“An ink-stained nightmare, stuck forever on repeat.”

I was told by someone I used to trust that Bendy and the Dark Revival was a halfway point between mascot horror and a Shock game. That’s a compelling pitch! It’s also kind of a complete lie, but I understand why someone would believe it. BatDR wants to evoke BioShock so very, very badly. It wants you to feel trapped in its corridors, hear the drip of the ink from its leaky pipes, fear the madness-stricken chattering enemies before you desperately beat them to death with a pipe, and be struck with wonder at the points where it opens up so you can see what its not-Walt-Disney character has wrought. It achieves absolutely none of these things, but it wants to!

There’s exactly one area of this game I’ll praise, and it’s the visuals. The sepia tones and inky outlines give the game a striking look that I find quite appealing. I was fortunate enough to marry an animator, and she’s quite picky about what she considers “good” in stylized visual media. To quote her specifically, they understood the lighting and textures well, but not the animation itself. The characters are more Fleischer-style than they are Disney, and visually they look the part, but none of them move like cartoons. The models animate as if they were all people in mascot suits, and the rigging appears identical from character to character aside from the non-humanoids. She’s also a Shock fan and she found the gameplay offensive, but we’ll get there in a sec I promise.

I won’t go into full on plot spoilers, but I have rarely seen a game say so much and accomplish so little. BatDR loves to talk, especially when it can have a character spend forever on introductions and unimportant prattle only to be cut short just before they can get to the details. I eventually came to realize that was because there are no details. The game’s plot is revealed to be quite simple by the end, and I suspect folks who played the prior game would have cottoned onto that even sooner than I did. Audrey is connected to this place in a way that will surprise no one, especially if you played BioShock. The primary antagonist is an ineffective dolt who’s impossible to take seriously thanks to some ridiculous voice direction. Everyone else doesn’t matter.

The bulk of this writeup is going to be discussing mechanics from here on out. BatDR is a mess of incomplete ideas and misunderstood influences, and it made the 6+ hours I spent getting through its 5 chapters a painful slog. If there was any doubt as to what this game was trying to be, at least in spirit, the first door code is a 0451 reference. Joey Drew knows exactly what they’re about, they just don’t know how to make it.

Initially you’re playing an Amnesia-esque hide’n’seek horror. Enemies will wander, and they run at about your speed if they spot you, so you will need to plan your movements carefully and stay crouched to avoid making noise. The stealth is rudimentary and doesn’t make use of light, but it’s functional. What’s jarring is how the game starts dumping collectibles on you from the word go and never lets up. Aside from food you have no use for any of them yet, but you dutifully hoover them up anyway because what are you going to do, not touch the shiny things littered in every bin and locker? And this is an aside, but why is Audrey’s first reaction to finding a glass cylinder in this spooky place to wordlessly thrust her bare hand through it for a stat upgrade?

Eventually you get a pipe to defend yourself with, and the combat is…distilled? There’s exactly one swing, which is equal parts fast and weightless, and that’s it. Lost ones are basically Splicers. They take a few hits to kill and as far as I can tell there’s no locational damage to speed it up. They have the same range as you and they swing as quickly, so unless you have room to circle strafe you’ll often trade a hit with them. This makes more sense when they layer in the stealth takedown (which comes with a BioShock Infinite-esque hand mark). You can only do it from a crouch because walking movement instantly alerts the horde, but said takedown gives you a fairly generous health top-off. The game is telling you to take things slow, to stay in stealth as much as possible, and that combat is perfectly winnable but often at a cost. This is a fine foundation to build from, which is why it’s such a shame that it doesn’t. There are no more enemy types outside of the game’s 3 boss fights. None of your unlockable abilities are for combat, not even the blink (which you can get hit during???). You may wonder if there are pipe upgrades and yes, there are! They don’t help!

The pipe and its consequences are a disaster. Your first upgrade, introduced with a moderate amount of fanfare, lets you charge your pipe with electricity. You’d naturally think that allows you to hit gooder! No. That’s the second, optional upgrade, and after testing it in several fights by reloading saves I’m not convinced it even works. The electric box strapped to your bludgeon stick is actually for opening doors, meaning your pipe is now a keycard that gets spent on each use and needs to be fed more batteries at designated charging stations. By the time I got this ability I had 29 batteries in my pocket and I’m not sure I used that many over the course of the entire game. There is a third upgrade that you can find by doing a ton of lategame backtracking which lets you stun the otherwise un-fight-able keepers, but you still can’t do damage, which is as good a segue as any into one of the game’s worst elements!

There are several recurring hazards that look like enemies but cannot be solved with violence. Said hazards consist of chasers, keepers, the ghost girl, and the infamous ink demon. The chasers are the least important. They pop out of random places to slap you and don’t seem to take damage, but they get bored after a bit and run back. They show up quite a bit early on and all but completely vanish after chapter 3, which sounds odd, but that’s when keepers show up and they’re inherently at odds with each other. Keepers are another basic patrolling enemy, but you can’t fight them at all (unless you have the aforementioned optional pipe upgrade) and they hit like a bus. You just avoid them. Both of these are fine if unremarkable, but the remaining two are neither of those things.

Carley, aka Slicer, aka the ghost girl, aka Dirt McGirt, just sucks. She shows up in chapter 2 and never stops showing up after that. Her sole role is to add jumpscares because the game otherwise wouldn’t have any, and first person horror games are legally required to blow your eardrums out at least a handful of times. I’m not exaggerating by the way, that really is her entire deal. For the rest of the game she will periodically pop up with a screech, stand still for a sec, and then rush you in an easily sidestepped straight line for a bit of damage. Her existence adds literally nothing of substance to the game, especially considering she has no relevance in the greater plot. The only positive I can give is that her vestigial-ness may be intentional considering her backstory, but I suspect that’s me desperately looking for meaning in the meaningless.

I can’t even muster a backhanded compliment for the ink demon. When it’s introduced you’d think it would be a stalker enemy because, you know, it stalks! No. For the remainder of the game you will periodically have your screen thrown into black and white and be prompted to hide. Should you not take cover in the next 5 or so seconds, the ink demon will instantly teleport behind you and force you to load your last save. There are cases where you’re in empty spaces, or would need to use a ladder to get to a hidey hole, in which case you are just doomed. Hope you saved manually in a game that doesn’t have quicksaves! This gets less frequent from chapter 4 and I think there are sections where he straight up won’t appear to allow for puzzles or stealth to not be ruined, but they’re rare. Fuck the ink demon. All my homies hate the ink demon.

This writeup has been less of a review and more of an airing of grievances, and I swear I’m almost done, but I need to take a second to touch on the game’s actual worst quality: its gameplay structure, or lack thereof, and how it affects moment to moment play. BatDR loves its setpieces and cutscene transitions. The very idea of potentially skipping one and messing up the flags likely filled the devs with dread, and so they implemented every means of constraining the player possible while trying to convince you that’s not the case. Let me paint you a picture of a typical sequence: you walk into a new area and are presented with a fork in the road. You turn left, walk down the hall, and hit an un-interactable hatch. You turn around, eventually reaching an open gate, only to see it slam shut in front of you. Confused, you turn back around, go all the way back down the left path. The hatch is now interactable.

Does that sound frustrating? Because the game does this con-stant-ly. At one point you’re given a little buddy to walk with and you move through an entire area with suspiciously un-openable garbage cans. Get to the end and you’ll find out you need a key, at which point your buddy helpfully walks to each individual can, points at it to have you open it, and you find nothing. Repeat several times until you finally find said key. Nothing is ever operable until you’re permitted. At no point in any of these sequences are the restrictions intuitive or justified within the narrative, you just have agency stripped from you constantly and seemingly at random until the game permits you to progress. Combine that with the wild quantity of invisible walls in an alleged Shock-like where you have a damn blink ability, which are only removed when you trigger everything beforehand, and you’ve got a recipe for unceasing frustration. If you want to restrict the player to this degree in order to tell a linear story that’s fine, but constantly rendering their means of interaction inert or straight up non-functional is not how you do that! It’s patronizing, clumsy, and prevents the player from ever getting immersed or achieving any kind of flow. I signed up for spooky pipe-times, not Invisible Flag Touching Simulator 2022.

If you’re going to make a love letter to media that inspired you, and especially if your goal is subversion or satire of their concepts, you need to understand your subject down to the marrow. BatDR is the result of wanting to pay homage to your influences without understanding how or why any of them worked. Not traditional animation, not horror, and certainly not games ending with -shock. The game is a simulacrum of its idols, an amalgam of incomplete ideas with none of the connective tissue, assembled haphazardly and moving with the stability of a newborn deer. If you want first person horror go play Amnesia: The Bunker, and Sonar Shock is a legitimately excellent new im-sim. This succeeds at nothing and I would recommend it to no one. It’s an ink-stained nightmare, stuck forever on repeat.

3/10

This code was provided by duhnuhnuh via his very cool Backloggd giveaway. Consider giving it a look!