Someday You'll Return Review: A Test of Nerves & Patience

[Nergal]

 

 

Horror as a genre has thrived in the video game industry. Storytellers have a bounty of fascinating ways to frighten and terrify players in the uniquely interactive medium that only video games can deliver. The genre is rife with classics, from big landmark titles like Silent Hill and Resident Evil to minor indie titles like Five Nights at Freddy's and Doki Doki Literature Club, whose humble beginnings swiftly gave way to monumental popularity when their unique and engaging means of scaring players senseless were exposed to the mainstream. Someday You'll Return is a similarly humble title; it's not the first game from developers CBE Software, but the team is far from a big name in the industry.

Someday You'll Return is a first-person psychological horror game heavily inspired by the likes of Silent Hill and Resident Evil 7. It takes a pretty standard approach by putting you in the shoes of a man who is searching for his missing daughter. His search takes him to a sprawling forest with which he has a very deep past. In typical fashion, very little about the situation is given to the player at the outset; the true story must be uncovered through notes, flashbacks, and encounters with mysterious entities.

In spite of its somewhat stereotypical premise, the story is handled remarkably well; information is teased out at a satisfyingly steady pace, just enough to keep you guessing but not enough that you feel totally in the dark the whole time. You might even be able to anticipate certain twists, but the story never feels stale or predictable. And the payoff is masterful, concluding the story in a jaw-dropping moment that will stick in the player's mind for a long time.


The forest that serves as the game's setting is prevented marvelously; there is a fantastic contrast between the beauty of the woods and the terrible horrors that you encounter during your journey. One remarkable aspect of the forest is that it's modeled after a real area in the Czech Republic. The player can even find QR codes in-game that can be scanned to provide map data for some of the forest's more interesting landmarks, including a very real ancient castle.

The developers, stationed in the Czech Republic themselves, clearly had a lot of love for the area, and it shines through in the game's visual design. Unfortunately, the beauty of the landscape sometimes works against the game. When an important event happens in the woods, the player character could begin reacting to it before the player even sees what it is, as the game isn't always great at making sure focus is pulled in the right direction. Furthermore, as with any real forest, it's very easy to get lost. Someday You'll Return doesn't always effectively communicate exactly where the player has to go or how the player should get there. This means that it's frustratingly common for the tension and frightening atmosphere of the game to give way to frustration and desperation as the player wanders around in circles trying to find the path. The game tends to fare better in enclosed spaces, like caves, or the sinister abandoned war bunker that the player character keeps finding himself returning to. These environments are designed no less skillfully, and the claustrophobia of the bunker's tight passageways is very effective.


For all the beauty and terror that the game's visual design delivers, the gameplay isn't always as effective. Many times you will find your progress halted by tedious chores, like gathering herbs to brew a specific potion, or figuring out how to work a large sprawling furnace so that fire will pour through a pipe and burn away a spiderweb. The solutions to these obstacles aren't always clear, and it can take a lot of head scratching before you figure out what the game expects you to do, much less how you're supposed to do it. Many of these puzzles rely on items you gather during your journeys, and it can be very frustrating to spend hours going back and forth in a desperate attempt to find out how to make progress when all you were missing was something as innocuous as a key in an unremarkable drawer.

There are also extended sequences of grave peril. The most common of these are stealth segments, tasking the player character with evading frightful, zombie-like monsters. These work fine, but the AI does tend to get a bit predictable and eventually tedium sets in every time a stealth mission starts up. The only weapon you have to combat these horrors is a mystical totem that suspends them briefly in midair if you use it on them before they see it coming. Unfortunately the totem has a number of restrictions, and in the heat of the moment it can be difficult to use and not always worth the effort. The totem is used to much greater effect in environmental challenges; it can also levitate certain chunks of rock which can serve as gates to open or floating platforms to navigate. These challenges don't appear very often until rather late in the game but they're a much more enjoyable use of the mechanic, and they present some very interesting obstacles.


As a horror game Someday You'll Return falls short of the greats. It's not going to take the market by storm like Five Nights At Freddy's, or start a long-running legacy like Silent Hill. But it's still good for a lot of tense, harrowing moments, and a few sequences of pure terror, and the story it tells is absolutely one worth hearing. The game has plenty of pitfalls and you will likely encounter some boredom. But for everything about the game that falls flat, there's more than enough to admire, respect, and fear about Someday You'll Return.

Someday You'll Return is available for PC.