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DreadOut Remastered Collection (Nintendo Switch) Review

Haunted Hallways

A year after DreadOut 2 brought its spooky shenanigans to the Nintendo Switch, and ten years after the original DreadOut launched, developers Digital Happiness have given their ghostly survival horror a new lease on un-life with the DreadOut Remastered Collection.

If you’re unfamiliar with the series, DreadOut is a survival-horror experience heavily inspired by Tecmo’s classic Fatal Frame franchise (or Project Zero in some regions). Players are thrown into the shoes of high schooler Linda, who has the ability to see spirits and to banish them with the aid of her trusty smartphone or a camera. Developed and set within Indonesian, Linda will have to explore ghost-infested location while trying to save herself and her friends from nightmarish entities.

In the DreadOut Remastered Collection – for the first time on Nintendo Switch and PS4/5 – is the original cult-favourite DreadOut and DreadOut: Keepers of The Dark, a standalone title that could be considered an expansion to the first. It’s a little disappointing they didn’t include DreadOut 2 but newcomers, but the two games on offer provide a pretty good journey through DreadOut’s Indonesian mythology-inspired world.

The first game follows Linda, some fellow high schoolers, and a teacher that take a very wrong turn that leads them to an abandoned and decrepit part of town hiding dark secrets. When her friends disappear while exploring the local high school, Linda is thrust into a fight for survival against the monstrous apparitions haunting the town.

In Keepers of The Dark, Linda is pulled into the Mirror Realm by the Mysterious Red Woman from the first game, and tasked with surviving a gauntlet of spooks across eight haunted worlds. For all intents, this is basically a boss rush game, just without much rushing.

Both games contain the same play mechanics of shoving you into pitch black, abandoned locations with just your phone or a camera to help you survive. As in Fatal Frame, your phone or camera can damage ghosts when they’re in attack range, highlighted by the screen glitching out. The smartphone also functions as your only light source in these scenarios, so most of your time is spent using it to light up your surroundings and explore in third-person, before jumping into first-person view for a fight. Thankfully, you have some assists while wondering in the gloom. A blue aura at the edge of the screen highlights items or puzzles, while a red aura indicates a ghost needing some busting.

Initially, there’s an intense atmosphere of dread that the games conjures in each of the dark locales, with wonderfully designed spirits and demons drifting around you and a lack of handholding. Unfortunately, it’s let down by a reliance on repetitive scares, that aforementioned lack of handholding, and a fair amount of jankiness that I thought might have been addressed in these remasters.

That atmosphere disappears as soon as you’re left running around in circles, unsure of what to do because the game hasn’t make it clear, or because a key item has not spawned in. There’s also the issue of how little lights the phone provides, which can leave you in darkness when walking through doors or trying to explore rooms because the beam follows the direction of Linda’s head. This often leaves you with light shining in a direction the camera isn’t pointed at – a real issue when trying to keep track of what’s coming at you.

There’s a degree of jank in the way Linda moves and her animations when picking up objects, but the most annoying issues appear in combat. Linda is far too slow compared to the ghosts coming at you, and even slower still when looking down the camera. When you combine how slow it is to raise and lower the camera, with Linda’s godawful speed, it’s not long before you’re stuck in a loop of being knocked down, getting up, and getting knocked down again repeatedly until you’re dead.

Without a dodge function, this is a recipe for pure frustration, and it doesn’t help either that the camera swings wildly whenever you’re hit or knocked down, so much sp that you don’t have a clear view of where the threat is. As an added pain, the remastered collection also seems to add a bug that prevents the phone and cameras flash function from working at times.

On the plus side – or perhaps not, depending on your view – dying pops you into a limbo of sorts and all you have to do is hoof it into the light to return to where you expired. It ensures boss fights are bearable but can be annoying since you will respawn right where you died. If a boss is on top of you, well, then you’re probably going to die again. But, if you can make it past an incoming attack, the damage you inflict remains between respawns, turning it into an endurance match.

While DreadOut 2 managed to add some useful additions to the gameplay loop, such as physical attacks, a much-needed dodge wasn’t one of them. As such, all these issues from the first game made their way into the second. That said, both the the remasters and the sequel remain fun to play, primarily as they dive into Indonesian mythology and urban legends that most of us likely know nothing about.

As for the remastering effort, I’d say the DreadOut Remastered Collection is, visually, on par with the second game in the series on Nintendo hardware. It’s a little hard to make direct comparisons as is an Unreal Engine title running on the Switch, and the usual cutbacks to get those games running on the handheld are in evidence here.

For the most part, the environments look good, and the character models are both well modelled and animated – at least if it’s just Linda and a few spooks floating around. But once you swop to more complicated scenes, especially during daylight with other characters around, the dynamic resolution kicks in hard. The envirionment, character models, and art assets become extremely, noticeably, blurry. On the plus side, performance is very solid and I can’t say I noticed any major frame rate variations. That said, if visual fidelity is a must for you, you’re better off checking out the PS4 or PS5 versions.

In contrast, the audio is a standout element, with some solid English vocal performances and wonderful environmental audio and sound effects. These have to be top notch to create the atmosphere the developers are going for, and all the various squeaks and groans and wails do a lot of heavy lifting when exploring in the dark.

Wrapping up, despite the series’ ongoing gameplay jank, I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t enjoy my time with the DreadOut Remastered Collection. It may not be set to take the photographic horror crown from Fatal Frame any time soon, but it’s a respectable alternative and fun enough dive into more traditional haunted horror fare, in a less common setting.

DreadOut Remastered Collection was reviewed on Nintendo Switch using a code provided to gameblur by the publisher. It is also available on PS4/PS5.

DreadOut Remastered Collection (Nintendo Switch) Review

DreadOut Remastered Collection (Nintendo Switch) Review
7 10 0 1
7/10
Total Score

The Good

  • Interesting mythology and urban legends
  • Great environmental sound effects
  • Performance is stable on the Switch

The Bad

  • Still plenty of jank
  • Flash functions don’t seem to work
  • Lower resolution textures and assets on the Switch
Total
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