K.EVIL DEMO (survival horror)

Intro

"K.Evil" is a survival horror game that was being developed by Xlion using RPG Maker 2003. Fortunately or unfortunately this build of the game was eventually abandoned for a spiritual successor that was created with RPG Maker XP under the name "CLAWS KILL - survival horror". And while I suppose it's nice something eventually came out of this. I really can't say I'm looking forward to playing that successor for two reasons.

For starters you have the obvious. I'm not a big horror fan and tend to find the genre rather unsatisfying to experience since I tend to enjoy happy endings. The ambiguous and outright bad endings you tend to get in horror are a major turn off for me. And secondly the combat system in this game is pretty bad. Though, I'll be getting into why it's awful in a little bit.

Story
Summary

You play as Stephany Dansson whose awoken one night by a combination of her sister screaming at the top of her lungs as well as from the blaring sounds coming from your home's emergency system. Unfortunately it looks like this system locked your sister in the kitchen before the emergency system ran out of power. So in order to get to her you'll need to explore your house in search of useful items. Though she's probably going to be dead by the time you get to her. After all, it takes her the better part of a minute just to tell us to call dad before she goes silent. And the genetically modified super cat that jumps out of the kitchen to attack us later is probably indicative that most of her flesh was eaten as well.

Strengths/Weaknesses

On the plus side the game does setup a mystery on where these freaks of science came from. Or at least a slight mystery since our attempts to get a hold of Stephany's old man goes pear shaped immediately. This is because the phone line is dead and even attempting to reboot it in the basement does nothing for her, but considering Stephany's sister Maya tells us our dad knows what's going on. It's likely he either created these super cats or was involved in the process of creating them.

On the other hand the game suffers from poor pacing issues. This is because the game will sometimes take forever to seemingly load a scene and because the developer sometimes included stuff in certain cut scenes that really didn't matter that much. A good example of this is the opening scenes of the game. Seriously upon starting the game your forced to stare at a black screen while a few noises play in the background. Then you cut to a scene of Maya making tea in the kitchen before she gets attacked by one of the super cats. And then we cut to Stephany sleeping in her bed for a little bit before rubbing the sleep out of her eyes. By the time you can actually control the game's only playable character you'll be over four minutes into the game.

Gameplay

When it comes to searching the house for items and potential weapons the game does alright for itself. It's when the game tries to flip from the player looking for items and avoiding enemies that the game falls apart. This is because both the player's character and the enemies move at the same pace. And since the only weapon I've found in the demo so far is a nail gun that needs to be reloaded after every shot. The enemies are easily going to reach and kill you if you actually try to fight them. To make matters worse if you get injured in this game you actually get slowed down. So it's possible for an enemy to basically stun lock you. And if that happens it's game over.

To make matters even worse you can only save in this game by interacting with PCs. And these PCs only appear in specific rooms and consume a floppy disc when you save. So you can only save your progress in this game if your willing to give up a limited resource in the process. And while I realize this was probably meant to help increase the tension in the air in this survival horror game. It also means any beginner's traps in this game are going to be super annoying to deal with if you haven't saved in a while.

Graphics and Sound

On the graphical and sound side of things the game definitely manages to set the tone for a tense atmosphere with danger lurking around every corner and under every bush. And while the movies tend to be rather underwhelming in my opinion. A few of them are definitely meant to be jump scares with super cats lunging at the player and their only warning they are under attack being the sound of shattering glass.



Though, I'll admit some of the short videos in this game are rather funny out of context.



After all, why is this cat spinning through the air? I know Puss in Boots does this as well, but that doesn't explain why the cats in this game spin through the air when performing a jump attack.

Conclusion

"K.Evil" is weird in that it probably would have been a lot better off if the developer had simply given up on including combat in this game. Especially an action combat system since RPG Maker 2003 really doesn't have the tools to implement such a system all that well in my experience. An experience made even worse in this game since it's not always clear when you can or cannot fight in this game. An issue that has led to me dying multiple times while trying to equip the nail gun since I figured my inability to attack was probably because the game had unequipped my nail gun to avoid any accidental discharges.