Chapelwaite

Chapelwaite is a horror RPG based on the Stephen King novel, Jerusalem’s Lot. From what I understand, it uses the same plot and setting, as well as some of the original text. It was made for the Theme Roulette event a while back with the assigned theme of “abomination.” The game isn’t very long or difficult, but it does some pretty interesting stuff with the time it has.

Let’s Talk About Graphics!

As you can imagine, these are pretty important in a horror game. I don’t know where they came from at all, but they certainly fit the setting and work to be decently creepy. Chapelwaite is an unsettling mansion that you could recognize as feeling haunted without having too many obvious clues that something’s amiss. The game is visually cohesive and nothing feels jarring or out of place. Character sprites and face graphics seem to be made from 3D models, helping to add a sense of realism (but not real enough to appear uncanny).

While things generally look decent on their own, some aspects feel a little janky and suffer from the engine limitations. The main character has eight-directional movement and a running animation for each one, but his frame count leaves him looking a bit stiff, whether he’s walking or not. Other characters only have four directional movement, and this is problematic for bigger NPCs like the large monsters that chase you in certain scenes. No matter how huge they are, you can tell they’re still following the grid as best their cardinal directions will allow. The game also uses some special effects to varying degrees of success. As your sanity lowers, things like visual blur or screen tint will take place for a short while. Outside the manor, a perpetual fog hangs in the air that partially obscures your view of things, but doesn’t always play nice with other effects that might be going on.

Overall, the game looks consistently good and it helps to build the atmosphere it needs to be engaging.

Let’s Talk About Audio!

Another important aspect of horror games, Chapelwaite handles this quite well also. There’s almost no music apart from the title screen, so it’s usually just ambient sound. They contribute to the atmosphere when necessary, and certainly help to build immersion and keep you on edge. Some sound effects are borrowed from other horror games (like Silent Hill), while others are just RTP. Once again, nothing is out of place and it’s plenty effective enough.

Let’s Talk About Story!

As before, it’s Jerusalem’s Lot. I’m not sure how much credit I can give to the writing since much of it is taken directly from the source. I can say the story is presented well enough. It has decent pacing and doesn’t jump the gun into Scary Town too quickly. Dialogue feels natural and believable for the time period, and the parts written by StormCrow blend closely enough with the borrowed work to be unnoticeable.

You play as Charles and his faithful companion Calvin as they move into Chapelwaite after inheriting it from its previous resident. The house has been in the Boone family for generations, and many of Charles’ relatives are buried in the adjoining cemetery. It doesn’t take long before strange things occur, and it’s up to them to unravel the sordid mystery surrounding the location and the Boone bloodline.

It's hard to say much else without spoiling it. It’s also hard to praise it knowing it’s not exactly original. Well done, King!

Let’s Talk About Gameplay!

While horror games are often story-based experiences with little interactivity, Chapelwaite has quite a few systems it puts to use. In a way, it’s a little unfortunate because the game’s length makes it feel like all these ideas are a bit crammed in. They would be enough to carry a longer title pretty easily and there’s room for most everything to be expanded upon.

Core gameplay is common of RM; map exploration and occasional battles, but it’s what the game does with it that makes it unique. For one, the game is broken up into exploration time and story time. At the start of the game, you get to choose how long you’ll have to explore on your breaks, with the option of up to six minutes. You can use this time to forage around the mansion for supplies to get through your coming trials. Once time is up, your exploration is limited and you must advance to the next plot point, which is usually something obvious. There’s a bare minimum of puzzle solving, to the point where I wouldn’t really call it that. It mostly involves finding key items and figuring out what to do with them. However, I did find it annoying that an object required to progress is unavailable until a certain plot flag is cleared, but the hints to get the object can be located sooner than that. It tripped me up, and a few others as well.

Battle is very infrequent and almost completely avoidable, but your combat options are limited and make things tricky. You can freely change weapons on your turn and still attack, and this is necessary to use skills that are strictly weapon-based. For example, Charles can use his Take Aim skill to improve his next shot with a gun, but his multi-strike melee attack is incompatible with those weapons. Skills have cooldowns, so you’ll have to swap back and forth between weapon types to fight at the best of your ability. It’s impossible to heal once you’re in a fight, so you have to be smart and try to end things quickly. Bandages exist for out-of-combat healing, so you mustn’t neglect your wounds after a scrap. Resources are limited, but unless you never bother to search anything, you should have plenty to get you through.

Apart from the basics, there are other factors at play in the game’s systems. There’s a stamina bar that drains while you run and forces you to walk when it depletes. You’ll mostly use it to get around faster, but it’s also vital during times when you must escape from something chasing you. For the most part, it’s fairly arbitrary, but it works as intended.

Another special stat is the Sanity stat, which decreases each time you witness something disturbing. If it ever hits zero, you’ll get a Game Over, but you’d practically have to force that to happen. The stat only goes down and never recovers, and sanity effects start to kick in below a certain threshold (like in Eternal Darkness). Eventually there’s a tome you can study to learn special abilities, but doing so costs Sanity, and using the skills costs Sanity as well. In that regard, you need to balance how much you’re willing to stake without running out later. I suppose it’s possible to run yourself too low and enter an unwinnable situation, but that would most likely be your own fault for being careless. Yet another use for stats is in the field for skill checks. The characters level up once per day, and as their stats improve, they can accomplish things they previously could not. Sadly, this system is underused and only applies to a couple things that only matter at a point where your stats could inevitably handle it.

Now, it’s not to say all these systems are without their faults. Exploration and combat are tight enough, but some of these features cause some real problems. The stamina bar, while functional, is mostly a hindrance during the course of play. You only really need it when fleeing from something, and the rest of the time, it just makes you stop and smell the daisies instead of charging around unabated. That really makes it more of an inconvenience than anything else.

The sanity effects, while cool on their own, become quite a nuisance after a while and occur with excessive frequency. It’d be much nicer if the effects had their probability tied to your level of Sanity, but as it is, they seem to begin under a certain threshold, and they can occur almost back-to-back at times. Personally, I think a higher threshold with very infrequent effects would be more palatable. Even so, they lose their edge when they happen too often, and you’ll see them repeat from time to time as well. Some of them run for much longer than it feels like they should, too.

However, the biggest issue I had is that some of them are outright broken. I encountered one that makes your character sprite vanish as part of a fake Game Over, but when you return to the map, you’re stuck in the top-left corner of the area. In some locations, this means you have no choice but to reset. Needless to say, it’s not good to have a potential unpreventable fail state at the mercy of RNG.

Let’s Wrap This Up…

Chapelwaite is a decently solid game. It gets a lot of things right, but falls short on a few as well. It has some great ideas that could use a little better implementation, or just more use in general. The game is so short that it feels like many of these features are just one-off gimmicks. It could definitely have supported something of greater length, but hey, it’s an event game. I can understand a few doors being jammed, never to be opened.

But all things considered, I give this a…

3/5 “A mostly solid game with a few too many rats in the walls.”


Just call an exterminator in the morning...