Amy (2013) - Zombie Videogame Preview

I just played the demo for downloadable survival horror game Amy.  It has gotten terrible reviews but I was pleased to find it plays and feels like a last generation survival horror game, you know back when they actually featured survival and horror rather than the shooter fests they have turned into nowadays.

The demo starts with a woman named Lana (your character) on a train with a young gifted mute girl called Amy, you are heading towards a city when there is an explosion and your train crashes into the station. Awakening some time later you discover Amy is missing and that the train and the station are in ruins, there are strange zombie like monsters everywhere also. Encountering another human; creepy taxi driver Marcello you do some puzzles (old school style) to turn off power to an electrified gate. Locating Amy you look for an exit to the train station.

Combat and movement is slow and clunky, while puzzles involve flipping switches and solving simple visual puzzles. Amy can be instructed to help you such as directing her to climb through narrow gaps and press buttons for you. I am worried that the game is going to be one long bout of baby sitting, but in the demo at least enemies did not attack Amy, though due to her slowness she did get trapped along with a bunch of creatures on the wrong side of a gate. I thought it was a glitch at first as Marcello kept referring to her despite her being a couple of hundred metres away but no, she is just damn slow at running.

Amy looks, feels and sounds like an old school horror, with cheesy dialogue, bad acting and the normal protagonist who has the misfortune of wearing a pair of high heeled shoes, hardly ideal for escaping the infected. At 800 Microsoft points it is not a bad price either.