#153: The Glass Staircase
PS2-style survival horror from retro-horror master Puppet Combo
This game was originally posted to Twitter on August 7, 2019.
Initial release: 2019
Platform: PC
Developer: Puppet Combo
For the last ten years, Puppet Combo has built a career on short-form, PlayStation 1-style survival horror games slathered in a grimy late 1970s/early 80s grindhouse/video nasty aesthetic. When you play a Puppet Combo game you can see the influences right away: grainy, pixellated graphics with chunky monsters with twenty polygons each and clunky controls, often slathered in a VHS filter for that perfect “parents aren’t home” weekend rental aesthetic. You wouldn’t think this blending of aesthetics, highly representative of specific eras in their respective mediums, would work, but as we’ve seen in games like Rockstar’s controversial snuff film simulator-cum-stealth game Manhunt (which, despite not being a retro game, had a grainy CCTV theme going on) it’s totally doable. I think the reason for this has to do with how grainy VHS movies (and the early years of DVD, flooded with shitty transfers of pre-DVD movies) and the clunky, halting graphics and gameplay of survival horror games, often went together in a sort of teenage cultural zeitgeist for an entire generation of kids. I don’t think anyone over 30 doesn’t remember this era. We all grew up watching horrible movies on late-night television and renting beat up VHS tapes from Blockbuster or some smaller mom-and-pop shop, ideally with our own moms and pops not knowing what we were watching. We rented crappy PlayStation and Nintendo 64 games and played them ’til our brains fell out and it was time to return the games — assuming the games weren’t totally destroyed from abuse by dozens of customers. Often, we got our movies and games from the same places. When I was a teenager I once watched Amityville 2: The Possession late at night because it was on and I couldn’t sleep; I was never quite the same after that.
Puppet Combo understands all this perfectly. Even their website reads like a video store’s online catalog, filled with sleazy-sounding titles like Babysitter Bloodbath and Power Drill Massacre. This is the good stuff, that really grody slasher flick garbage, forever ripping off Tobe Hooper, John Carpenter and Lucio Fulci to make you feel like you need a shower.
While Puppet Combo’s earlier releases hearken to the late 90s in terms of the era of games they’re emulating, The Glass Staircase represents the logical next step: the aesthetics move ahead to the early-to-mid 2000s, calling to mind PlayStation 2 and Nintendo Gamecube titles like Silent Hill 2, the Resident Evil remake, or Fatal Frame. It also of course is a deliberate love letter to 70s/80s Italian horror films, especially zombie films like Zombi 2 and Cemetary Man, or perennial sample source The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue. Even the opening of the game deliberately evokes this era & genre of film.
There’s an element of the gothic to it as well; set sometime in the early 1920s, you play as a number of young girls (who can’t be older than maybe 12 or 13) who are kept as drugged, indentured servants tasked with maintaining a slowly-crumbling English manor. There doesn’t seem to be anybody else around; every day, a public address system announces who has been chosen to do a task, and they must retrieve their orders from an envelope on a table downstairs. One by one, the girls disappear. The opening half hour of the game is where it’s at its strongest. Each victim you play as successively opens up more and more of the house for the next one to explore. The second one, for example, has to go outside in pouring rain to retrieve a package. The hedge maze she must traverse is confusing and featureless; thanks to the awkward camera angles and general sameyness of the maze it’s easy to get lost. It’s mildly infuriating in that way, which feels like a deliberate callback to a similar maze in Alone in the Dark 2.
Of course, it doesn’t matter whether or not you find your way out of the maze, as your character’s fate is set — and as jumpscares go, this is one of the more subtle ones, making good use of the way the static cameras don’t allow you to see everything at once. Eventually, you’re left with one final girl, and this is where the meat of the game rests; you are armed in fairly short order (and despite having to reload the rifle, ammo is infinite) and tasked with going into the crypts under the manor to destroy the mysterious… thing that seems to be the centerpiece of the story.
The back half of the game is where things fall down a little. While the developer has added an auto-aim feature, combat sequences are frustrating and difficult, made worse by the fact that autosaves are few and far between. A more traditional save system would have been nice. There’s a lack of polish on certain things such as the character models (their legs poke out of their dresses when they run, for instance.) While the game looks better than your average Unity asset flip, it’s obvious that graphics aren’t the goal here — though why would they be?
Puppet Combo have included a number of optional filters, some better than others. The default is a “survival horror” filter that gives it a low-res, pixellated look; an update added a “remaster” mode that simply removes all filtering. I personally used the VHS mode.
There is quite a bit of text in the game as well, much more than you’d expect for an hour-long game. Long journals and notes lay scattered about the manor, giving the reader what amounts to a boilerplate weird fiction tale in piecemeal, epistolary format.
In spite of some poor design decisions, this game still gives an hour or so’s worth of creepy, old-school surhor. I’ve often wished survival horror would revisit its roots, and while modernist takes like Resident Evil VII have their place, Puppet Combo gives me what I want.
