Boring 'horror' that has both terrible combat and lacks actual horror.

I wanted to like this. I really did. There were some cool ideas and an interesting aesthetic that had so much potential.

However, the mechanics simply aren't great and, at times, actively work against each other. Any sense of horror was quickly replaced by frustration.

Things contributing to my negative score:
- The combat is awful. Actually terrible.
- The game encourages you to sneak, but it's painfully slow and you'll probably be spotted anyway.
- Constantly respawning enemies, which is super annoying.
- The whole "Ink Demon is Coming - Hide!" thing quickly becomes old and tedious.
- That random jump scare ghost girl gets spammed to a ridiculous degree. At one point, she attacked me four times in about eight seconds. I hate her.
- It's sometimes very confusing about where you're supposed to go or what you're supposed to do.

Ultimately, I've given up trying to sneak and now just rush around trying to finish the game for completeness sake. I'll engage in clunky combat when necessary and have ceased to even care about dying, instead viewing it as a mild inconvenience.

So in conclusion, the two big takeaways I have from this game are frustration and apathy.

Is BATDR a good game? Yes.
Is it a good HORROR game? No.

When I originally played Bendy and the Ink Machine, I saw a lot of talent. The gameplay was my biggest issue, with combat being simple enough that you could simply walk backwards and hit every enemy to death. However it was my opinion that they nailed the tone, atmosphere and aesthetic they wanted, and that kind of writing sucked me in completely. It was my opinion that JDS had done a great job realising their vision, but with some really clear areas for improvement that I believed they were absolutely capable of doing.

Now, i'm several years older, and a new game is out.

Bendy and the Dark Revival represents a large improvement over the previous game. Once again, the tone, the atmosphere, the sound design, the music, and the art are all a masterclass. The combination of different shades of literally two colours blends together to create a surreal, yet believable environment that once again completely sucked me in. Sure, it borrows even heavier from bioshock than the last game, but those elements were in bioshock because they worked, so that's not a criticism.

As for gameplay.....i'm not disappointed. This is an indie game, so there' some expected jank, but rarely was I actually pulled out of the game by an issue. I personally had some weird problems with vsync causing some strange visual glitches and somehow messing with my mouse sensisitivity, but it was nothing I wasn't able to ignore.

The sound design was delightfully icky and cool in places. I was wasting more batteries than i needed to because i simply enjoyed the sound and animation of the battery insertion into the chargers. I can't quite explain it. The game just sounds brilliant. I hope the sound team got paid well for what they achieved here.

The game has improved very much on level layout, in the first game I was able to bypass most of the threats early on, and that problem has been totally solved here, so the developers have clearly improved greatly in this respect.

I am sadly disappointed by the combat, though the developers made the game a lot more interesting by essentially changing it into a stealth game, there are some unavoidable combat sections where the awkwardness of the combat really shows its face. it's hard to judge the actual range of your wrench hits, but ultimately the game wants you to avoid combat, which is a sentiment i agreed with in my original review. Good horror combat wants it to be slightly awkward in order to deter the player from engaging in it, making them feel threatened.

So why do i think Bendy and the Dark Revival is a bad HORROR game, even if I do believe it is a good game?

Because, honestly, as with the last game, JDS has failed to remove my largest gripe of their previous game, which was refusing to allow their already good setting to speak for itself. Both The Ink Machine and The Dark Revival rely heavily on jumpscares for the "scare" factor, and one enemy type even outright punishes the player for exploring the game by adding an enemy that chases you for the entire game and exists only to jumpscare you at random moments. This enemy only appears if you open a specific box, you'll know it when you see it, and the thing you release by doing this will just follow you for the rest of the game. You can't remove it. This is arbitrary horror. I am not afraid, I am annoyed. Both games already have a fantastic setup for a horror game, that the ink itself is a living, thinking eldritch creature, that has trapped untold mortals in a hellish recreation of a failing animation studio in which everyone there has completely lost their minds or mutated into a horrific parody of the cartoons they likely used to draw. That on itself does not require the game to scare me further. Show me the terrible things that happen in your universe, but don't provide arbitrary, and frankly annoying jumpscares for the entire game, they really detract from the experience.

The writing is, in spite of this, a significant improvement over the previous game.

My only real other gripe is that some of the levels and mechanics were a little gimmicky. In the final two chapters the game introduces not one, but TWO fast travel systems (A subway system and a teleportation mechanic) One of these would have been fine, but also neither of them allow you to pick where you are going. So they're redundant and i only used them once. Additionally, in the final level, avoiding spoilers, it felt janky that i could not walk and attack at the same time.

The combat could actually serve well to be a little more punishing if you get caught (perhaps this happens on the highest difficulty, i played on Normal), as of the time of writing, you can avoid almost all combat by hiding, even mid-fight, allowing some really funny exploitation of the AI. It should be that if an enemy sees you enter a hiding place, they can pull you out of it.

Joey Drew has shown me that they really do have solid talent behind them. I will be closely watching their output in times to come, because in spite of my gripes, I really do love the work they've done here. I hope they continue to release better and better stuff, and really keep in mind what I said about horror, because the writing is really solid if you really let it just be!