Post Trauma is another survival horror game inspired by the PlayStation classics. Post Trauma is mainly pulling from the Silent Hill series, but it doesn’t stop there as it enjoys playing with different camera perspectives evoking the wider history of the genre. As a horror game, it handles atmosphere well creating creepy environments. Solving puzzles is a rewarding, multi-layered process. It only got this half of the survival horror experience right because the combat bounces between frustrating and effortless, and the story falls flat.
Post Trauma opens with protagonist Roman waking up in a subway station. He doesn’t know where he is or how he got there. As he pushes forward, he finds terrible monsters trying to kill him. The people he meets in this place seem to know who he is even though they are strangers to him. The more he learns about this place, the more he realizes this isn’t the real world, and he has done something terrible to get here.
The Slient Hill influences are obvious early on. It’s in the way characters speak to Roman showing they know more than he does, but they remain vague and withhold information from him. The locations are familiar, but they are warped with mannequins and dolls everywhere instead of people. There are strange growths of fleshy vines on the walls and floors. He will find himself in one place such as the subway station to then go through a door and end up in a completely different location. Some of these places have significance to Roman, but he’s not alone is this place. He encounters other characters as he enters their world.
One of the unexpected features of this game is there are multiple characters the player inhabits. In the first two acts, I played as Roman and Carlos. Roman’s gameplay is captured with a Silent Hill-style camera. It’s fixed in one location at times while dynamically following Roman in other times giving me limited to no control over the camera. In the Carlos sections, it’s more like Amnesia. The camera is in first-person perspective, and in continuation with the Amnesia influence, Carlos’s sections have no combat. The game has a level-based structure and each act usually involves playing as two characters. Which character I play as is determined by the story, and not the player’s choice. There are more camera and character changes further into the story to keep things amusing for fans of the genre.
The vague and secretive nature of the characters in Post Trauma may help to build intrigue around its mystery, but it holds on to those traits all the way until the end making for an unsatisfying conclusion. Post Trauma’s ambiguous approach kept me from knowing the characters involved. I’m given very little of their lives which prevents me from getting invested. Carlos is the most fleshed out character as his piece of this world finds him trapped in his old workplace, a police station. As I walk around in his shoes interacting with the environment, he complains about his treatment and his co-workers when he used to work here. He’s an angry, bitter, and lonely man. I struggle to find words to describe the other characters as they are singularly focused and shallow. This all concludes with an ending reaching for emotional connection but only getting a shrug from me in response.
Post Trauma is a survival horror game that puts puzzles over combat. The puzzles are rarely straight forward often requiring multiple steps to complete. The pieces are found by observing the environment around you. It’s not enough to just find them as there’s usually a trick to put them all together to complete the puzzle. In one level, I notice several computer monitors are turned off with screens appearing in different colors such as blue, green, and red. Looking closer at the monitors, I see there are pictures of animals taped to them. It’s odd, so of course this must be tied to some kind of puzzle. I struggle to figure out what the puzzle is though. I head downstairs to find a keypad I don’t know the combination to. I haven’t seen any numbers anywhere, so it feels like another dead end. After a while of running around in circles, I notice a dartboard on the wall in the room with the computers. It still takes me a while to piece things together. Finally, I notice the darts are in the same colors as the computer monitors and there’s a vague note mentioning speed and order which connects to the animals taped to the monitors. The darts on the board give me the numbers of the combination, the colors of the darts connect to the computer monitors, ranking the animals by speed gives me the order of the numbers for the combination lock downstairs. Most puzzles in Post Trauma go like this. It creates a healthy challenge which leads to a satisfying eureka moment.
Unlike the puzzles, the combat isn’t satisfying. There are around three enemies in each stage which makes combat a rare occasion while playing the game. When I do find myself in a fight, the fixed camera often becomes a problem. The camera will be placed in a spot where it’s difficult for me to tell how close I am to an enemy before I swing my melee weapon. This caused too many missed swings making combat frustrating. Eventually, Roman finds a gun, and this created a different problem. Combat became effortless with a gun as I was killing enemies in one shot. They were no threat at all which is not a good thing in a horror game. This continues into boss fights which have easily avoidable attacks. I hesitate to say “attack patterns” because it’s just one move. There’s no reason to fear an enemy encounter. As I got into the late game, the enemies became bullet sponges which swung combat back around to frustrating. It’s a survival horror game though, so I started running around them to avoid putting up with it.
Because there is so little combat, there are very few enemies. The enemy types are mostly amorphous blobs of combined humans. It’s initially frightening on the first encounter with one that’s two humans fused together. They are connected like conjoined twins at the torso with two separate heads at the top of their bodies. They don’t have a face losing all defining features from the humans it’s made from. Seeing these monstrosities loses its effect after that. It’s a small pool of enemies, so I see them multiple times. There isn’t much backstory given to them providing any disturbing details on their creation. Outside of those, there’s another enemy inspired by Scissorman from Clock Tower that is ultimately ruined by how easy it is to kill. There is one great boss creature reveal taking inspiration from Undead Laura from The Evil Within. I appreciate any love for one of my favorite games. This boss is the creepiest enemy design in the game.
I will give the combat this: there are some nice touches in the animations and sound design to help convey who Roman is as a character. I heard the idea of survival horror protagonists needing to be “normal people” to make the horror effective. This is the argument that makes people push back against Leon S. Kennedy continuing to be a protagonist in Resident Evil. He’s too much of an action hero now making him capable at fighting waves of enemies. If the protagonist isn’t afraid, the player has no reason to feel fear. Roman is just a regular guy. When he fires a shotgun, it takes a few seconds before he can fire again because of how strong the kickback of the gun is. A high-pitched ringing noise plays after every shot to convey the damage the sound of the blast does to his ears. He’s an older man, so his ears are not be able to handle it as well. The way this translates to gameplay strategy is I have to account for the delay in both the windup on a melee strike and the recovering from firing a gun. This requires me to pay attention to how an enemy attacks and how long they take between attacks because Roman’s delay in attacking leaves me open for damage.
Post Trauma has enough neat gimmicks to make an impression, but the game itself isn’t strong enough to make it worthwhile. The characters are thin, and the initial intrigue in the story doesn’t lead to a satisfying payoff. The puzzles provide a satisfying challenge, but the combat is a dud. I appreciate the Silent Hill influence, but Post Trauma remains squarely in it’s shadow.
