The first chapter put us in the first-person perspective of a man moving to a house in the middle of nowhere with his partner to try and escape the hassle of the urban sprawl, and when we say in the middle of nowhere, it's pretty much bang in the middle of this huge forest. Now you don't need to be a horror expert to know that this is pretty much a guaranteed bad idea - alongside such other bad ideas in horror games like 'let's split up' - and lo and behold it seems to be. Not that we see it in this first chapter, mind you, as all we do here is work out the controls and mechanics by exploring the house until we find a diary, which details the lives of someone who used to live in the house in the 19th century.

This is when the scares start, as it gets dark and we're thrust into the role of the man who wrote the diary, Nicolas, as part of a flashback. Obviously, the darkness brings with it some terrors, and since the demo is so short, we won't spoil the events, but mechanically it revolves around lighting matches and lamps (both of which will run out if you're not careful) and fumbling around to respond to noises and mysterious events that need investigating.

 

 

 

Ever since PT came out, the playable teaser for Hideo Kojima's now-cancelled Silent Hills project, every horror game on the planet has been compared to it in some way, and this is no different. There are certain elements that scream PT, especially considering there are spectral beings overlooking you on the stairwell at one point, almost point-for-point like in PT. We're not saying it's a copy or anything sinister like that, but a lot of what made PT so effective is present and accounted for in here, and that can only be a good thing in our eyes.

There's a lot that makes The Beast Inside stand out though. For a start, it's incredibly unsettling to know that you're totally alone in a house miles away from civilisation, and this sets the tone early on since you know nobody can help you. That isolation hits home even more when you realise that strange and mysterious events are unfolding, and what's effective here is that we only ever see glimpses of what happens. At one point you see a mysterious figure as you're looking out the window, and at another you're jumped by a ghost who then vanishes, and you're never given too long to try and comprehend all the horrors you're witnessing. It's hard to anticipate, and that makes for the most horrific of experiences.

There are jumpscares, sure, but we wouldn't go as far as to say The Beast Inside is reliant on them. The emphasis is more on intrigue here, rather than knowing what the threat is and trying to avoid it. Here we don't know what's going on, so we're forced to keep gathering clues around the house and consulting the diary to make sense of what's going on. When the jumpscares do happen though, they hit hard, so this should be one for those who like to squeal when playing their games.

 

 

The Beast Inside has definitely awakened something in us. Perhaps not a beast, but definitely a desire to know more about why all these mysterious events are going on and how all these strands of narrative link together. It looks good, it delivers the story to us in satisfying chunks, and most important, it's pretty good at scaring the pants off us, so we're excited to see whether the Kickstarter campaign hits its target by April.