Until Dawn: Rush of Blood, despite being a launch game, was one of the best horror video games you could get on PSVR. The game was an on-rails shooter that was a spin-off of narrative adventure horror Until Dawn, and was a blast to play. The Dark Pictures anthology series of video games were made by the same people, and while they have been hit and miss, they are still fun to play. Hearing that a similar thing was happening for PSVR2, and that a new on-rails shooter based on the four games in the series already released was being made, The Dark Pictures Presents: Switchback VR, made me very excited. The game came out and unfortunately it was not great, mainly due to the hideous low-res graphics that made it look like something that was designed for PSVR, not the new and vastly improved PSVR2 device. With the developers promising a vast patch was on the way, I decided to hold my review until I had played through it again. I've now played through it post patch, and can happily say it is much improved over it's original incarnation.
There is a barebones story here, but considering Rush of Blood didn't really have one, that is a step in the right direction. You play as someone who was on a train, travelling to meet their estranged sister in order to visit a roller-coaster that was a favourite of your fathers. The train crashes and you find yourself on a nightmarish roller-coaster, tormented by a demonic female creature. It appears back in the real world you are on the cusp of life and death, and should you die on the killer roller-coaster then you will also die in real life and the demon will be able to claim your soul. Thanks to the influence of a mostly passive watcher (the narrator character from The Dark Pictures games who sadly remains silent throughout), you are armed with pistols which you can use to defend yourself against the horrors you face, and find a way to avert your fate.
There are ten levels in the game, and much like Rush of Blood, the first acts like a tutorial, and like that game it was a little dull to play. The meat of the game is revisiting the locations from the four games in the series, with each game getting two stages each, then culminating in a final level that acts as one long boss fight. It starts off with The Dark Pictures: Man of Medan which mostly takes place aboard an abandoned American warship. These levels mainly take place within claustrophobic corridors that see you under assault from zombies. Of the proper stages, I found these first two to be the least interesting, I did like that it doesn't give spoilers, instead the focus is on horror. The next stages are based on The Dark Pictures Anthology: Little Hope, this started the trend of each new pair of stages being better than the previous two. The more open areas suited the feel of the game better, and I enjoyed how they incorporated elements such as being trapped in loops into the design of the level, the enemies were fun, this time mannequins brought to life, but there wasn't really any getting away from this just being re-skinned versions of the zombies from before.
I was looking forward to checking out The Dark Pictures: House of Ashes levels as that was a fantastic video game, and it was a joy revisiting the vast underground temple location. In terms of the enemies here, this was one that did have unavoidable spoilers. Final was The Dark Pictures Anthology: The Devil in Me, a game I haven't played. This was the cream of the crop, a fantastic two levels journey through a hotel full of traps, culminating in the game's most entertaining boss fight, one that actually required you to do more than just shoot repeatedly at a monster. Sadly, the actual final level of the game was a dip in quality. Rush of Blood had it's whole last level designed around a gigantic monster, so fighting a human sized adversary here was a let down, as was the bland cave location used.
Each of the sets of levels have their own unique elements to them, with the ghost ship, you have to shoot valves to clear gas from your path for instance, while the murder hotel has you needing to shoot electric bolts to activate traps that can be used to kill enemies. There are also some really cool elements that use the power of PSVR2. Some sections see you facing enemies who change position each time you blink, those couple of sections were fun, though you have to blink if you want to get through that. Even better were parts where enemies are frozen in place while you are looking in their direction, but they move as soon as you look away. This led to some superbly creepy moments of trying to keep your gaze in three different directions. The game mainly isn't scary outside of some limited sections. The biggest problem is how utterly telegraphed the jump scares are. A bizarre decision was made to have your guns vanish whenever a jump scare was due to take place, I guess this was to stop the player from trying to shoot whatever unkillable event was going to happen, but it led to it being extremely obvious something was going to happen, while your guns being taken away was a giant indicator that nothing bad was going to happen to you during this segments.
The game does have branching pathways, but I found these to be unremarkable with it often not really even being obvious what the differences were. There isn't much replay value at all outside of that, there are survivors to rescue if you want, though it doesn't really affect much, and there are specially marked items among the detritus the levels are covered with, but these merely grant you a point boost if you destroy them, it would have been far cooler to actually be rewarded for shooting these, such as some kind of unlockable reward for doing so.
Switchback VR as it is now, was a big improvement on how it launched, yet I would still say it isn't a patch on Rush of Blood. It was very neat revisiting the locations of the previous games, but the reskinned enemies came to feel samey, and the jump scares fail completely every time. This is at its best in the set piece areas of each level, china dolls who keep chanting "are you my mommy?" as they crawl towards you, rooms full of animatronics, that have some randomly springing to life, and some occasional fun level design do all help, but outside of one or two plays there isn't anything that I think would call me back.
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