We enter Sker’s old spa-hotel in a mix of walking simulator + uneven stealth horror.
“One piece of advice, sir, never go near the lake … And above all, cover your ears if you hear the voice sing under the water …”, The Phantom of the Opera “(1910), Gastón Leroux
In a video game, as in a movie, it does not matter if it is large or small, if it was made by a study of 100 people with an 80 million budget, or 5 with just a few tens of thousands. What counts is its effectiveness, its ability to achieve the ultimate goal that its gender seeks. Maid of Sker achieves that in its great first half, but ruins it in its second, in a game with 2 halves differentiated by their mechanics. But even as it is, its story deserves to be discovered.
Sker’s Maiden
After a Don’t Knock Twice that certainly made for a great atmosphere, the Wales Interactive studio returns this year with Maia of Sker, a title with which they seek to solve the faults of the previous one while telling us a great cosmic-maritime horror story.
The starting point is straightforward: You are in the 19th century, in a purely Victorian setting of old England, traveling by train to a ‘lost’ destination, buried in a forest and near the coast. You go to the Hotel – Balneario de Sker, a once popular place and a favorite destination to relax but that little by little was falling into oblivion … Its owner wants to reopen it and regain the grandeur of before, fame, everything. And for this he wishes to use his daughter, Elisabeth Williams, as the great attraction, since the daughter has the same hypnotic voice as her mother. But Elisabeth has realized that something horrible is happening in the heart of Sker, and warns her lover, Thomas Evans, to rescue her and end the horror that lives there together.
And here we stop, because here the game begins. And we stop because its plot is worth discovering by itself, especially if you are a fan of classic authors such as Poe, Lovecraft and others, since the story of Maid of Sker first plays the card of Poe’s ghostly world, to enter suddenly in the cosmic terror of Lovecraft when you find out what happens in Sker’s hotel, always through the classic narrative use of documents, notes and, as it should be at the time, recordings on gramophones.
Victorian Resident Evil VII
With a duration of no more than 4 hours if you go to bag, and 5 (almost 6) if you want to find all the collectibles, Maid of Sker is right in the first half in which most of the gameplay is based on the Walking style Simulator + puzzles. At the beginning, everything is walking, discovering areas of the map, looking for save points, items to unlock the rooms and glimpse the enemies.
We loved this part because its creators play well with the genre, and know how to create a tension that is cut with the knife: we do not know who lurks in the dark, who makes the wood creak upstairs, who closes the doors suddenly. The tension in that illuminated gloom is high, and 2-3 sudden scares do their job as effective ‘jumpscares’.
The bad comes later, when we already know the ‘plot twist’ of the story, when we even go outside the hotel, because the new areas and the ones we visited before are suddenly full of enemies. Here the walking simulator gives way to a ‘Stealth Horror’ that drinks from titles like Resident Evil VII, the classic Amnesia, etc, and already forces us to (not) face a plethora of enemies that lose all the condition of terrifying. Terror turns into infiltration, but badly executed.
Do not breathe
Some save points are very badly distributed, because it is absurd to have to repeat what has taken you 30-40 minutes to do carefully again -and even a third-, because the study has not put a save point where it should, forcing you to repeat a section through no fault of your own. This is when the atmosphere of Victorian terror dissolves: Wales decides that you have to be dealing with entities just for the sake of it, and instead of posing a kind of cat and mouse game, he prefers to fill the rooms with enemies to slow down your progress, causing a serious playable imbalance.
Playable we learn some new mechanics to avoid enemies, such as the great mechanic of holding your breath and others like using a device that temporarily paralyzes creatures. The first, learned from titles such as Until Dawn, is used very well not only in the face of enemies, but to avoid calling them from afar when we pass in front of a bonfire or a section full of dust that makes the protagonist cough.
The second is a blessing, or would be if it had infinite uses, but Wales prefers that you have to search for the ammo as well. If the exploration already becomes tedious, on top of that having to also look for ammunition to stun is the icing on the cake, because since you dedicate yourself to putting several enemies unfairly just to increase the difficulty, at least let us stun them as many times as we need so that the frustrating progress does not get more tedious yet.
The song of the maiden
Visually, Maid of Sker denotes its humble development, because the textures are not exactly rough and the sudden load of elements is noticeable in the larger areas. In return, it exhibits a photograph in its first precious part, careful lighting both during the day and at night, and a first-rate artistic design that manages to give Sker’s hotel its own personality, something that is not easy. The ensemble is beautiful to look at, but the enemy design fails because that ‘bogeyman’ idea is not terrifying at all.
In terms of sound, it is the lion’s share: We have voices with an exquisite English accent and everything localized to texts in Spanish, but Latin American and not Spanish from Spain must be clarified. Gareth Lumb’s OST is a beauty, mixing pianos and ethereal voices in some tracks, and opting for others of tension and atmosphere with percussion and rubbed strings without falling into the mere use of ambient music. And while the sound effects fall into ‘jumpscare’ at times, those distant footsteps and creaking wood are great.
CONCLUSION
We really like the story, we love the first part and that terror of what will come around the corner, but the change from the third to the infiltration is not as well executed as the Victorian walking simulator with puzzles. It’s this core mechanic that ruins the whole and loads up the atmosphere, even though the game is short. Maid of Sker is for fans of Victorian horror, scary games, but it is also a title that had good potential that does not come to light.
THE BEST
- The artistic design of the hotel and its rooms
- The delicacy of the OST, with a wonderful aria
- The mechanics of holding your breath
- The atmosphere and the enormous sensation of terror that it creates in its first part …
WORST
- … that disappears in the second
- Few scares, too stretched and some predictable
- The design of the enemies, which are not scary at all
- Poor implementation of the Stealth mechanics and some checkpoints, which thwart progress
Right
It is not the latest or the most original, it does not have the best execution either, but it can be fun if you like the genre. Good, but room for improvement.
