Maid of Sker (2020)

One star ratings are reserved for games that are offensively bad or straight up don't work, which does not apply to this game. However, I was about as disappointed as I can get before that point. So two stars it is.

I don't know whether this just aged bad very quickly or something given that I had only heard positive things about it when it came out, but it just felt like a huge cliche to me. The atmosphere is just any horror game set in the pre-internet times, the gameplay is boring and frustrating, the story has been done in 100 different iterations already, the structure of the game is just straight up early resident evil, the jumpscares are just blumhouse basics... nothing felt original to me.

A game that borrows everything from other sources needs at the very least some deep lore to work for me despite of that, and the game does not deliver. You can interact with almost nothing, which is very noticeable from the very start and pulls you out of the game (e.g. when you leave the introduction train you just leave all your luggage without even being able to inspect it). It becomes clear very quickly that investigating is not a meaningful part of the game and that any information you need will be basically put in your hands for you. Even the collectibles are pretty much in the main path.

Horror games that do not have this deep lore/investigative angle can still work great if they are full of action and fun gameplay. But the game's enemies force you into stealth gameplay the whole time (which would work much better with a more investigative style of game) and their AI is not great. You feel like they either ignore you when they shouldn't or kind of randomly attack.

I am genuinely confused by the game's positive press I remember from when it came out, and the pretty decent steam ratings. It's the first game in a long time that I refunded purely because I got bored so quickly.

While initially I was impressed with the visual fidelity of the environments in Maid of Sker, I didn't have to get very far before it became evident that this game had little else to offer. The gameplay and story both fail to deliver on what they promise, which leaves this as a pretty game with not much else to love.

This game feels like it wants to be Amnesia: The Dark Descent with the way you need to stealth your way around patrolling enemies and pick up notes to learn the story, but it's lacking the mechanical depth to pull it off. Where in the former game you had sanity and oil reserves to manage alongside avoiding enemies and solving puzzles, here it really is just mostly avoiding enemies. Sometimes you get a puzzle, but the lion's share require little thought and only serve to trap you in rooms with more roaming enemies while you solve them.

Also, for a game designed around enemies who react almost solely to sound rather than sight, the sound design and the way it incorporates into the gameplay is quite poor. A single creaky footstep could tell an enemy exactly where I am so he can run me down from across the room while the cacophonous grinding of a secret passage opening right next to him prompts zero response. It's totally inconsistent throughout the game.

The plot is also primarily divulged through notes and dialogue bits that play out of telephones and phonographs, which is a big pet peeve of mine in horror games. The very existence of these notes and recordings rarely makes sense. I don't feel like this is a remotely engaging way to tell a story in the videogame format.

And the cherry on top is that the story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense either. As the credits rolled (twice, as I did both endings) I just felt unsatisfied because it's kind of a nothing burger. Stuff just happens with little thought to whether it makes sense or is even scary (it typically isn't), and the characters feel like cardboard cutouts being pushed around rather than people. They have zero agency whatsoever. Even the bad guys don't seem to have any say in what's going on.

You can tell there was some love put into this, but it's tough to recommend for many reasons. Thankfully it's fairly short.

Maid of Sker made a great impression on me for about the first hour. So let's start with the good.

The game looks great! It is beautiful, I didn't experience any glitch or lag. Graphics are nice and the game performs very well. The lighting is top notch. Being a game about music, of course it has to be good. But it is not just the music. The sound of the game as a whole is outstanding. Those footsteps... wow... chilling. The voice acting is good, not something out of the ordinary, but it is well made. Story wise, it has a good setting and plot. I always wanted to know more about what was going on. It was told through a combination of notes, and Elizabeth's dialogue through the conversations over the phone. It was nice to have a combination and not just notes telling you everything. The pacing of the story was also good. A good length for a horror game like this.

Now, you must be asking, why did I give this game 2 stars if those things were so good? Well! Gameplay.

This game is stealth. Everything is stealth... there is no combat and almost no way to defend yourself. You just have to be quiet, move slowly and run when you are detected. This mechanism made the game almost unbearable in some levels. I must admit that I hate stealth in games, but stealth can be done well. This wasn't. It was boring, annoying and obnoxious. Sometimes I had to wait for a long time in order to get to a certain spot to progress in the game. And most of the time, I was detected. It was hard to make them stop following me too. Just...no, please. Another thing that was just nuts were some of the puzzles. There were no hints, no reason for some of them. You just had to do some trial and error until you got it. The thing is that with all the people around looking for you, it made progress so slow, just because you had to walk at a speed of one step per minute in order to not get caught. How can I do some trial and error moving so freaking slow! Also, I was getting stuck on stairs all the time. Especially when I had the only defense mechanism that was available in the game out. Why?

A lot of potential, but the gameplay killed it for me.

Really short game, beat it in 5 1/2 hrs, felt unpolished and a few things didn't add up. Story was there, but poorly executed which was sad because the story is really the main redeeming quality of the game. For me having a horror game where you interact with the enemies too often removes the spookiness quickly; and you interact with the enemies A LOT. For enemies that react to sound there are a lot of noises that the enemies don't react to for some reason. Then there are time that they react to absolute silence, it's confusing to say the least.

Ultimately, I would recommend a play if you could get the game for free, but it is not worth spending your money on it.

This is a pretty good Halloween pick. Not many games choose the turn of the century as a backdrop and Welsh folklore as narrative context. Because of this, Maid of Sker is able to stand out from the bunch just on aesthetics and storytelling alone, even if the rest, aside from one or two somewhat unusual mechanics, comes with a ‘been there’, done that’ sort of feel.

There’s an impressive and very noticeable audiovisual atmosphere buildup as you get going, further enhanced by the first person camera. The overall ambience is one of the main selling points here, contributing on occasion for moments when the game is able to convey a truly eerie vibe. From a technical standpoint, however, sound propagation is a bit all over the place, and it’s sometimes hard to determine how close or distant enemies really are in relation to your character (it's also weird that enemies right next to you fail to hear you doing things like unlocking doors for example).

Movement feels a bit clunky, but this isn’t too much of a problem because, gameplay wise, this is essentially a game of stealth. You get one solid option to escape enemies on a pinch, but that's about it for the majority of your playthrough. You walk around, you sneak past enemies, you hold your breath so you don't cough, and you untangle the mystery via a mix of character interaction and well designed environmental storytelling. The inspiration taken from the Resident Evil franchise is beyond obvious: interconnected levels, puzzles, key fetching, save point rooms, and even Mr X inspired bosses are all part of the Maid of Sker experience, though none ever quite reach the level of the quality that inspired it. The boss sequence does add a welcome element of added tension to what is otherwise a pretty easy affair, as far as avoiding enemies is concerned. I also really enjoyed the fact that the game was actually a lot less linear than I thought and that, to an extent, you can go about uncovering things your own way.

The story is fairly straightforward and nothing that will stick with you for too long, but the Welsh folklore and decent voice acting give it an edge that sets it apart from most other games. I also liked that they take your choice into consideration when it comes to the ending, with one of the outcomes being particularly dark.

Overall, Maid of Sker is a pretty easy recommendation, especially for October. As is the case with most Indies in the survival horror genre, there isn’t much to write home about gameplay wise - it is horror on a budget after all. But despite its limitations, the alluring, grim and somewhat rare period aesthetics, uneasy vibe, solid environments, effective storytelling and RE inspired goodness are more than enough to justify a 4-5 hour playthrough. Give it a go if you get the chance and don’t mind combat-free games. 7.5/10