The Charnel House Trilogy

Short and sweet

There is something I find very cathartic about playing point and click adventure titles.

I think perhaps it is the combination of almost pure storytelling, atmosphere, and dialogue in a single package that leaves gameplay mostly by the wayside, but does not abandon it completely. A good point and click adventure game is an intimate affair. As we play, we learn about the main character in ways that you seldom do in other types of games. We hear their thoughts on everything they see and can interact with as they narrate. In fact, this encompasses almost the entirety of the gameplay itself.

With the exception of the puzzles, of course. But a lot of indie point and click adventure games seem to be dropping the idea of irritating puzzles preventing you from going forward and enjoying the narrative. Though you still collect and use items in interesting ways, I see fewer and fewer actual puzzles and more and more emphasis on story.

I would say this trend is a good one, overall. Puzzles generally tend to annoy me and break the flow of the narrative. I do not want to sit there fiddling with doodads trying to get the ‘whatever it is’ onscreen to work correctly so I can get to the next room and hear the next bit of story.

With that in mind, The Charnel House Trilogy is a creepy little point and click adventure title with a heavy emphasis on story and no real puzzles to speak of. It’s atmospheric and moody, the music is wonderful, and the graphics are your typical indie pixel art affair.

The game looks alright enough, I guess. There are a couple of areas with very nice artwork, but for the most part there’s nothing really all that special here. Kind of looks like it was made in the nineties, but it’s pretty standard indie pixel art. These are not your AAA titles and you can tell, because they know that graphics are not everything or even the main thing. Indie titles like this attempt to either sell you on the gameplay or the story and occasionally, both.

The gameplay is also pretty standard. You collect some random things, use the random things on other random things or people and mix and repeat. There is nothing really out of the ordinary here. Almost no mixing and matching of items in your inventory and no custom responses for combining odd things in amusing ways, just a single generic phrase for when stuff does not work. This too, is not the focus of the game.

So let’s talk about the dialogue. Though I would say that by and large, the game is well written, it must be said that the voice acting is pretty darn average, sadly. You can tell that the voice actors are amateurs, probably members of the development team if I had to guess. It’s not terrible, but the person who voiced the main character definitely does a better job with the witty, non-serious deliveries, verses the heavy emotional ones. She just wasn’t believable in a few places, which is unfortunate, because she has a pretty voice and I liked listening to her.

I’d say the best voice acting came from Jim Sterling, a rather prolific online game reviewer, for those of you who haven’t heard of him. He was fairly solid overall, but sorry Jim, I don’t think you quite fit the role the plot demanded for your character. I don’t know, maybe I’ve watched a few too many of his reviews.

In fact that pretty much sums up my opinion of the voice acting in this game. It was okay. Not really terrible. Not really good. Just okay. It reminds me of a few other indie games I’ve seen with amateur voice actors.

So, while The Charnel House Trilogy kind of falls flat in a few areas, there are some things that it really does quite well and I appreciate it.

The first is the music. Man, I love this game’s music. I actually bought the soundtrack to the game, which is not something I normally go out of my way to do and which is compounded by the fact that right now the soundtrack is priced higher than the game itself. So yes, I spent three dollars on the game and four dollars on the soundtrack.

I don’t regret it either. In fact, I’m listening to it right now.

Who composed this stuff? I need to find out if they’ve made any other music.

My only complaint about the music in the game is that it stops playing if you spend too much time in a room in some areas. I don’t think the tracks loop, sadly.

Music is such an important part of the overall atmosphere of your game. You are completely ignoring a critical, must have tool if you neglect your soundtrack. In a smaller project like this, the music can sometimes almost single-handedly carry a title.

Which is not to say there’s nothing else to like here, goodness me, no. The storytelling and writing is good and I always appreciate good writing.

And therein lies the problem with me reviewing something on the strength of its story. If I talk a lot about it, I essentially spoil it for anyone who wants to go on to enjoy it themselves, firsthand.

So what can I tell you?

I can tell you that the main character is a young woman named Alex and that she has recently broken up with her boyfriend. She is melancholy and sad and her father is sick in the hospital. You start the game in her apartment and you can examine all of her things and listen to her thoughts on it all. Pretty much the entire first part of the game takes place in this apartment, though there is a scene at a train station as well. Why she is leaving and where she is going is something of a mystery at first, though we do eventually learn that she is visiting a friend at a place called Auger’s Peak.

This part is called Inhale.

The second part of the game is called Sepulchre and it stars our second main character, a man named Dr. Lang, who Alex meets at the train station. The switch from one character to another surprised me, but Lang is an interesting enough fellow. It’s too bad his segment is so short. It’s here that things begin to go seriously sideways and Lang discovers that the train and its personnel might not be quite what they seem.

It’s rare that a game actually causes me to have a ‘WTF’ moment, but I had a few here during Lang’s segment.

The last and longest part of the game, making up the final part of the ‘trilogy,’ is called Exhale. Here we switch back to Alex for the remainder of the game. She sort of discovers the truth of what the train is in a way that is totally not really discovering anything at all, but just calling it something and then forgetting that particular mystery exists.

It is here that I would like to register a final complaint about the voice acting. Look, if you’re going to have a character who swears a lot that’s fine. For goodness sake though, if the situation is serious and twisted and fucked up, try to work on your delivery a bit more. Make it believable. Show the emotion! It’s not enough to just say swear words. You need to put emphasis on them. It’s not that Alex doesn’t have enough reason to be swearing up a storm in this part as she definitely does, but most of these lines were just a bit off. Not quite right.

It was frustrating to watch.

That being said, the ending surprised me and that’s not something I run into a lot anymore. I mean, sure people seem to believe that every horror anything has got to have some sort of twist at the end, which makes it all the more painful when you are expecting a twist of some kind and then it inevitably happens instead of letting the thing actually end. It just gets terribly dull and predictable after a while.

That being said, I have to admit that I had no idea what to expect from The Charnel House Trilogy. To quote Alex at the end of the game:

“It can’t end like this!”

No, I did not expect the ending. Rather refreshing, that.

I believe that all almost all horror is rooted in mystery, and having a compelling mystery is what convinces people to go through the scary and unpleasant parts of your story. The mystery here is not really resolved in any way and at the end of the experience I am left with more questions than answers.

That’s...just plain irritating is what it is. I want to know more. Luckily there is a sequel planned for 2016.

I think one of my final complaints about the game is that it is very short. I beat it in about three hours and I got all the steam achievements and examined almost everything in the game. I like to play these games slowly and immerse myself in the experience. Someone sticking mainly with the plot could probably beat it in less than an hour if they rushed. As it was apparently originally three separate titles which got smooshed together into one game on steam, I was really expecting something a little longer. About three times as long, in fact.

The three segments of the game make for a great intro, but breaking the story into tiny little easily digestible chunks just makes me hungry. There’s not enough here. And I really do mean that. This game has literally three main areas. Alex’s apartment, a tiny segment at the train station, and the train itself. While on the train, you will wander back and forth between two hallways, a dining car, and the passenger rooms. You’ll do it twice, once in Lang’s segment and once as Alex, though she finds things to be drastically different than he does.

Don’t do that again, by the way.

Make more areas to explore in the sequel. Give us more characters, more time to develop them, and increase the overall length considerably. Less backtracking to places we’ve already seen, please.

I read one reviewer who likened playing the game to curling up with a good book and maybe I concur. It is pretty darn good, despite my nagging complaints about it. It’s good, but it’s less a book and more like one of those free ebook stories you see on Amazon that’s designed to hook someone into reading a series. Well, not free in this case, but you get the idea.

Short and sweet with a taste of what’s to come.