Who’s at the door? Spiel
After I had played the demo version of Who’s at the door?, I wanted to see for myself how much more could the game offer for an indie horror game. The demo, the decision which I personally appreciate not to abuse Early Access on Steam, had shown different take on Exit 8-likes as a horror-centric game.
Unlike its predecessors, Who’s at the door? asks the players to find hallucinations, specifically, ones that do not disappear. The fundamental difference lies in the fact that hallucinations are given — they are always present in any given loop, or “day” as the game puts it. The core issue of the game also lies within; the anomalies quickly overload the player’s capacity. It was daunting as-is to describe the new system — where only the moving objects are considered anomalous — in The Cabin Factory, now the bar has gone up.
The plot of the game does not help to mitigate the issue at hand. If there are permanent hallucinations, the protagonist must take the pills by the door; if there are no hallucinations at all or disappearing kinds, the protagonist must answer the door and take the pills from the strangers. From the players’ perspective, we are still taking the random pills. Neither choices particularly sound more coherent, let alone natural. The game does try to turn it around with an overused cliché, I did not find it to be more convincing after the plot was revealed. If anything, it adds more questions as the in-game dialogues conflict with each other.
In order to introduce story elements, not lore, into the Exit 8-likes, the Who’s at the door? has either withdrawn from controlling randomness or flooded itself with too much contents. The common complaints I could find on Steam reviews were largely on the fact that consecutive days were all dangerous — they ran straight to the pill by the door without looking. And my experience is quite similar. The game would reuse plot-crucial anomalies if the player did not survive the encounter. As for the likelihood of hallucinations being permanent, the statistics from the main menu seem (relatively bigger collection of anomalies than other Exit 8-likes) to support the anecdotes from the community.
What’s more, the game plasters AI generated contents everywhere. The voice for characters have definitely changed for the better since the demo, — whether if the voice is also generated by AI, I do not know — but some of in-game cinematic should have been placed higher priority to be polished further. In-game newspaper articles that are crucial to the story are barely passable; I wonder why the developer bothered to put in a newspaper clipping, when it could be yet another note or letter.
Conclusions: Korean Exit 8-Likes with AI
It is hard to be critical of an indie game that is priced at $4.99. The demo did deliver promising atmosphere, its focus on psychological horror set in 90s South Korea, and the released copy does not disappoint on the theme itself. It’s the other elements, such as overused and unpolished AI-generated contents, that ends the game in sour note. The clichéd ending with rough cinematic does not support delivering how the system works to the players. Overall, it is an interesting attempt to use AI to fill in the blanks; only that there seem to be too many of them.