Clive Barker's Undying for PC - Review

June 19, 2001

originally written for GamesDomain.com

The gaming industry is said to be cyclical.  Game genres flourish, then flop, then come back retro-cool.  However, the first-person shooter (FPS) has earned a reputation as a mainstay among fans.  The majority of FPS games consist of kill the bad guys, find the key, open the door, load new level, repeat.  Clive Barker’s Undying takes this tried-and-true formula and adds a compelling story, exceptional visuals, brooding music, and some good scares.

The story takes place in 1920s Ireland.  Playing as Patrick Galloway, an Irish combination of Jack Colton and Fox Mulder, you are invited to investigate strange happenings at the house of your old friend Jeremiah Covenant.  Jeremiah is an old war buddy, whose now dead siblings are making every attempt to shuffle him loose the mortal coil.  As a child, Jeremiah played a prank on his four siblings.  He took them out to the Standing Stones; a Stonehenge-esque ring of five stones engraved with runic symbols near their house, and proceeded to read from an ancient text discovered by their father.  Doing so, he unknowingly invoked the curse of the Undying King and doomed his family to an eternity of supernatural misfortune (Oops!).  The Covenant siblings hope to lift the curse by killing Jeremiah.  He has called on Patrick to make sure that does not happen.

Being a FPS, Undying has the staple weapons; handgun, shotgun, and a version of the sniper rifle disguised as a spear gun.  However, it also features some weapons that are all its own.  Weapons like the Scythe of the Celt, an extremely powerful close-combat weapon, the Tibetan War Cannon, a golden dragon’s head that blasts enemies with a sphere of freezing air that slows them down, and the Phoenix, a low-power version of Unreal Tournament’s Redeemer.  Unlike other FPS games, Undying does not have a BFG.  There is no cataclysmic, apocalyptic, instrument of destruction that will devastate anyone and everyone in sight.  So when you stumble into that room full of enemies, they all have to be dealt with one by one.  Some of the weapons have alternate ammo types to add some punch.  You can load up the revolver with silver bullets, or the shotgun with phosphorescent shells.  The downside is that they extend an already long reload time.  Lucky for Patrick, guns are not his only weapons.

Undying features a welcome ambidextrous attack style.  The controls for this are simple enough; left mouse button for guns and right mouse button for spells.  While you are emptying your revolver into a swarm of Howlers with your left hand, you can be casting spells at them with your right hand.  At the onset of the game, Patrick only has the Gel’ziabar Stone and his revolver.  Throughout the course of the game, he will find scrolls that will teach spells and amplifier stones to upgrade the spells.  Patrick can use the Gel’ziabar stone in his left hand to temporarily upgrade his spell casting an additional level as well. There are eight spells total in the arsenal, and each one will become necessary.  Spells like Ectoplasm, Lightning, and Skull Storm are offensive spells that will aid in dispatching the supernatural denizens of the Covenant household.  The defensive spells like Shield and Invoke (or Raise Dead) will help Patrick keep the fiends at bay.  There is also Dispel Magic allowing Patrick to tear down magical barriers barring his path, and Flight, which will give him limited flying capabilities in certain areas of the game.  One of the most interesting spells is Scrye.  When Scrye is cast, Patrick can see or hear events that took place in the past in his immediate surroundings.  These events help to unravel the mystery and allow for some generally spooky moments.  There is always an ethereal “looookkkk” or “seeeeee” heard to cue the player that they should cast Scrye.  Or, if Patrick is holding the Gel’ziabar Stone, it will glow when Scrye should be cast.

Since this is Clive Barker’s Undying, it must possess a certain horrific quality to bear Barker’s name with pride.  Those familiar with Barker’s writings, movies, and art will immediately recognize the enemies as having that unique combination of unimaginable pain and fascinating beauty.  The most prolific enemies are the packs of Howlers, short bipedal animals with tearing claws and razor sharp teeth.  The Howlers can be seen in almost every environment throughout the game, although they do have an affinity for Jeremiah’s sister, Lizbeth.  Other residents of the Undying world are the skeletal Dri’nen, the nomadic humans known as the Trsanti, and the shambling Scarrow.  The AI is not as revolutionary as Half-Life’s, but the enemies will take cover, run for help, hunt in groups, and follow Patrick everywhere they can.  It’s lucky that the enemies are not uber-smart, because at times, the sheer number of monsters attacking you can be overwhelming.  The creatures that inhabit Undying all share the Barker touch, but are diverse enough to not feel like a different skin on the same model.  Also, they are all appropriate, meaning they fit in their environment.  Nothing feels out of place.

Each environment in the game coincides with a quest involving a member of Jeremiah’s family or the elusive Keisinger, who is an old enemy of Patrick’s conveniently embroiled in the Covenant curse.  While much of the time is spent in the Covenant manor, Patrick will also have to explore an abandoned monastery, a pirate’s cove, and alternate dimensions like Oneiros and Eternal Autumn.  Each quest ultimately ends in a ferocious battle with one of Jeremiah’s kin.  These ‘boss’ characters all seem invincible at first, but any self-respecting gamer knows that all bosses have an Achilles heel.  Once the weakness in the boss is found, they are easily dispatched.  Undying does an excellent job of building to that final battle with each boss, giving you hints that it is approaching, and then finally unleashing the undead Covenant on you.  The AI routines for the boss characters are probably the weakest in the game.  Each boss will typically have two or three attacks and cycle them.  Despite that fact, I found the boss battles to be the most enjoyable part of the game.

Undying’s biggest draw is its graphics.  It uses a highly modified version of the Unreal Tournament engine, and the attention to the graphics really shines.  All of the environments are rendered in beautiful 32-bit color, but the inside of the Covenant estate truly has to be seen to be believed.  The textures and the lighting all help to establish the game’s gothic horror theme early on.  The Covenant manor features blowing drapes, flickering lights, and all the creepiness of the best haunted houses.  The outdoor environments can get a little “blocky”, but when you are outdoors, you truly feel outdoors.  The draw distance and scope of the outdoor environments is quite refreshing after trudging through the claustrophobic corridors of the Covenant manor.  If I had a complaint about the graphics, it would be with the fog.  There were a couple of levels that could have benefited from some Quake III-quality volumetric fog, but instead you get some white layers with dithering.  Other than that minor quip, the graphics are top notch.  The game exhibited a fairly constant frame rate running on a PIII 733 with a GeForce 2 GTS, and there were very few clipping problems.

Undying features a very interesting story; unfortunately it is all told in the manual and journals that Patrick will find along the way.  There are a few game-engine cut scenes that push it along, and the Scrye events flesh some of it out, but by the end of the game, I still had lots of questions unanswered.  A bigger problem for the game is the all-too-frequent level loads.  Undying loads fairly small sections of the environments, and it is not uncommon to get 3 or 4 load screens in less than 30 seconds of play moving through the house.  Nothing takes you out of a game like a 10-second load screen, especially when the game preys on you with horror and tension the way Undying does.  The game has its moments of white-knuckle tension using sound and mood to scare the player, but just when you think something terrifying is about to happen, it does…in the form of another load screen.

Another unfortunate staple for FPS games is evident in Undying, but much less frequent than I expected.  Of course I am talking about the abomination that is jumping puzzles.  Does anyone enjoy these things, or are they just a hold over from the old console days?  Some of the jumping puzzles in Undying are delightfully deceiving, and feature The Last Crusade-style leaps of faith.  I suppose the beings who create alternate dimensions really enjoy watching people fall to their deaths.  However, it could have been worse.  Until game developers come up with a new problem for the player to solve, we will have to suffer through jumping puzzles in FPS games.  Thankfully, Undying has a ‘save anywhere’ policy, so a brief quicksave will make that leap to your death a little easier.

FPS fragsters might complain about Undying’s lack of multiplayer, but come on, how many more FPS deathmatch games do we need?  This certainly does not warrant multiplayer.  I would rather just enjoy an excellent single-player game than have it suffer so a bad multiplayer option could be tacked on late in development.  Clive Barker’s Undying contains a very satisfying, fairly long single-player experience, which is a rarity in the FPS world.  I look for Undying to ‘live’ on and possibly spawn a sequel or two.