Lost in Vivo (2018)

Lost In Vivo deliberately wears its PS2 era survival horror inspirations on its sleeve and at least initially does them justice. But while the protagonist's quest to save their dog lost in the sewers has some excellent atmosphere propped up by great sound design, it failed to impress me past the first hour.

The plot is a mess of ideas that never get resolved and it overall felt painfully contrived. The visuals are decent and I like the direction they took with some concepts from the Silent Hill games, but they'd more than overstayed their welcome by the end. The environments and puzzles felt pretty derivative.

The combat is also pretty terrible even by the standards of late 90s and early 2000s survival horror. Mashing the attack command felt most effective to me despite there being a block button. The inclusion of health regen encourages you to stand still and do nothing after defeating an enemy because healing items are nonexistent. This feels like a very poor design choice for a game in this genre.

But I should highlight again that the people involved knew what they were doing with the atmosphere here. It has moments where it's oppressive and uncomfortable in a way few horror games have made me feel. The game also has a fun sense of humor.

You can tell the developer wanted to pay homage to some of their favorite horror games but because so much of the game is tied to these ideas pulled from other media, it ended up feeling like they were just checking boxes off a list of their favorite games instead of putting thought into what made sense for the story they were trying to tell. There's a lot of potential here and I'm curious to see what they might make next.

Kind of like how "Souls Like" became a term for hard action RPGs, I think we need a term for survival horror games like this. I propose "Hills Like." Lost in Vivo is a Hills Like survival horror game played in first person, sort of like the newer Resident Evil games. You play as an unknown protagonist who is trying to rescue their therapy dog from an insane haunted sewer, which is honestly a pretty compelling premise.

The gameplay varies from being extremely easy to somewhat frustrating. It's really hard to die, and there are no healing items. Your character seems to regen health, so I never felt a lot of fear in combat in this game, though there are some pretty creepy parts. There's also at least one really beautiful piece of music that I didn't know would end if I went through a door. If I had known that I probably would have stayed and listened to it.

Story wise, I have no clue. This game seems almost made to encourage the YouTube deep dives of lore and symbolism, but it honestly just makes the game feel kind of slapdash. The greatest hits of survival horror level design but done in stunning low res. It is kind of funny how some of the enemy death animations seem to be bugs that just weren't ironed out. Makes them seem really otherworldly. Basically, there isn't a lot to chew on for story and no climactic boss fight.

The game isn't very long, though, and it's also not very hard. You could probably blow through it in one sitting if you were really dedicated.

Maybe try this if you're in the mood for a real mind screw.