Three Throwbacks Good for a Refreshing Dip into Gaming's Past

Home » Features » Article » Opinion

With each new generation, gaming grows, advances and changes into new forms that we dared not even dream of before. Much of what was impossible twenty-plus years ago is standard practice today, and design philosophy has also evolved in order to take full advantage of it.

The results are games that are bigger, smoother, more complicated and in many ways better than anything that came before. This doesn't mean that those old ideas, frameworks and features were bad though; quite the opposite. Many of the old classics are still celebrated today precisely because they were so well-designed.

Still, one doesn't necessarily always want to go all the way back to an early 00's game to enjoy some of that style, and fortunately they don't have to, since more and more new games celebrating those old graphics, mechanics and limitations are being released these days. All it takes for a nostalgic trip into the past or a thrilling excursion into the old unknown is a bit of research. Alternatively, one could just check out some of the following and then branch out from there.

By merit of its story, music and artwork alone, Signalis easily stands up as a must-play for anyone who enjoys a good, psychological horror experience. It's the sort of game that tends to stick with a player after they put down the controller. In terms of gameplay, though, Signalis functions very much as a callback to the likes of the original Resident Evil games. Combat is slow and clunky, resources are limited and only six item-types may be held at once. That may not sound good on paper, and it does indeed feel frustrating in practice. Yet, that frustration actually enhances the experience in a way.

Only being able to carry the bare minimum creates a sort of mini-game within the larger Signalis experience. Players need to be calculating about their runs to and from different points of interest. Enemy types and locations along the planned route, what could possibly come next and what has to be done at the destination must all be factored into what gets taken and what gets left in the item box.

Get it right and there's no issue. Get it wrong, though, and Elster's going to wind up back at the last save point sooner than expected. It all feeds into the already tense atmosphere too, making everything just that much more nerve-wracking. It's horror but of a flavor different from most modern titles.

Tormented Souls’ story isn't as solid as that of Signalis, but it makes up for it with an even greater focus on puzzle-solving gameplay. It's the kind of out-there puzzling that any Silent Hill fan will instantly recognize, requiring the player to pay close attention to everything so as to divine the solutions to its many challenges.

Some are straight-forward like remembering a set of number from a pocket watch, but most are not so easily dealt with. Seriously, it takes some serious mental stretching in order to make it all the way to the end of this one. Beyond this hair-pulling style of puzzle Tormented Souls brings back two classic mechanics from the early Silent Hill and Resident Evil era: limited saves and fixed camera angles.

Both mechanics have long been abandoned in mainstream gaming thanks to advancements in gaming tech, but it turns out that they’re still effective techniques for ratcheting up a game's fear-factor. Limited saves is self-explanatory. Nobody wants to die and lose twenty minutes or more of progress, so the prospect of not being able to save every five minutes or so is going to feel unpleasant.

The flipside of this is that Tormented Souls does get more tense because of it. Enemies are that much more threatening, unknown spaces are all the scarier thanks to the player having some actual skin in the game. Save items aren't so limited that one has to go twenty-plus minutes without, but they are scarce enough to make one be careful.

Fixed-camera angles, on the other hand, help to maintain Tormented Souls’ thick atmosphere. Players can never see all or sometimes even most of a room at any given time, forcing them to proceed somewhat blindly and rely on sounds and other cues in order to sus out enemy locations and status. Players will usually have enough ammo to deal with whatever comes at them, but there's always the risk of being blindsided if one is too careless. It's a clever way to keep players on their back-foot without totally stripping them of their ability to defend like more modern horror games such as Outlast or Amnesia tend to do.

Consumer Softproducts’ Cruelty Squad is the kind of project that doesn't even look like a full and proper game at first. Rather, it looks like the kind of mid-2000s homebrew mod some would make just to mess around in the likes of Garry's Mod or Star Wars Jedi Knight III: Jedi Academy; the sort of thing that's fun to do with friends for a bit, but is so jank that the maker would never actually let it out into the wider internet. Cruelty Squad does indeed almost crossover into that level of jankiness too, but it's just short enough that the end product is still oddly fun to play.

Cruelty Squad is probably best summed up as an immersive sim that doesn't actually want its players to understand what's going on. Players can try anything and everything to complete their objectives in each stage, but they’ll likely be more than a bit confused all the way through. "Why did this kill me?"; "Why is that hidden there?"; and "why on earth did they make it like this?" are all questions that are certain to crop up multiple times as one forges onward.

Yet, just like with someone's pet mod for their favorite game, it becomes part of the charm. One could even say that a lot of the fun of Cruelty Squad is in going back and finding all the odd secrets and discovering all the techniques and tactics that inexplicably work (and work well at that). Whether or not Cruelty Squad objectively good is anyone's guess, but it's entertaining nonetheless.

While modern games are largely the way they are for good reason, that doesn't necessarily mean that there isn't still value in what was left behind. Certainly some of the conventions employed by the games listed here are outmoded to the point they could never really make a comeback in the mainstream, but all that means is that their value has shifted a bit.

Instead of being major money-makers like before, they instead serve as grounds for developers to explore their passions and iterate on the old in new ways. For the average gamers both young and old, though, these games grant us new ways to remember, understand and enjoy gaming's past. That's another great thing about modern gaming: we can still enjoy the past without actually having to dig it up.