The Inpatient (PSVR) Review
Date Released: January 23, 2018
Date Played: October 10th, 2021
Continuing on with Horror Month 2021, we've come the "In Patient," a VR horror game from the developer Supergiant Games. They are most known for the PS4 cult classic Until Dawn. Personally, I am a huge fan of Until Dawn and loved it when I played it for Horror Month 2016. Then, last year, I played the spinoff game Until Dawn: Rush of Blood which was a horror based rail shooter/carnival shooter set in the Until Dawn world. And let me tell you, that game was great as well. So, I was excited to try The Inpatient. It was another game set in the same universe and was supposed to be a sort of prequel to the first game in the series. I grabbed it very cheaply not long after it came out and put it on this shelf with the rest of the collection until it was randomly selected for me to play. So, were my expectations met? I won't beat around the bush. The Inpatient is terrible and barely constitutes being a game at all.
You play as some character locked up in the Blackwood Sanitarium who is suffering from amnesia. The game takes place in the 1950s and fills in the story of the origin of the monsters in Until Dawn. As you learn in the first game, (spoilers ahead!) some miners got trapped in a cave in and had to resort to cannibalism to survive. This caused them to become cursed. When they are rescued, they are all committed to the Blackwood Sanitarium to recover. Eventually, the curse takes over and they all become monsters and kill everyone in the sanitarium and continue to hunt on the mountain that serves as the setting for Until Dawn. You basically act as a passive witness to all the events going on with the monsters taking over the sanitarium. Although, most of these events are just sounds in the distance and not very much is really shown.
Gameplay really only consists of attempting to walk around with the game's terrible controls while people talk about what's going on and why everyone is dying. Most of your time is spent in your room talking to your cell mate or following people around as they move through the enormous environments. There's little to no gameplay other than finding and collecting memory fragments that spark flashbacks of how you came to be in the facility. If I had to describe the style of the game, I would say it's like a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Often you will be presented with different dialog choices that can affect the outcome of the game. There are several endings and a generic cast of characters that can be saved/killed through your actions. It rehashes the Butterfly Effect mechanic from the first game and builds up how important your choices are. But, since the experience is so miserable, mustering up the energy to care about these choices is the hardest task you'll have to perform while playing this game. Even though the whole game is only about 2 hours long, it overstays its welcome and was a total chore to finish. I guess you're supposed to play through the game several times to try to pick all the different paths and save/kill everyone... but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. The last 30% of the game is just following people around while they open and close doors on the way to the other side of the sanitarium. It's extremely boring, and knowing that there's really no danger kills all sense of tension and fear in the game. Also, since I played the first game, I basically knew what was going to happen. It's slightly creepy, but other than the occasional cheap jump scare it's not scary at all. Most of these jump scares you can see coming from a mile away, so even that aspect was a let down.
Whatever choices I made led me to becoming cursed myself and I had to abandon my plans to escape to help other people off the mountain. It was very anticlimactic. There's a post credit scene the reveals that you become the monster that set the events of Until Dawn into motion 60 years later. I guess that's a little interesting, but not enough to save this game from all of its other flaws.
The character models in the game don't look great and have a strong uncanny valley look to them. On top of that, the voice actors aren't very strong... of course, they're really weren't given much to work with. I feel like the developers want you to have some sort of emotional attachment to these characters so you care about them enough to try to save them, but they are so hollow and their dialog is so superficial and brief that everyone ends up feeling like an extra in a low budget movie. Half of the characters you encounter only have a handful of dialog at most and most of that boils down to cliched lines like, "Did you hear that!?" or, "What to you think happened here?!?" Just listening to these NPCs prattle back and forth is exhausting. On a positive note, the setting of the sanitarium can be really nice sometimes. This is especially true when you enter large open areas, point your flashlight up towards the ceiling, and really get to take in your surroundings and feel the massiveness of the sanitarium. Unfortunately, all you ever do is just walk through them at a very leisurely pace. It's the most immersive aspect of the game and should have been explore more by the developers. As for the technical aspects, I didn't have any crashes or other issues other than some slight motion sickness at the beginning of the game (during a segment while you're being pushed in the wheelchair).
Honestly, this game is quite bad and is more of an interactive experience rather than a game. The story is bland and executed poorly, the game controls are abysmal, and most of the time with the game is just passive where you stand around and watch characters have dialog. The whole package feels like a total cash grab from Supergiant Games and I'm disappointed in their choice to release this game. I wonder if they were contractually obligated to make a handful of VR games and they pretty much just shoved this one out into the shovelware bin. With all of the heart, great writing, and energy put into the two other games I've played that they developed, there must be some sort of outside event that caused this trainwreck of a game to be released.
I bought this game not long after it came out and I paid $8.15 for it... In my opinion, that's too much money... and coming from someone who has paid stupid premiums for terrible games that are "rare," that's a bold statement. In the end, I can't recommend this game to anyone. It's a terrible game and not even a good VR experience. Stay away from this one.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 3/10 (Terrible)
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