Outbreak: Contagious Memories wants to take you back to a time when tank controls felt immersive. Where a well-designed horror game made you feel vulnerable and unsure of what lies around the corner. The 90’s horror games of yore were a diamond in the rough, but three decades of innovation have made them impenetrable without modernization. Outbreak Contagious Memories wastes no time making comparisons to early Resident Evil and Silent Hill. However, it’s a bill of goods that the game doesn’t come close to delivering. Graphics, controls, combat, puzzles seem more of a proof of concept rather than a commercial product due to quality.

Dead Drop Studios is porting Contagious Memories, one of several games in a series, to the Xbox Series platform. While the marketing indicates that it is taking advantage of new hardware, it’s apparent from the get-go, that this is simply a port. Nearly every action outside of gameplay will force a loading screen. Hitting pause, opening a door, and navigating one or two clicks deep into a menu, all cause a brief loading screen. It’s jarring and while I’m not a developer, it makes me ask the question, why does a native game with such simple levels require a landing screen given the SSD and speed of these consoles?

You play as Lydia who wakes up to a city undergoing the early hours of zombie infection. While getting the lay of the land you must find a way to escape by managing your resources, shooting monsters, and solving puzzles. The game attempts to apply pressure by giving you limited resources to clear each section of a level, solve a puzzle, and keep moving towards leaving town. The game also features a coop mode where you must share resources.  While I appreciate the goal of wanting to transport me back to the 90s and make a campy experience that gives me feelings of nostalgia, I found the game to be too frustrating to be able to appreciate the aim of the developer.

Outbreak: Contagious Memories gives you the option to choose between fixed camera, over-the-shoulder, and first-person perspective. While It’s a good idea to give players choice when revisiting a more reductive level design, the controls, locomotion, and aiming were so clunky none of the schemes felt at all playable. Similar to when Grand Theft Auto V added first-person to their third-person game, your character has the momentum to overcome before and after indicating walking. It gives the controls a loose feeling that makes it difficult to line up shots, with your limited ammo as a zombie takes sometimes 6-10 shots to kill!

To add insult to injury, the aim-assist system is so broken that you’ll end up wasting shots and get your health chipped away. This is evident especially when shooting the dog enemies in the game. As the dogs run towards you, the auto-aim in first person locks on above the dog’s character model. I can only suspect that this is what happens when you apply the same auto-aim mechanics to a character model that is 1/3 the size of the zombie character model. I understand a design choice of wanting to not feature the overly sticky auto-aim of modern games, but this game’s aiming mechanic is broken not challenging.

I had to restart from scratch two different times when I would reach a new room and not have enough ammunition to clear the enemies or even begin to read whatever note was left behind to solve a puzzle. For that reason, I ended up not even finishing the game but instead spent my time sussing out all the ways this game trips over itself and tries to call it nostalgia.

I can put up with campy and silly callbacks to 90’s horror games, I was there and loved discovering the genre moving into the 3D realm, but I can’t describe this game as a finished commercial product. Enemies clipping in and out of each other as they shamble towards you while you empty shot after shot into them, dogs levitating back up from the ground after you’ve spent all your ammo shooting behind them, clogged levels that have you endlessly backtracking and seeing a loading screen for the 5th time in three minutes of playing, it all robs the experience of any fun you could have.

Outbreak: Contagious Memories is a part of a series that can be found on Limited Run Games, Stadia, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Switch, and Steam. It’s normally priced between 10 and 30 dollars and I have to say it certainly smells like shovelware. Furthermore, Dead Drop Studios is launching a Kickstarter this month to fundraise. It’s certainly a harsh criticism, and I’m sure someone else may resonate more with the design intent, but I can’t recommend you spend your money or time on this title. I’d be suspicious of other games in the franchise given how many platforms it’s been ported to. If you’re looking for a nostalgia kick, I’d look somewhere else.

After watching the trailer, I was excited to go hands-on with Eternal Hope. I instantly gravitate towards this moody and beautiful art design and puzzle-platform gameplay. While this is a small Brazilian studio, it’s apparent that they aim high by the almost direct comparison to other games in the genre. On its surface, the game easily points towards 2010’s Limbo and subsequent 2016 INSIDE. Between the silhouette art design, gruesome ragdoll deaths, and somber tone, Doubhit Studio aims to add another layer by allowing the player to access the Shadow World to solve puzzles and navigate this contaminated but beautiful world.

After a brief exhibition highlighting how lonely he is, you take control of Ti’bi, a companionless silhouette boy. Shortly thereafter you find your paramour, a shadow girl with a scarf, and all seems right in the world. That is until your love is whisked away, and her soul is shattered into disparate parts that you must go find. With scarf in hand and equipped with a fairy-type companion named Heli.

You’re given the ability to immediately shift into the Shadow World as much as you like. That is the hellish monster-ridden background that underpins the beautiful land. This will help you solve puzzles and reach places that would otherwise could not. While you can only transition to this plane for a brief time, it is a nice spin that encourages constantly checking to see if there’s something you missed. It aids in finding collectibles to boot, so I found myself hitting it constantly.

These games live and die on the tight controls and natural feeling physics to make the player feel like when they die, it’s a skill gap that they can improve on. However, the controls weren’t tight enough to always feel like I was executing the solution that I had already figured out. Small things, like if you hold the jump button a smidge too long your character will jump twice or grappling onto ledges feeling inconsistent. If the game asks me to learn by dying, then I need the deaths to be my fault.

A second gripe is the polish on the puzzles. 9 out of 10 times, you can find the solution to the clever and satisfying puzzle through repetition and looking for the visual or audio cue from the game design. However, about 10% of the time, I found myself scratching my head and wondering how anyone could solve that without dumb luck.

A hidden trap door that didn’t have any visual or audio cue indicating that I could stomp on it or a block that I ciuld only climb 50 percent of the time for example. For a game that is only 2-3 hours long, I spent almost 20% of my time solving two undercooked puzzles. While it’s not realistic that every square foot of the game would have an equal polish from a small indie team, it was so obvious that I wonder how it didn’t come up in playtests. At the time of writing this, there has been no day-one patch resolving these two instances. As an aside and speaking of polish, when the credits rolled on Xbox, the text was all overlapping each other, and I could not read any of the roles or credited names. It’s probably an easy fix, but not a great last impression.

The art and style of the game are what stand out the most. Across the four different levels, each was distinct and beautiful in its own way. My favorite was the Forgotten City which pointed towards a lost civilization and helped to flesh out the world you find yourself in. With an almost fairytale atmosphere, Eternal Hope has a very clear and developed art style that carries the player through some of the rougher attributes.

One of the main sticking points will be the game length. Clocking in at about 2-3 hours for a play-through and adding another hour for completionists to find the remaining collectibles, it’s a very short experience. Also, bear in mind, I play games very slowly. It’s my opinion that more games should explore these tighter condensed experiences and set their price points accordingly. It’s currently on sale for $7.99 on the Xbox Store, and I think that is an entirely appropriate price point. For gamers who are looking for a satisfying and beautiful game for one or two evenings, it will certainly fit the bill. However, if you want to stretch your dollar per hour of game, look elsewhere.

While I do wish the controls were a bit tighter and the small number of clunky puzzles were polished, I enjoyed my time with Eternal Hope. I wouldn’t expect the level or length of a Limbo or INSIDE, but it is nice to see something so lovingly crafted in their images. I hope that Doublehit can make enough to pour into a second puzzle-platformer because the potential and technical skill are there, it’s just a little short and clunky to be a mainstream hit. That being said, if you want a bite-sized romp in a colorful and sad world, then by all means jump into the Shadow World and save your lost love.

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