Song of Horror Complete Edition – Review

Song of Horror is a game that’s been in the making for a LONG time. About six years have passed since initial development and the game finally reached its conclusion. The fifth episode has been released, making the game completely playable. So, time to delve into this dense terrifically terrifying 3rd-person horror game as a whole, looking at all the episodes and how they scare you as a whole.

Story

If you haven’t heard or read anything about Song of Horror yet, there’s a lot of story to discover. To avoid spoilers, here’s a quick summary that will leave you mostly in the dark. It all starts when a publisher hasn’t heard of one of their most promising writers in a while. One of the publisher’s employees named Daniel is tasked with checking up on the writer named Husher. As he enters Husher’s creepy mansion, he quickly discovers something that will later be called the Song of Horror, as well as The Presence, a dark and weird entity that’s constantly harassing you during all the episodes. As Daniel gets stuck in the mansion, you then get to choose between multiple characters to go and find him.

Multiple characters are available for most episodes, and it depends on the story which ones this will be. One of the good things about Song of Horror is that it gives you this bit of freedom in choosing who you want to play as or what your initial approach to the horror will be. Each character has their own small differences, such as more movement speed and a different light source, but essentially they are all equally useful for the gameplay at hand. That being said, playing with the original rules causes characters to permanently die when they screw up.

Graphics

From moment one of diving into the game, you can clearly see that Song of Horror is a work of passion (one might definitely hope so with those six years of development) that’s highly detailed in its environmental design. There’s so much to see that’s it almost a shame there’s no first-person mode available. Most places feel like houses and other buildings where the inhabitant has been hoarding stuff for a century. Vases, clocks, old bikes, a whole heap of dust and dirt, and more. On top of that, everything is blending together by the lowly saturated colors that bring out a palette sepia-like colors with green, yellow, and red tints.

It’s a perfect mix of horror as you are not sure where to look nor what will happen. This is enhanced by the old Resident Evil and Eternal Darkness type of camera where the perspective of you, as a player-witnessing person, keeps on changing through multiple rooms and areas. This means you might run through a stretched hallway as you see the character get further and further away from the camera, or you witness whatever creepy stuff sneaks up on the leading role from a corner of the bathroom. It’s a classic favorite under horror game players because it’s so effective, and in Song of Horror this is no different.

Sound

Much like action-triggered events, Song of Horror uses your perceptive senses to trigger certain situations and prevent you from bad things happening as well. Sound is no exception in this and is insanely important. Not only are some monster sound-triggered, but you can also listen at certain doors to guess what’s behind them and prevent a horrible death-by-closet-monster. Besides that, the game obviously has some eerie atmospheric sounds like babies and women crying, creaking floorboards, groaning voices, and invisible footsteps. The general music that’s present is hard to pin down exactly and presents itself as i.e. a soft music box in the background that’s almost random. It works perfectly. Perhaps the voice acting isn’t always great, but it’s far from bad either.

Gameplay

A lot of Song of Horror is actually a bit like old-school point-and-click mechanics. You walk around and check out whatever you can interact with to gather information and possibly also items. These elements you then use to solve puzzles, and make progress. The main difference is that you don’t actually click on items, but you look at them by facing them as well as kind of pointing your light source at them. Besides this subtle difference, Song of Horror also combines this classic gameplay with bits of horror-survival. Mostly this results in keeping the player alert and on their toes, making them check every bit around them as they will be unsure of what will happen next.

In episode 1, this is all still relatively mild, but as you progress to the newer episodes, the survival gameplay grows and will turn up more frequently. Depending on the episode, there are different ”mini-games” of grotesque survival involved. Where you might try to shut a door of demons in Episode one with timing and button bashing, another episode requires you to not let any creature get too close to you by shining a light on them with quick precision. It’s enough to hustle it all up and keep you on your toes, as generally, an episode takes between 90 and 120 minutes to complete. This means you will have a rough eight to ten hours of tense gameplay for about thirty bucks, which is a really fair price.

That being said, the movement itself occasionally seems a bit sluggish, and the characters their decisions are sometimes questionable as best, but then again, doesn’t every horror story ever have such doubtful moments at some point? It doesn’t take away from the fact that Song of Horror is a rollercoaster ride, although it’s one through a very long and windy haunted mansion that will make you wonder what’s around the next corner as well as ”when will it stop?!”. It’s a great indie horror game that deserves all the praise it generally gets.

Conclusion

Song of Horror is doing great things with a compelling story and great elaborate graphics and sound. The gameplay is occasionally a bit sluggish, but the tension is high at all times, which is great. For all the very small things that Song of Horror could improve, it puts down a thrilling experience that’s beyond solid, and changes things up just enough to not get bored at all.

Icecreamvamp

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I'm a game designer, developer, and reviewer. I've been reviewing for 3rd-strike.com since 2017.

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