A convoluted compendium of horror clichés that superficially invokes mental illness.
Many of this game’s issues were easier to swallow on the DS.
All of them have earned their right to be here, either by standing on the shoulders of giants or wildly impaling creatures of the night.
Portions of the game may deliver high-octane thrills, but its paramount moments are frightening because they’re understated.
While it lasts, the game is a challenging blast, even if the story offers only the skin-deep and all-too-familiar choice of siding with a potentially mad scientist to defend and use the Anomaly for mankind.
Each chapter is completely free of tension and coherence, with no sense of time passing between sections (can be minutes, can be months) and a stunning amount of reuse to make areas more bloated.
At this stage, the alternately thrilling and unwieldy three-hour epic is the season’s closest thing to a wild card.
The puzzles and supplementary goals suffer from inspiration deficit, hurting for true incentive, a legitimate tie-in with Murphy’s tale.
Capcom, via system downsizing, has managed to recapture the dark magic that made past console entries so pictorially triumphant.
The game’s effective sound design and drippy character models, though compromised by the Kinect’s CPU-cycle overhead, do a good job of making you feel grossed-out and jumpy, while paying tribute to the campy delights of horror games past.
Yourcharacter’s phrasebank is so small that you’ll already be sick of his one-liners within the first hour.
The faceless dog-thing that cackles like a clown every time you shoot it will be in my nightmares for a long time to come.