Since the release of "Black Album: Medan" in 2019, developer SuperMassive Games has consistently released new works for the series on an annual basis. Now, with the release of "Black Album: Heart Demon", the production team's grand ambition of "Black Album 8" has been halfway achieved, and this series has also ushered in the conclusion of its first season.

After last year's Grey Underworld, I was worried about the future direction of this series. However, in the first half of this year, Supermaster worked for 2K Games and did "Quarry Cry" again. The quality of the game and the courage of the production team to double play have reignited my confidence in "Heart Demon".

But the fact has proven that I have completely overthought it - "Heart Demon" is a mediocre and crude work, to the point where I suspect the production team has already let go of themselves and started putting it on display, wasting the title of "Season 1 Conclusion". After completing this game, it's really difficult for me to have any expectations for the four games of the second season anymore. Let's continue to worry.

Retrogressive viewing experience

Not long after entering the game, I was shocked by the performance of "Heart Demon": the graphics and character details of this game have greatly degraded from "Quarry Shock", and I think it looks even worse than "Medan" a few years ago.

At first, I ran the game in PS5 performance mode. After finishing the preface, I saw the administrator in the opening animation with one arm pasted into a pixel block. I couldn't hold my tension on the spot and quickly switched to picture quality mode.

However, in picture quality mode, whenever I rotate the perspective, the game's visuals will experience extremely exaggerated blurring. Moreover, the judgment of the changing perspective and the blurring effect both have a slight delay, which makes me feel physically uncomfortable, and I had to switch back to the performance mode.

  What is the material of this scene in the efficiency mode bothering me& nbsp; 

The modeling and performance of the characters in "Heart Demon" also disappointed me greatly. I still can't forget when I first met Officer Travis in Quarry Fear, his series of vivid facial expressions and details directly filled the eerie and terrifying atmosphere. But perhaps due to the lack of 2K technical support, the characters in "Heart Demon" are stiff like plastic figures, with some of them staring blankly at unknown places, sometimes giving me a sense of terrifying alienation.

In addition, the lines and actions of the characters in this work are also difficult to call outstanding, which did not surprise me. To put it nicely, every character is very consistent in their appearance - what impressed me at first glance is that they are indeed this kind of personality, with little room for exploration, too thin.

  "Quarry Cry" (left) and "Black Collection: Heart Demon" (right) & nbsp;

At the same time, this game has the least and most perfunctory death animation in the entire series, and players can easily avoid unexpected situations with the foreshadowing screen. Of course, this made the gameplay itself easier, but it also greatly weakened my enthusiasm for trying to play BE.

Although the film and television performance is limited, Supermaster's interactive movie style games are still centered around the plot. Therefore, if "Heart Demon" tells a good story, I can still give a good review.

Well, yes, I mean "if.". Unfortunately, the plot and narrative of this work were also messed up.

Abandoning logic and wasting settings

Compared to the science inspired light supernatural approach of "Medan" and "Xiwang Town", or the sci-fi horror of extraterrestrial monsters in "Grey Underworld", the story and background of "Heart Demon" are actually much more realistic and specific, making it very easy to understand. This work is more like horror movies like "Moonlight Heart Panic" and "Friday the 13th", where the source of fear is not the threat of unknown creatures, but the direct survival pressure caused by being chased.

In reality, there was a person named Henry Howard Holmes, who was the first serial killer in American history. This person built a maze hotel and used various hidden mechanisms to torture and kill over 200 innocent tenants. The story of "Heart Demon" is inspired by this: a program team on the brink of disbandment is invited to film a replica building of Sherlock Holmes's "Murder Castle" and unsurprisingly becomes the target of imitators.

Before the release of "Heart Demon", I was really looking forward to seeing how this game could bring out the charm of this background. On the one hand, this time, it was clear that not pretending to be a god or a ghost might use suspenseful narrative techniques to make up for the visual deficiency of not having supernatural monsters; On the other hand, if the twists and turns, deadly traps, and intricate mechanisms of the Murder Castle can be reproduced in the game for players to experience, it would be like a virtual interactive haunted house, just thinking about it would be exciting.

Unfortunately, the true presentation of this work did not satisfy me. Some scenes made me feel that the production team had completely let themselves go, wasting such a good theme in vain.

"Heart Demon" adopts a slightly fragmented narrative technique to reveal the truth about the behind the scenes mastermind. In fact, I personally feel that after picking up clues, presenting the reasoning brought by the performance in the form of recorded reports is still a bit interesting. However, due to the overly conventional identity of the perpetrator, I roughly guessed the final result in a very early stage, and by the end, there was less interest in being enlightened.

And my expectation of seeing all kinds of exquisite murder equipment in the Murder Castle was completely shattered. There are less than five trap rooms in the entire game that I can remember without the need for effort, and only two of them make me hesitate when choosing. In the later stages of the process, the protagonists also discovered how the killer operated various mechanisms, and the two sides subsequently engaged in some manipulation with each other. I won't be a spoiler here, I just want to say that the entire plot took the American horror film's illogical, character lowering, and forced intimidation customs to a new level, which made me laugh in anger.

Upon closer examination, the entire story of "Heart Demon" can only be described as "riddled with wounds and holes.". By the end of the game, some seemingly important foreshadows had not been collected, and some things about the killer had not been explained clearly.

In addition, the choices made by players in this game have little impact on the fate of the characters. The decision at the beginning of "The Medan" is related to the ultimate fate of some characters. The personal personality, liking between characters, and the amount of resources on the body can all affect the ending in "Town of Hope", but these details are completely missing in "Heart Demon".

The idea is good, but the implementation is not successful

In fact, there are also good aspects to "Heart Demon". I really like the newly added character tool system this time... Although the effect of implementing this thing is relatively average, at least I can see that Supermassive has ideas to introduce more playable content for its interactive film and television games.

On the positive side, different characters in this game have different identities and therefore have different props. For example, as lighting tools, the lamplighter uses a flashlight that can illuminate the distance, the smoker uses a lighter that can only illuminate the area around them, and the photographer uses a flash that requires cooling to be reused. These different equipment make me feel completely different when operating three people. For example, when operating a lamplighter, I tend to move forward boldly, but when operating a photographer, I often worry about encountering accidents during the process of charging the flash (however, in reality, the production team did not use this design at all, and still only relied on cheap Jump Scare to scare people).

In addition, the characters in the game have abilities such as prying locks, repairing electrical boxes, and exploring sounds. However, the process of this game is actually relatively linear. When, where, and what roles to operate are actually arranged by the official, which means that the use of these abilities is actually quite limited - since I am using this person, there will definitely be places where I need to use that ability - this does not reflect the differences between the characters, and it also makes the puzzle solving process unnecessary.

I think if the scene and route are made more open, allowing players to encounter puzzles that are forced to be solved by someone else, it can better demonstrate the concept of the "butterfly effect". For example, when A encounters an unopened box while exploring, he comes back to pry the lock and decide whether to take the item with him or leave it for C.

Heart Demon also introduced more interactive environmental actions and completely abandoned the design of fixed camera angles, I think this is for the convenience of more players to get started. But the judgment of this game is very strange, the characters are bulky, and most of the time they are in a narrow indoor environment, which is not suitable for free viewing, so these two changes are also difficult to be considered successful.

epilogue

If we make good use of the inspiration foundation, there is actually a chance that "Black Collection: Heart Demon" can become an impressive horror game, summarizing the phased development of the series. But the uninteresting characters, vulgar stories, and branching options with minimal practical significance ruined this game, and the already unsuccessful new attempts certainly failed to save its overall performance.

If you are a fan of Supermassive, there's nothing to say, just play Heartbeat. But if you're just interested in interactive movie style horror games, I think Quarry Cry, Until Dawn, Medan, and Sparse Town are all better choices than this game.

  The first work of the second season, "Direct 8020"& nbsp;

Amidst the ups and downs along the way, the first season of "Black Collection" finally came to an end. After the cast of "Heart Demon" finished broadcasting, the official released a trailer for the next work as usual, which seemed to take players into space to face aliens.

However, I always feel that the production team doesn't seem to care much about making good movies out of games anymore. They just want to learn from the theme style of their favorite horror movies and then turn them into games. So I wish them all the best in the development process and a happy day. It's really nice to be able to do what they love and earn money. But no matter what, "Heart Demon" has made me quite unhappy, and I don't want to be with you again in the next season.