We Went Back (

2020

)

Silent Hills is, without question, the most influential game that never got made. Excitement for it reached a fevered pitch after the release of its Playable Trailer, a short demo that departed from the series tradition by being completely free of combat and entirely in first-person perspective. It also dialed up the surreal and disturbing imagery that Silent Hill was famous for back during the PlayStation 2 era to a hitherto unseen extreme. The game promised to marry Amnesia: The Dark Descent [2010] with Videodrome (1983) and revitalize the flagging survivor horror genre in the process. Then Konami canceled the game and released a Silent Hill-themed pachinko machine instead. I don't think Konami realized what a blight they were inflicting upon the gaming world by canceling Silent Hills, because it seems that every 2-bit indie developer and asset-flipping hack has taken it upon themselves to make their own version of it. At time of writing, the number of knocks offs is truly staggering, including titles such as Visage [2018], Layers of Fear [2016], The Convenience Store [2020], Dead Secret [2016], and The Survey [2016]; and those are just the games that I've personally played! Take a few minutes to look through the horror games on steam and you'll see the greasy fingerprints of the unreleased Silent Hills all over the endless pages of indie offerings.

Some of these games are pretty good (The Convenience Store [2020]), others are absolute dogshit (The Survey [2016]) and in my experience, there are a lot more on the dogshit side of the spectrum. Part of the problem is just how easy it is to make one of these games. Even a novice game designer can slap together a first-person horror game with no combat and a few jump scares and call it a day. It's made even easier when you're keeping all the action confined to a single level the size of an average suburban home. Yet making a horror game and making an effective horror game are two completely different things, especially when you're trying to keep your scares artful and psychological like they were in Silent Hills' playable trailer. This is where the vast majority of the Silent Hills clones fail and fail miserably. As it turns out, crafting a deeply unsettling game with no immediate threat of violence against the player character is a rather difficult task. There's a reason that most horror movies don't aspire to evoke any subtler fears than the terror of some psycho with a machete and a hockey mask, and indie game developers would be wise to take this to heart. The vast majority of them wind up being boring slogs punctuated with a couple of cheap scares. Most of these horror games fail to inspire dread and instead can only conjure up boredom in their audience.

The latest of these indie Silent Hills wannabes (at least for the ten seconds until another one crops up), We Went Back, solves this problem by being so short that not even the most ADD-raddled ten-year-old will be able to get bored before completing the game. Since this puts the playtime well under the 2-hour refund window, the developer, Dead Thread Games, has opted to get ahead of the customers and just make the game free. Free is probably the correct price for it as well, because this game is little more than a demo, and only the greediest game publishers try to get us to pay for those (ahem Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes [2014] ahem). Presumably, the guys at Dead Thread Games are using We Went Back to showcase their technical prowess and attract some attention from gamers and/or investors for a project with a bit more meat on its bones.

We Went Back seems to take place in an alternate universe version of the late 1960s/early 1970s where mankind has made considerably more progress exploring outer space than we managed in our own timeline. Rather than just a handful of manned missions to the moon and a couple orbiting space stations, human beings here have master cryogenic freezing and gotten to the point where whole spacious modules can reach distant worlds. That is not stated explicitly explained mind you, as precious little is explicitly explained in this game. Any details about the setting must be gathered from the stations' set dressing: The posters that advertise retro computers and technology and the swanky mid-century feel of the living quarters. Like the setting, the backstory of both your character and whatever mission he/she was sent on is left deliberately sketchy. Even up to the point where I cannot tell what celestial body it is that the space station has landed on. I would assume the moon because the game's title seems to be an answer to the old question “Why didn't we go back to the moon” but there is no real evidence for this. Indeed, all we know about our character is limited to their predicament: they have just awoken from cryostasis on an abandoned spaceship and they need to get the hell out of there because a hostile alien creature is prowling through the ship.

The game's sketchy plot also includes an element of time travel, which should always raise a few red flags. Obviously, time travel can be done well in fiction, but the number of works that do it well are vastly outnumbered by the works that do it poorly. This is only natural because the rules for time travel are so mind-boggling and bizarre that any story that incorporates them will require much more care and consideration than one that doesn't. We Went Back doesn't give a shit about whether its version of time travel makes sense, indeed it doesn't even bother with giving you an explanation for why your character is jumping back and forth through time. This is rather galling, as the game is set in the unknown reaches of outer space; bizarre time distortions could easily be explained just by mentioning anomalies in space-time or malevolent aliens. At least say we were sucked into a black hole or something. While there is no plot reasons for the time travel, it does serve a mechanical purpose. Lovely as the linear interior of the space station is, it would get pretty stale if it stayed the same throughout your entire playthrough. Time travel allows the station to change and decay each time you walk through it, so each lap of the space station looks a bit different from the last. The little differences can be scary in-and-of-themselves like the lab rat that disappears and then reappears as bloody chunks. There are also some points where the game just openly chucks realism out the window and descends into the surreal by trapping you in an endless loop where the same room is repeated again and again. It's an unsettling visual at first but honestly gets old pretty quickly as the game repeats this trick three more times. Just like time travel this bizarre occurrence has no textual reason but does make sense in the logic of gameplay. The rooms only repeat when you need to find a clue to advance, and by repeating the same room again and again it effectively narrows the area you have to search so you're not stuck wandering around the whole map for half an hour.

From the plot to the settings to the characters to the very premise, the game provides us with little explanation for anything that happens. Where did the alien come from? What does the alien want? What is the player character's mission? Why is reality warping? No answers for any of these questions will be forthcoming. Leaving so many details deliberately obscure could, in a better game, cultivate an atmosphere of mystery and tension. But here it seems like the developers couldn't be bothered to flush out the details of a compelling sci-fi world, so they just left everything blank instead. Indeed, even the game's Steam description says with a shrug “Why? Be honest – do we ever know why?” When dealing with ghosts, demons, and other aspects of the occult, too much information about them can be an impediment to cultivating an atmosphere of fear. These things are, after all, impossible and therefore any scrutiny of them will just result in frustrated disappointment. With sci-fi horror though, much of the terror is derived from the plausibility of the scenario, so having everything left deliberately obscure only gets in the way of things. Everything does not have to be laid out from the start, many great works of sci-fi horror begin shrouded in mystery and are only illuminated by a final mind-bending twist (A Maze of Death and To Walk the Night spring to mind). However, there is no startling twist at the end of We Went Back to justify or explain anything here. There's not even a hint about what might be going on. It just feels like the story and setting were rushed out in a hurry, with little care or consideration. If you want an example of how this can be done in a game and done effectively you have to look no further than SOMA [2015], which catapults the player in a bizarre and terrifying sci-fi world and then gradually answers their questions about both the world and how they got there.

In terms of structure, the game has the most in common with those old internet browser games where you would be tasked with escaping from a room (Escape the Red Room and its sequels most notably). There is one central puzzle in the game, a locked door leading to the outside that requires a password, and you spend the whole time collecting clues that will enable you to deduce said password. Here the clues come in the form of a series of photographs your character takes of objects around the ship that correspond to simplified drawings of the phases of the moon. This is fine in theory but struggles a bit in practice because it seldom feels like you are doing anything yourself to solve the puzzle. There are no false clues to sort through, no dead ends to break up your investigation, or even hints at items and areas you cannot yet access. Indeed, the clues are all meaningless until you find a cipher near the end that turns a baffling puzzle into a simple matter of rearranging a few letters into a word. It would have been far better if the player had to deduce the cipher for themselves, then solving the puzzle would have felt like an accomplishment rather than a scripted story point. The puzzle, like much of the rest of the game, also suffers from feeling incredibly arbitrary. Why is the passcode to the door encrypted using random objects from around the ship that happens to look like the phases of the moon? Was the security chief just a weirdo who wanted an incredibly inefficient backdoor into his system? Moreover, the whole ending of the game begs the question of where did the cipher come from? Having been over every inch of the ship in both the past and future I know it wasn't anywhere onboard. If I had that earlier I wouldn't even need half the clues. This is something that could have been resolved by the game's use of time travel, but unfortunately, this potential is wasted.

To be fair, this game is a cut above the vast majority of offerings in the genre of indie Silent Hills wannabes. The graphics are superb, though it does seem to be poorly optimized (such a tiny game shouldn't make my PC purr like this, especially when I'm capping it at 60 FPS). All the art assets look like they are original compositions, and better yet a degree of care has gone into designing the environment. The only oversight I could find after a sweep of the station was a few posters in the living room where tiny placeholder text was being used (amusingly it looked like code lifted right from the game's source files). Not everything looks great though, and nothing looks worse than the rat in the station's science lab. This poor critter wouldn't look out of place in a PlayStation 2 game. The lighting is downright exquisite, evoking both the setting and the technology level of old-school sci-fi films like Alien (1979). The retro terminal displays as well help to create the illusion that we're really onboard an alternate history mid-century spaceship.

The one area where the art design slacks is, unfortunately, the alien monster. It's not that the creature is unthreatening, it is a rather intimidating beast, especially when jumping out at you from behind a door frame. The problem is that the monster just feels out of place in the setting. The creature is far too identifiable human and a bit too demonic-looking to make sense in a sci-fi setting. Reality is warping around us to the point where the progression of time is no longer something we can take as a given. If there is a being behind this anomaly then it needs to be something more bizarre than a bipedal creature that looks like it might populate the first dungeon in a fantasy RPG. If ever there was a game that would have benefited from replacing its primary enemy with a Shoggoth or a Chaos Spawn then this is it right here.