Review for Vile Matter
Imagine walking into real-world building filled with escape rooms and going through all the themed rooms they have on offer, back to back, which can easily be done because each room contains only one (rather basic) puzzle. You may well enjoy each room well enough on its own merits, limited though they may be in terms of challenge, but there would be nothing (or at least, very little) linking them all together. Playing Vile Matter is akin to such a marathon. It’s a perfectly playable game, and even a bit spooky, but it’s just so simple, disconnected and uninspired that there’s little reason to get excited about it.
Vile Matter begins in a dark office. You have no idea how you arrived at this place, or even who you are. Outside, you can see rain droplets trickling down the window, framing a pitch-black landscape. There are some models and pictures on the shelves, as well as a laptop on the desk next to a handwritten note. The note offers a warning about the challenges you’ll face ahead, and hints that this may not be the first time you’ve been here. Wandering the perimeter of the small room, you soon come to two doors – one small, leading to a gallery, and one large, like the airlock of a spaceship. Both are locked, prompting you to scour the room again and look for a way out.
Once free of the initial room, you’ll find yourself not in some sort of office tower or laboratory, but rather a brick hallway with eight doors. Here a musical puzzle plays out, in which you must follow a series of notes in order to weave in and out of the doors in the correct order. Emerging from the final door, you’ll notice the décor has changed once again. Standing before a city block at night, your platforming skills (and nerves) will be tested as you dash between points of light to outrun a stalking phantom. Leaving the stalker in the dust, you then emerge into a waiting area with gender-specific restrooms, where you’re tested on your colour-mixing skills, using spray paint to decorate a pair of twin statues.
Vile Matter’s level and puzzle designs are varied, to say the least, but if this all sounds a bit arbitrary, that’s because it is. While the game does create a dream-like atmosphere with its strange assembly of rooms and puzzles, there hasn’t been a whole lot of effort to associate them. Dreams don’t have to make sense, of course, and as a collection of weird subconscious constructions I guess you could give the game a pass for not having more continuity. However, it’s a shame more effort wasn’t put into tying the pieces of this surreal world into a more connected whole.
Distant echoed voices from the protagonist’s life can sometimes be heard, though they are too fleeting to provide any real backstory or illuminate your current situation. I spent a good deal of time scanning areas for other clues, but all I found were more notes left for the amnesiac protagonist to mull over. Whoever left these messages knew why these events were unfolding and what was coming next, but there seemed to be no hint of cohesion between the spaces explored. By the time I completed the restroom puzzle and the game dropped its “twist” reveal, I felt more like I was playing a game jam experiment hastily built in a couple of days rather than a well-mapped-out piece of visual storytelling.
Instead, Vile Matter is essentially a collection of roughly half a dozen themed rooms with challenges that make sense mechanically, but not narratively. Each room is its own self-contained scenario, but while the gameplay diversity is nice, none of it is overly difficult. The aforementioned musical puzzle did spur me to pick up a pen and paper to jot the required pattern down, but most others can be solved by trial and error after only a few minutes. The platforming section in the dark alleyway involves dashing into the darkness, flare in hand, hopping over debris and scaffolding, trying to reach the next safe zone before the flare’s glow extinguishes. It’s certainly tense, but not particularly challenging, and if you do fail to reach the next safe zone, the only penalty is a quick restart at the section’s start – maybe minute or so lost at most.
The way Vile Matter moves between science fiction and horror, urban and surreal environments never seems to coalesce as an intentional set of metaphorical constructions representing our protagonist’s subconscious, but the individual components can be compelling in their own right. While none of the rooms are particularly inspired, creepy touches like blood spatter and heavy rain ensure the atmosphere remains adequately eerie, and there’s an ongoing threat of jump scares to keep you on edge. The graphics sport a high resolution, and the objects populating the different environments showcase a nice array of surface textures, like stone statues, oil paintings, and small potted plants. It’s a shame such artistic details aren’t more significant, as this is a pleasant game to look at wherever they’re featured.
The way Decoy Software uses lighting and room design to encourage exploration is impressive, demonstrating a good understanding of level building, both in terms of visual cues and floorplan layout. The office, for instance, is peppered with objects but you quickly come to recognize what can and cannot be interacted with in the room, and what the goal is. It makes for a great introductory sequence, as rearranging the furniture, in a manner of speaking, is the key to getting out. Likewise, a note placed before the start of the alley sequence warning you to stay out of the dark while having a lone streetlight off in the distance as a reference point effectively communicates what needs to be done. There is rarely any challenge in figuring out what to do in Vile Matter. Rather, it’s usually a matter of summoning the nerve or referencing the right clue to push through.
Controls are standard for a free-roaming first-person exploration game like this. When you are in range of interacting with a hotspot, a red handprint forms over the cursor, letting you know you can do so. WASD moves you around, while Shift allows you to sprint (for a limited period), the Space bar causes you to jump, and the mouse buttons are used to pick objects up. I never ran into any issues with the interface, or had any problems with glitches or performance hiccups. The platforming sequences played just as well as any first-person game, and don’t require a ton of dexterity anyway.
However, one issue I did have is with the checkpoint system. I played Vile Matter in two sittings, reaching the final room just before deciding to take a break. When I later loaded my game from the main menu, I found myself all the way back near the game’s start, only a few rooms in. It didn’t take long to catch up, as I knew the solutions to the puzzles this time, but I still had to sit through all the scripted reveals (which, while scary the first time around, were no more illuminating or entertaining the second). Why the game doesn’t have a checkpoint after each room is mind-boggling, so be forewarned that when you sit down to play, you’ll probably want to continue all the way through to the end.
That’s easily done, though, as Vile Matter is very short, taking no more than an hour or so to complete. While it lasts it’s a perfectly passable, even competent use of the Unreal 4 engine, and it works as a brief diversion with sensible (albeit simple) puzzles, spooky (albeit inconsequential) bits of horror, and a tried and true (albeit underutilized) premise. However, there are plenty of better puzzle games about exploring the mind of a comatose person, as there are better surreal horror adventures.
Ultimately the game’s biggest issue is that it’s just okay. As a simple, linear escape room-style game, it’s hard to criticize it for any one thing it does. Rather, Vile Matter’s problems are more a result of all the things it doesn’t do. The developers have demonstrated a good understanding of level and puzzle design, so it’s too bad it hasn’t been melded into a more coherent whole. It’s hardly imaginative in its conceit, nor does it tell much of a story or provide much of a challenge. It’s a nice enough little experiment, but even for the small amounts of time and money needed to play, it’s hard to recommend to any but the most ravenous of horror fans desperate for a cheap adrenaline hit, or to puzzle fans just looking for a quick fix between more substantial challenges.
