Returning To The Realms Of The Haunting
It’s your own fault for sitting in the scary chair in the middle of an evil sorcerer’s mausoleum. Seriously, suck it up. No sympathy.
The name Realms of the Haunting summons up exactly two responses: a sigh of deep-seated nostalgia for a truly overlooked classic, or a more general look of confusion because you’ve never heard of it. Not surprising. It hit the shelves back in 1996, putting it up against Tomb Raider, with a graphics engine at least three years out of date, a truly hideous box that looked like a mad collage of poor quality images, no star power for its FMV sequences, and a demo that cut out almost instantly. It reviewed pretty well – surprisingly well, actually – but didn’t exactly fly off the shelves.
Replaying it now, it’s impressive how much of its atmosphere it’s managed to hold onto, even though it’s not likely to have you jumping out of your skin on a regular basis any more. More importantly though, it did some really interesting stuff that didn’t deserve to be forgotten.
Let’s do something about that, shall we?
It was a dark and stormy night
The house may be a wreck, but at least the lightswitches still work…
ROTH starts out as a fairly typical haunted house story. You play Adam Randall, who has been plagued with nightmares since the death of his father and the arrival of a box of broken seals. In search of answers, he tracks down the house, only to have the doors slam and lock shut as soon as he gets inside. Picking up a gun and a lantern conveniently placed on a nearby table, he begins exploring. Within a few minutes, he meets the ghost of his father, trapped and tortured in the study by dark spectres. Then the monsters start coming for him…
Let’s watch the intro to get a feel for what we’re dealing with…
What makes ROTH particularly interesting is that despite this incredibly clichéd opening, it’s one of the most surprising, constantly evolving games you’re ever likely to find. The main problem with horror games is always maintaining the sense of fear and dread. Kill a monster a few times and it stops being scary, unless it’s a spider or a facehugger of course. Spend hours and hours in an environment and while it can still be atmospheric, it’s probably not going to stay scary. Even the Silent Hill games, arguably the most successful, have a tendency to drag on.
ROTH gets past this by always keeping you slightly off-balance, sometimes in a good way, sometimes not so much, but always in an interesting way. The opening areas are a great example, showing off the generally superb attention to detail that the poor technology level doesn’t prepare you for at all. Almost all the generic haunted house stuff you expect is front-loaded, where it still has the potential to creep you out. A typewriter rattles out a spooky message. A record player in the study fills the room with the sound of a crying child. Cliched or not, much of it is still strangely effective now, and remains so, no matter how funny most of the monsters now look on screen. Absolute top marks have to go to the sound team, on everything from monsters jumping out of the ground, to the satisfying ‘kachunk’ of picking up an ammo box in the latest stygian abyss.
Evil is everywhere. Dumb as rocks, but everywhere…
After the study, ROTH becomes a mix of adventure, shooter, and RPG, although thankfully one without stats. A secret door in the bookcase – where else? – lets you into the basement, which turns out to be an insanely convoluted mausoleum filled to bursting point with dark magics and hidden relics. Your pistol is supplemented by a shotgun, and you’ll need it. Demonic Urges scream out of the ground without warning, as often as not behind you, and while their AI is comically awful (they often can’t go through doors and you can run past most of them), they can rip through your health bar like nobody’s business. There are health potions and boxes of ammo scattered around, but not a lot of either if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing and where you need to go.
The Mausoleum continues the general weird-horror-shit vibe from the first part, but now it’s a bit more specific. A mysterious voice booms that your presence violates ‘the Pact’, before setting robotic monsters on you. A terrifying chair of bones and scorched flesh burns bizarre cross-shaped brands into Adam’s palms, which he needs in order to pick up a holy relic called the Shrive that everyone seems to want. Most importantly, meetings with a noble knight and the evil owner of the house set the scale of the conflict. This isn’t going to be a simple haunted house story.
No. This is Armageddon, baby.
Heroes and villains
“Trust me, I’m a professional sidekick.”
As is often the case, the big sweeping plot isn’t the most interesting bit. It’s fine, as long as you ignore the typical horror-game howler that the villain who keeps trying to murder you with monsters should be the one trying to keep you alive at all costs, what with needing you to fall for his plan to destroy the world and everything. However, the characters are a different story.
You meet the most important as you leave the temple, Shrive in demon-branded hand. Again, the game throws a curveball as you step back into the haunted house’s study and find a woman waiting for you. Her name is Rebecca Trevisard, a psychic lecturer, and after a bit of back and forth banter, the two agree to team up to explore the house’s many mysteries. There’s no shortage of them, from the villain’s diaries, to love letters written by his mistress, random weirdness tucked away in the corner, and a grab-bag of mythological references and original fiction tied to it all.
Rebecca is a great addition, and a perfect example of something that later games like Clive Barker’s Undying could really have used. You don’t see her outside of the FMV sequences, not even if you look in a mirror, but she remains a constant presence. She and Adam banter constantly, sharing ideas, opinions, suggestions and the occasional snarky comment about everything from the paintings on the wall to the sulphurous smells downstairs. This really helps with the atmosphere, turning what was previously a case of mere survival into a fully fledged investigation. Simply not being alone helps to recast the increasing fantasy elements of the story into a much more human storyline. And of course, it’s not a huge surprise that she’s not exactly who she appears to be, even if the big reveal is actually pretty nicely done, with plenty of subtle foreshadowing in terms of specific actions – like knowing who to avoid and how to get past some particularly nasty traps she’s supposedly only just seen – and the papers scattered around the house.
“Hey, remember that time we met the Antichrist?” “Yeah, that’s totally the kind of thing I’m going to forget.”
In general, the character development is one of the most impressive elements of the game, with the characters getting used to their surroundings at about the same speed as the player. Near the start, every monster makes Adam go “My god!”, but he stops that as they cease to be a threat. Likewise, his relationship with Rebecca moves from purely professional to a genuine sense of friendship. As well as items in the gameworld, you can shoot the breeze about characters, themes, worlds, or anything else you’ve heard about, courtesy of the inventory screen, with new options opening up and descriptions changing the further you get and more secrets you uncover. Early on, everything is treated as impossible, horrific and amazing. By the end, the characters are mouthing back at the most powerful supernatural entities, and completely comfortable travelling between worlds to fight armies of demons. You really feel like you’re walking down the critical path with them, never getting it too easy, but on an increasingly even footing.
Angels and demons
“By the power of my scary glasses, I command thee…”
Many of the other recurring characters have some fantastic quirks. The big villain, a sorcerer called Florentine, is a camp imbecile who clearly isn’t allowed near children, but his former servant turned nemesis Belial is utterly superb. You meet him underground as he makes his first attempt to get the Shrive. He appears dressed as a doctor, pulling on dusty patchwork gloves made from bits of partially branded human skin (Remember? Only someone with the brands can touch it, and Belial’s not stupid enough to risk ruining his hands personally. Another nice bit of plot, instead of just a random creepy aside like the spooky noises back at the start…)
Needless to say, Adam and Rebecca immediately ask him who he is. The response? One of the best lines ever spoken in an FMV game, even including Sewer Shark. Say it with me…
“I am… Belial. As to what I want… well, that can wait a little longer, while we have some fun. Humans do still bleed, don’t they? Splendid.”
Admittedly, there’s one extra detail that only fellow British folks around my age are likely to appreciate. Belial was played by David Learner, better known at the time as the actor who played Pickle the comedy helper elf in ITV’s Knightmare. Love him or hate him there, he’s really good in this, even if Belial doesn’t work very well outside the FMV bits. Due to the limitations of the game engine, your final battle consists of him standing stock still in the middle of a rocky field, while you effortlessly walk round in a circle, trading magical zaps until he falls down dead. He also makes the truly moronic decision to leave the items you need to foil his plan just lying around, right next to the portal to the final area, which doesn’t do a lot for his villain-cred.
Until that point though, he’s wonderfully sinister..
Most of the lesser characters aren’t as much fun, but even then, there are some very enjoyable twists. An early one, the Keeper of Time known as Gnarl comes across as a bored civil servant who really can’t be bothered any more. He challenges Adam to a test, Adam reluctantly agrees, and with that, the Gnarl announces: “Done. I tire of trivialities…” and just hands the key item over.
A second, encountered much later on in an alternate universe, is Raziel, the universe’s jailer. He challenges you to sneak through his castle without making a noise, making it quite clear that if you screw up, he’ll lock you away until Judgement Day (Rebecca points out that at least there probably won’t be that long to wait). In practice, it turns out that despite being bound to this task by the rules of the universe, he’s willing to cut you a little slack, just this once, because the situation really is that serious. It’s little touches like that that give Realms much of its texture and make otherwise frankly forgettable characters stick in the mind long after the credits roll.
(Although most of the good guys who aren’t Adam and Rebecca really are a bunch of dullards throughout. It’s especially irritating when they pull that ‘Oh, the laws of the universe say I’m not allowed to be helpful, even when it’s so you can free me’ stuff, even as the baddies dance a flamenco across the rules in the name of shafting everyone and anyone in sight. The result is that when you get to a bit where someone can explain what’s happening, it’s exposition piled on top of infodump. On the plus side, at least Adam’s pretty good about asking the right questions.)
End of the world
There’s a lot of lava for a game set in Cornwall…
ROTH’s main weakness as a narrative is that the fantasy elements aren’t anything like as interesting as the horror ones, and the further you get, the further they take over. Stripped of the realism of the house, but in an engine not capable of making them particularly impressive, they get dull fast. The Realms of the title refer to the four worlds of the universe, including Raquia, which is basically just a garden maze, the divine realm of Arqua, which mostly uses the same graphics set for an incredibly tedious puzzle about making a bong for a water elemental in exchange for St. Michael’s sword (no comment), and Sheol, the abode of Hell, which is…
Okay, on that one, mission accomplished. The first of its maps is a hideous, convoluted maze where you have to retrieve 16 brains to put into a machine for no apparent reason. The second is simply boring, consisting of nothing more than smashing a few mirrors. As for the third… years later, I still have no words. It’s like falling into the designers’ wacky test map, or the abandoned Hell Zone from The Crystal Maze. Seriously, just watch it on YouTube, it’s incredible.
(Interesting ROTH factette. Whether by design or accident, you don’t actually have to do all the puzzles – there’s a trick that lets you skip about half of them. Even so, it’s a great example of a level that should have been burned out of the final design with an arc welder.)
When the game sticks to our universe, Heled, things are much better. The house is incredibly creepy, with some great setpieces – dead rats crunching underfoot in corridors never stops being as satisfying as it is disgusting – and the designers squeeze some great things into the appalling 3D engine. Everything is presented as one continuous world, no pauses for loading, and while there are a couple of minor areas where the effect breaks down, for the most part it’s absolutely seamless.
The areas are superbly detailed for a Doom level engine, and come complete with a terrific sense of history. Rooms have long passages of angry ranting burned into the walls, abandoned sleeping quarters still have all the necessary paraphernalia lying around after years of neglect, and every time you return to the house from one of the other worlds, there’s terrific tension as you wait to see what it has to throw at you this time. The see-saw effect as you bounce between horror and fantasy keeps both feeling fresh, right up to the end. ROTH is a game that can have you screaming in annoyance at yet another bloody maze, or as another cheap enemy teleports in, but there’s always good stuff to be found. And when the end comes, it’s very satisfying indeed.
Forgotten realms
Realms isn’t miles away from Bioshock in being a shooter with a brain. Of course, they’re still completely different types of game.
Realms of the Haunting is a game I have a real soft spot for, and despite trying a few other games – Clive Barker’s Undying is the obvious spiritual sequel – there really hasn’t been anything that’s lived up to it. Replaying it, it’s amazing how well it’s held onto its charm and atmosphere. But that’s having picked it up when it first came out. Try it now, and you’ll find it phenomenally clunky.
Look beyond that to some of the unique elements however, and there’s still a lot to admire. Realms didn’t have a lot of technology on its side, but it clearly had a lot of passion in its design, and the guts to break the mould even as it was busy pouring. That’s worth remembering, even if the shooter bits make it tough to recommend tracking it down for yourself. As an example of a horror game with a human touch though, you won’t find many more interesting.
Elsewhere: Just found another complete Realms of the Haunting Lets Play over on YouTube. More intricate than the one above, and he definitely knows it pretty well.