#156: Clive Barker’s Undying
Cult horror shooter falls short of its promises, but it’s still kinda fun
This review was originally posted to Twitter on August 12, 2019.
Initial release: February 21, 2001
Platform: PC
Developer: EA Los Angeles
“Unf!”
“Stuck!”
“Won’t budge!”
Get used to hearing these phrases over and over and over again, because Clive Barker’s first foray into video games is an infuriatingly linear shooter that promises but doesn’t deliver.
Clive Barker’s Undying is a game about doors. Many doors. At least a hundred. Not only are most of them locked, but often, ones you just passed through will be locked as well. The object of the game is to find which doors are unlocked and occasionally shoot boring, frustrating enemies.
Okay, okay — I’m snarking pretty hard on this game, I admit it. Can you blame me? Coming out at a pretty pivotal time for horror games and first person shooters, Undying seemed to promise a first person survival horror adventure, like Alone in the Dark but in first person. It isn’t. What we got instead is a fairly generic turn-of-the-millennium post-Half-Life corridor shooter that forcibly funnels the player in the direction the game wants you to go. Doors remain locked until the plot demands they be open, and later, they’ll be closed again. At least with rail shooters like the thematically similar House of the Dead there’s no expectation of exploration. Here it’s just a cruel joke the game plays on you — the illusion of exploration… until you’ve heard that doorknob rattle sound for the hundredth time.
So here’s the plot: Patrick Galloway is an Irish World War I vet and paranormal investigator/debunker with a bad accent. His friend and former commanding officer, Jeremiah Covenant, is dying of cancer and another bad accent and has asked for Galloway’s help with a curse that has doomed his family. Seems Jeremiah’s brothers and sisters have all died horrible, mysterious deaths or disappearances in the years since they performed a ritual on an island of standing stones without any idea that something would actually answer, and now things are coming to a head. Most of the staff have fled the manor, monsters roam the halls, frequent sightings of the younger sister (who seemed to like the taste of blood) are reported — and it’s Patrick who has to get to the bottom of things. Cue six to ten hours of rattling doorknobs.
Of course, in between all the locked doors is an actual FPS game where you shoot things and run around. Aside from some basic firearms (the most exotic being a mostly useless “Tibetan war cannon” that fires freezing balls of ice) you also have a number of spells. Starting from from a scrying spell that lets you see things invisible to the naked eye, there’s also various offensive and defense spells — each one is unlocked automatically in the course of play. There is also an inventory consisting of medkits, spell amplifiers and the like.
Your enemies are… well, let’s be honest, you’re gonna go through whole chunks of the game that are populated by the same one or two enemy types, changing as you go along. There’s not a lot of variety, and they’re all annoying. It’s like going through a burrito built vertically.
Oddly, this game does have a small following, with some overlap with both the American McGee’s Alice fandom (interestingly I got both games in a small budget bundle) and the Thief fandom. The former makes sense — both are by EA, and that bundle likely helped. The latter, though… that’s strange. Thief has always had a freewheeling design ethos; it was a core part of the looking glass studios school of thought. Why would an ultra-linear corridor shooter attract thief fans, who pride themselves on self-perceived discerning tastes? The best answer I have is that, atmosphere-wise, Undying is very much in the vein of Thief and Thief II. EALA have crafted a truly gorgeous (by 2001 standards) old manor, with some amazing texture work and excellent use of light and sound. There’s also evidence that the game was going to be a little different. Aside from a famous level where you go back in time to visit an ancient monastery that plays out a little like a Thief mission, cut content reveals a few stealth-oriented spells and even a visibility meter. Another thing that was cut is a flashlight. This is infuriating because the game is almost pitch dark in almost every part of the game. You’re often forced to use the scry spell just to see — or a mod that unlocks the cut content so you can cheat yourself a lantern.
So with all that in mind, and knowing what EA is (and was) like, it probably stands to reason that whatever vision EALA had for this game was necessarily compromised to meet a Valentine’s Day deadline. It’s some seriously squandered potential. It’s not like the shooting is terribly good either. The “howlers” who harass you through most of the game move fast and are hard to hit with your default revolver, making the early game a bit of a slog — and then you run into the fucking skeletons. For me though, the worst part is the lack of subtitles. Evidence in the game’s files indicate that there were, in fact, subtitles for a sizable chunk of the game, but it was never finished and the option was never included. That’s six hours of bad Irish accents with no subtitles. Wack. It all makes me a little angry; this could have been a solid survival horror title alongside Alone in the Dark and System Shock 2, and instead we got a linear sequence of scares, a big-budget funhouse ride that slaps your hand when you so much as look in the wrong direction.
