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unbirth simulator

🦁🦁🦁 THREE LIONS ON A SHIRT 🦁🦁🦁

[tl;dr - the middle is decent, but how it is bookended by two (imo) poor chapters really hinders what could have been pretty enjoyable. For how cheap it is, especially as it is on sale at the time of this review, it may be worth a pick up if you enjoy this particular genre of point and click.]

The Charnel House Trilogy, is a point and click project developed by Owl Cave, and recently released on Steam. It tells the tale of two characters on a train journey to the mysterious Auger Peak, and this is split across three sections - Inhale, Sepulchre, and Exhale - which form the ‘trilogy.’

Having previously played the second act of this game, which was released as a standalone piece several years back as ‘Sepulchre,’ I was looking forward to seeing what The Charnel House Trilogy exactly was. Sepulchre had a very intriguing mix of Lovecraftian psychological creepiness, and grim morbidity - I expected a similarly enjoyable interactive story.

That is just what The Charnel House Trilogy actually is - an interactive story. There is no real failure state; just a series of simple puzzles which are easily solved by paying basic attention and using basic logic. Therefore, the game rests entirely upon its narrative; because of this, I will try to keep to generalities, as to avoid spoilers. I would also like to quickly mention that the options menu/etc is completely fine - limited, but appropriate for the game.

The first arc of the the game, titled ‘Inhale,’ is a seemingly self aware 15 minute introduction to Alex Davenport (voiced by author Madeleine Roux) - one of the two main characters of this game. While the player clicks around her apartment, Alex comments on objects in typical point and click fashion, in a condescending way which seems to be a form of satire on the genre itself; likewise, the chapter offers a lot of ‘in-jokes’ about the games industry/PC gaming/games journalism, which are obviously meant to appeal to the player. But they simply do not. Instead of being presented with a wry wit, they are just quite annoying, falling suspect to the things that they seem to be mocking. When you add in the cameos from people in games media, such as Jim Sterling and Cara Ellison, the first part of the game really just seems littered with references which do not offer any real grounding to the narrative. They do not sow the seeds of a committed pastiche (as The Bard’s Tale was to RPGs), nor do they offer any real comedic value.

When the game reaches the second arc, however, the game does become more enjoyable. ‘Sepulchre’ switches to a more curious setting, with a better written, and more likeable character - Dr. Harold Lang. I was rather fond of this section when it was in the standalone form, but when it is played straight after the underwhelming ‘Inhale,’ a lot of the immersiveness and atmosphere is heavily mired. Whereas ‘Sepulchre’ is a committed confident ghost story, on a train with a layout which lends itself perfectly to the point and click genre, the questions it made me previously ask myself several years ago, are unnecessarily drowned by lingering memories of ‘Inhale,’ and confused expectations of ‘Exhale.’

‘Exhale’ brings back the character of Alex, but it does not bring back the shortcomings of her previous arc. I actually found the character herself to be a bit more likeable, and the setting of ‘Sepulchre’ is recycled in an interesting way which lends itself to the gameplay. These points are far outweighed, however, by a complete change of everything which made the narrative in arc two enjoyable; the sly, creepy horror, which could have been a lost chapter of The King In Yellow, is now replaced with a frightfully naff stalker/ex-boyfriend… thing. It still takes place on the supernatural train, but this works negatively, because answers you expect are left vague, and the writing seems to adopt a method of not explaining anything, which just creates a covering of pretentiousness, rather than the gradual clever unveiling one would expect.

When you wander from the narrative aspects of the game, there is actually a lot of praise to be given. The art style is beautiful, and definitely one of the more recent examples of pixel art done right. Likewise, the music, which is ever-present, but never intruding, provides a really gorgeous tone, which compliments the developments well. The voice acting is incredibly hit-and-miss, with poor writing magnifying a lot of otherwise passable lines (e.g. Jim Sterling delivers the one believable use of the word ‘♥♥♥♥♥♥♥’ in the entire game). I found myself more inclined to just read the text myself, and skip through, more and more as the game progressed.

To conclude, I would like to showcase one particular scene which explains everything I felt about the game at once: at the end of ‘Inhale,’ Alex gazes out of her window at the street across from her New York apartment - the soundtrack is very fitting to the fantastically drawn rainy scene. This is intruded, by a very badly written monologue from Alex - it reminded me of a GCSE creative writing task in style, with an uninteresting set of descriptions slowly ruining an otherwise pleasant visual experience. This echoes the game itself, which has one genuinely decent chapter (Sepulchre), overpowered by two completely unfitting ones.

The game seems to hint towards a future installment in the Charnel House series of games, and it could be quite good, if it fills in the gaps that we are left with at the end of the Trilogy. The issue resides in the fact that these gaps are in a ground comprised of already ill fitting narratives, badly written characters, and aspects which will be tough to explain enjoyably.

So this game is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ brilliant.

I still think The Walking Dead ep1 was better overall, however TWAU boasts a much better opening chapter/your choices have a larger impact upon the guaranteed events/the setting allows for some very interesting things you wouldn't be able to try in a post-apoc WD-universe game. I still love Lee/Clem, but playing as the Big Bad Wolf was assuredly just as fantastic.

It's set itself up for a really good sequel - one with a proper plot continuation, that draws heavily from the comics, which are also amazing. The game has loads of iconic moments, and true badassery you can't find in many games nowadays.

Only negative things I'd say:
- You don't appear to be able to get all of the Fables entries/collectables by naturally going through it; aiming for a particular character needs to be broken occassionally if you care about the 100%.
- Because the dialogue you select isn't EXACTLY what Bigby says, if you're not 100% concentrating/reading it several ways, a few accidental choices could be made. :'(
- Due to the nature of only being able to have so many responses, a lot of the time you're really wanting to say something that there just isn't an option for (tho the genre can't really avoid this tbh).
- Episodes 2 and 3 are pretty short, and not as good as the stunning 1, 4, 5 - TellTale appear to have grasped back their quality, after a rough patch (probs coinciding with the GoT/Borderlands/other TWAU eps' release dates/TWDep2/etc).


Overall, buy it... You really have no reason not to; the price is so low when on sale, and although you won't rack as many hours as you will on some other games, each hour will almost always be far more emotional/interesting/etc than far too many other games. I had a lot less hours on this, than I did TWDep1, but it felt just as long - it has none of the walking about to find clues/puzzle solving/long character dialogues that TWD had, and replaces it with much more action/narrative; both are still great. A nice feature that almost replaces the puzzle solving is how you can be wrong - the game openly invites you to guess at suspects/etc, and if you haven't been paying attention to what has unfolded before you, the story can change nicely.

ggwp telltale