Lost in Vivo is a Silent Hill inspired horror FPS with a retro PS1/VHS inspired graphic style. The game is about someone who’s seeking to rescue their support dog from the mean demons in the sewers, and somewhere across the way has to confront their claustrophobia as well.
The game at its best is one of the scariest horror games I’ve ever played, and at its worst it’s a fairly averageLost in Vivo is a Silent Hill inspired horror FPS with a retro PS1/VHS inspired graphic style. The game is about someone who’s seeking to rescue their support dog from the mean demons in the sewers, and somewhere across the way has to confront their claustrophobia as well.
The game at its best is one of the scariest horror games I’ve ever played, and at its worst it’s a fairly average indie horror game. Much like the Silent Hill series which it takes so much inspiration from, Lost in Vivo struggles with combat. You will for the most part have more than enough ammo to deal with any enemies you encounter in the game, making ammo conservation a very minute issue. Enemies for the most part don’t respawn, and are fairly easy to deal with as well. The scariest part of the game is travelling to the next area and feeling great dread in anticipation of what the next area’s foe will be, unfortunately most of that fear disappears as soon as you find them and realize that a few shots of your pistol will put them in their place quiet easily. Fortunately for the game the actual enemy’s sound, character and gameplay designs are all very diverse and interesting.
Now despite the games easy difficulty, the game itself is among some of the scariest I’ve ever played. Barren, decrepit, claustrophobic and eerie environments plague the games world, and each is as daunting as the last. Strange and disturbing enemies seem all the more bizarre because of their low-poly models. And the sound design when it’s not suffocating you with silence is assaulting you with horrible noise and disturbing ambience. Every area is distinct from the last, and offers unique enemies as well, making for some memorable areas. Clever enemy AI and design made for some really surprising and unique moments, and it all came together to really get me scared a lot throughout the game.
The game tries to run with the theme of claustrophobia by often making you walk through extremely long and narrow corridors with strange, nonsensical layouts, and this does successfully add a lot of tension and disorientation to the experience. However, the game offers multiple endings and a new game + mode, and walking through these long hallways for a second or third time would probably lose a lot of the impact it had the first time. The game does offer an option to shuffle enemy locations, but enemies really aren’t a huge threat however. And there’s also lots of optional side levels in the forms of tapes and secret modes which make for some great Easter eggs and optional content. Either way, with how linear the game is for the most part, there really isn’t a whole lot to come back to. With the Silent Hill games you could change the puzzle and the combat difficulty to spice up your later playthroughs as much or as little as you wanted to – but with Lost in Vivo you just shuffle the spawns of the already easy enemies and the very far and few puzzles remain exactly the same. I personally see very little reason to come back to this game, especially considering how lackluster the story is in a lot of ways.
The story seems to follow a character who suffers from claustrophobia, who needs to rescue their dog from the sewers after being washed away during a storm. The game allows you to whistle, which will help you locate your dog, this mechanic is implemented two or three times throughout the whole game however, and I wonder why they even bothered. The story starts off simple enough with the focus on mental health, but later incorporates paranormal, demonic and even light sci-fi elements to the story. The areas are all very disconnected from each other (at times just randomly teleporting you to the next area for no apparent reason), and each have their own self-contained stories irrelevant to the main character. All of this seems very devoid of any themes of claustrophobia, or more specifically the characters struggle with claustrophobia, especially when most of the later scares in the game are because of monsters rather than actual claustrophobic environments. The claustrophobic element of the game seems to be very unrealized, and with all these random horror elements and themes thrown into the mix, it ends up feeling like a series of random little horror games thrown together like Spooky’s Jump Scare Mansion rather than a focused experience like Silent Hill.
The game has a few bugs here and there but not enough to really bother me. The lack of a V-sync option really bugs me though, and meant I had to play in windowed Overall, Lost in Vivo despite how heavily rooted it is in its own inspirations is a very unique and a very scary game. It offers simple mechanics in exchange for deeply unsettling atmospheres and fantastic pacing. 7.5/10, worth picking up on sale.… Expand
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