Forewarned is forearmed: way lots of spoilers ahead. In fact, I'll pretty much be ruining the entire story so keep that in mind. Also, Bloodlust is a pretty darn graphic game, so play at your own risk.

Bloodlust is a strange beast. Unlike Missing, which I reviewed last month, Bloodlust uses the standard OHR engine for both the walkabouts and the combat sections. However, it ends up feeling much more like a survival horror game than an RPG.

The basic setup is that something horrible has happened, your sister is dead, your parents are missing, and the whole world's gone to shit. Monsters are roaming about and killing everyone they can get their hands/tentacles/horrible fleshy appendages on. In fact, you're confronted by a monster very early on, and it's not exactly an easy battle.

Bloodlust uses a unique set of systems to make what could have been a standard "level up and beat the boss" RPG into a tense war of attrition. Rather than gaining resources when you win a fight, Reed (the main character) will instead grow more tired and weak. After every fight, not only is his health depleted, but his stats have very probably gone down in some way and he's that much closer to death. This made every fight feel important to me, or more accurately, every time I managed to avoid a fight.

The battles themselves are quick tense affairs, often ending with both parties massively injured. Reed is relatively weak and since he can't level up, relies on upgrading his equipment and firearms for defense. Since the firearms use hard to come by ammunition I ended up mostly avoiding fights and, when backed into a corner, slowly chipping away the enemy's health with whatever melee weapon was lying around.

Boss battles are balanced extremely well, and I usually found myself on the brink of demise just as I achieved victory. The only real complaint I have about the combat in general is that Reed's special skills seem pretty useless, and I got through the game without really using them at all.

If Reed's health is low, then he must use one of the few healing items found lying about the wretched environment. There is a very limited supply of resources in Bloodlust, and this makes each usage a painful experience as I would easily run out of healing items if I wasn't being careful. Luckily, the designer (OnlyOneInAll) was very smart about placing resources and I typically found myself running low on healing items right before I found some more. I was always able to save enough health kits to get through the boss fights, but just barely.

The game works very hard to disguise many of the most important gameplay mechanics, including the de-levelling system and damage system. The opaqueness of these mechanics meant I could never be sure what the next chapter would bring, and whether or not I'd be able to handle it. The constant threat of the enemies also limited the amount of experimentation I could do with the important systems, deflating my attempts to deconstruct the game and "beat" it. Especially frightening is the fact that each battle depleted me unrecoverably of my basic stats. Dying loses its edge when I just start over with a better plan, but the idea that I lose stats even when I win battles is quite frightening.

The tension that the game design creates is essential, but the bleak and oppressive atmosphere really drives the point home. The suburban, and later urban, environment you find yourself in is completely overrun by decay and death. In just a few hours, it seems that an entire city has crumbled in on itself. Wreckage and debris lie everywhere, and it just get worse as you delve further into the city.

The monster design is occasionally in questionable taste but is usually effective. The early game tends to be a bit heavy on the "unidentifiable blob of flesh" theme, but later enemies are much more defined and frightening.

The movement of the monsters visible on the map also has a certain effect. Many of them move spastically and seemingly without control, while others are very slow and patient in their efforts to maim/kill/violate you. You can block some of their paths with chairs and other debris, and this small amount of control was extremely effective in making me feel otherwise helpless.

The one thing that I feel is necessary to mention is that there are a number of color palettes to choose from. The default is dark and gloomy, but also washed out and hard to see. I feel like the "High Contrast" palette should have been the default, since it's easier to see but also more uncomfortable and dreamlike. See the comparison shots below.

While the writing can be amateurish, the dialogue and strange vignettes in the game reminded me of Stephen King in a way. Particularly in the Library section, the author uses the voice of a demon to alternately taunt me and remind me of how pitiful I am. Some of the writing is melodramatic, and a few parts are so overtly gross as to just be in bad taste rather than shocking, but for the most part it's effective.

The storyline is...well, here I have to go into Spoiler territory. I highly recommend playing this game before reading the below; it's definitely worth it.

The story essentially boils down to a very (very very) slow reveal of a few facts: (A) Reed's girlfriend, who he has been searching for the entire game, has been dead for months, killed in a car accident by one of his friends; (B) all of Reed's friends are bastards; and (C) no, Reed, you are the demons. In between all of this, numerous horrible/awful/terrible/disgusting things will happen to Reed, his friends, his acquaintances, and the few living strangers he meets. It seems like every terrible thing the author could think of was happening at every possible moment.

(Tangent time: When I was a teenager, I would occasionally imagine myself in the worst situation possible in a strange sort of self pity moment. This usually involved all of my family/friends being dead, and me being really sad about it. The story in Bloodlust is essentially this, except projected on to the whole world. I'm not sure if all the teen angst is intentional or not, but it is super interesting.)

Reed spends most of the game looking for his friends to no avail, and commenting on how horribly horrible everything is. The beginning of the game is the worst for this sort of "tell-don't-show" sort of writing, but the latter half of the game is much more effective. In fact, the game as a whole really comes together towards the end (except for the ending itself; see below), and you can really feel the growth of the author through the long process of creating an exceptional game.

There seem to be two endings, one that is massively horrible, and the other that is also massively horrible. In either case Reed essentially accepts his dark side and does some horrible stuff despite the perceived growth that he went through as a character. This disappointed me, and I'm still holding out for a better ending. I may even try to beat the game on Hard just to see if Reed can grow up and learn anything.

Despite my disappointment in the ending of the game, Bloodlust is still seriously scary. It's at its most effective in the gameplay, but the dialogue and graphics also help to create an atmosphere that is oppressive and bleak. There is a feeling of helplessness that permeates the entire game up to the very end.

Overall, Bloodlust effectively uses a mix of atmosphere and gameplay to create something frightening that cannot be recreated in other forms of media. I really felt like I was in danger at all times, and never truly understood the intricacies of the system. The mysteriousness of the mechanics and the setting worked together to create an almost intolerably tense game.

Reed's still a bastard though.

Next time, I'll be reviewing Tilt. If you have any recommendations for horror games, stop by this thread and let me know.