Lake Haven – Chrysalis: Mystery in the town of Lake Haven Storm Knight

Although it is only a prequel to the main game, Chrysalis has brought many great experiences to the game Lake Haven. Created by Encrypt Game as an Indie Dev with a very small budget. Lake Haven is an Old-school Survival horror title that targets the style of Silent Hill and Twin Peak with all the most traditional elements of the genre from the PS1 era.

Gameplay: This will be an extremely picky game with all the most traditional formulas: Tank Controll, Preset camera angles, aiming system to focus first and then shoot, puzzles etc… Survival horror players are too old. If you know the lesson, you will feel at home with each setting of Lake Haven – Chrysallis. The game is quite hardcore in respecting the formula so the difficulty of the game, especially in the puzzle stage, can be said to be extremely terrible. First of all, there will not be any specific instructions or instructions, but if there is, it will depend on how you understand the problem or understand certain patterns. The game’s context is the prologue, so you will follow detective Zeke Reynolds to the town of Lake Haven in a remote rural area of ​​America to investigate a mysterious disappearance and loss of contact of a family. family. The camera angle introducing Zeke in the car changes from upside down to sideways – those who are fans of David Lynch will immediately recognize familiar effects from the movie Lost Highway. Zeke arrived at the right address – in the middle of the wilderness with little light from a few lights. You start on the porch and then realize the door is locked, an unusual feeling that seems like someone is still in this place. The next thing you discover is a normal house that has a secret passage under the well, a few secret rooms and a mountain of creepy stuff that doesn’t seem to make much sense, like an episode of Courage The. Cowardly Dog so. The game plays at an extremely slow pace, even assuming you are playing for the first time without any monkey speedruns here, the game spends its first 30 minutes to an hour just teaching the player. about the game’s puzzle mechanism. The pistol Zeke holds is invulnerable and obviously this is just the Prologue of the main game, but it’s still cooking for a few more months, a year before it’s released, so the combat mechanism isn’t anything worth discussing here. Because solving puzzles is very difficult, you can imagine that the familiar backtrack problem will be a common problem when in just the first 15 minutes, you run back and forth digging in the dirt behind the house to get the key to the main door – which I quite like this riddle because it implies that the house must contain something terrible for the last person in the family to bury the key in a dug-out in the backyard. The basement is locked with a spiked chain and padlock. The documents in the game are written very carefully and scientifically, and sometimes suggest puzzle clues for you.

The game’s plot throws a series of mysteries at the player as well as an exhilarating sense of a crazy adventure within David Lynch’s worldview. The game’s context is a decade, so you see things in the house built with space, deprivation, limitations, but also full of cultural products of that decade. In the game, you follow Marianne Lambert’s letters to investigate her close friend Eleanor Robertson, who has been silent for exactly 13 days and has had no contact or movement from her family. Robertson family too. The game slowly guides players to do the silliest things in the exact context of the 9x Survival Horror game, like someone in the house actually hiding stone slabs in the strangest places, you have to run away. Turn around to attach the stone slab to the wall under the open well to get the clock hands, turn the clock to 12 o’clock for the zodiac and then do all sorts of other silly things to open up the deep space at the bottom of the well. I like the way the game teases you that the time you spend in this place solving puzzles makes you forget reality and you mentally question what the hell you’re doing. There will only be one Combat match in this entire Prequel and as usual, you can easily pass or die and the game does this just as if to say: “This is just an appetizer”. The way it sets up the opposite scenario is one of the things that makes me love indie games so much more than AAA because of the creativity and experimentation – I dare say these are things you don’t often see since the game market Survival Horror AAA doesn’t drown in a hallway FPS, but it also drowns in a walking simulator with a boring plot or a remake, or worse, you hire a super bad guy to remake a masterpiece because you want to save money. save money (I’m watching both of you very closely Kuntnomey and Bloober )

Spoiler: You discover that Eleanor has been dead in the house for some time now… She looks so sad and cold, and from the letters you learn that her husband’s name is James (It seems the guy’s name is James is often very problematic in the Survival Horror genre – this paragraph if you know what I mean ). The Twist being played here is that the plot does not leave open what actually happened in James and Eleanor’s relationship. From the letters James left behind, it seemed that Eleanor seemed to have problems and was no longer herself, while to Eleanor, she described that James was not the type to leave her and even in her eyes, Both seem to be monsters and the couple cannot understand anything about each other. Because this is a game that also has psychological content, the manipulation is that you can’t blame Eleanor or James because you don’t know who is the problem, why people are like this and what happens in the end. What the hell was some demonic force here doing? Or more accurately? You are Zeke – a detective, a man who has spent his whole life believing in science to solve crimes and now he is in a house in the cold wilderness with a strange fear of what he is getting into. there. After you get the angel badge to open the damn door in the well… This is the part where Zeke is like: “Oh, I’m so sorry” he discovered that there really is some power here. , but the problem is that while the well and the house were all locked haphazardly to prevent it from escaping, Zeke accidentally helped break all those seals… And one of the most impressive scenes The most impressive part of the game is when you see Zeke running down that spiral staircase – Reminiscent of Silent Hill 1 and as Thomas Grip described how that spiral staircase creeps into the mind in a terrifying way. In LH: Chrysalis, you witness blood-red chains slowly rushing up to engulf everything and the scene where Zeke runs up quickly while the chains continue to rush up, the ferocious background music is truly amazing. impressive and memorable.

The last part is a surprise and I won’t spoil it but here’s a hint: Watch Twin Peak, it’s worth it. Even though we know this is an Indie Low Poly Classic PS1 game, it will be quite picky, but in the end, if you find a good game that makes it into your suggestions, we don’t need to discuss taste here anymore. One thing I like about the game’s graphics is that even if it’s Low Poly, it’s hard to see, but the horror atmosphere is undeniable. It closely adheres to the art style, direction and the way Silent Hill 1 overcomes the limitations of the PS1 itself to create its horror. The game does use a light layer of Blur to cover up some things and shadows, but this is a prime example of what doing the right thing can do when the Blur is only very fleeting and subtle, the effect from the flashlight above. Zeke’s shirt also flashes in the same way that Silent Hill 1’s flashlight worked. The way you set up the Camera angles and use Tank Controll to create the feeling of distorted space and you are entering the journey of abandoning the old world shows that the game makers have really done very careful research. The sound in the game besides the background music has almost no other voice acting, or they use voice distortion and fast forwarding to pretend to have dialogue (this effect I mentioned in the game Lunacid before). But it is also this dead silence that creates the mood of the game. The way Zeke always looks straight at the camera, the faces of both him and Eleanor show that they are both moody and troubled with a little movement and drawn expressions that show their own discomfort and psychology. In fact, the game uses a lot of straight face effects where the character will always stare straight at the camera as if looking straight at the player. The Warp and distortion effects are also done very well and actually when you see the screen sucking everything into it is quite interesting – makes me wonder why don’t more games try new and unique concepts. More weird, right?

Compared to an Indie game that costs only 2 to 3 dollars converted into Vietnamese currency, about 30K – 45K and can even be discounted in the future, Lake Haven-Chrysalis is truly a great bargain. The main Lake Haven game is also being developed, so I’m waiting to see how it turns out. The game is an example and proof of how a lost style can still be attractive and unique if you know how to do it. If you have completed this Prequel and reached the end of the game, to see what it is about to set up, I believe that Silent Hill fans will definitely be more interested and impatient, it’s funny that you always It can be said that something is even more Silent Hill than the one that Kuntnomey currently owns and outsources…

HenryMason AKA TranVietBach