Clive Barker's Undying

Clive Barker's Undying was pretty much a pure impulse purchase for me. I saw it on sale on GOG and thought: "Why not play another early Unreal Engine first person shooter." I suppose the writer / film maker Clive Barker might have been on my mind due to the upcoming Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival. Barker's name on Undying (at least) is more than just him signing off a paper for the right to use his name because he's credited as the writer for the title. The game was developed by now-defunct EA Los Angeles (formerly DreamWorks Interactive before EA acquired them). In the last years before their closure, the studio was known as Danger Close Games (whose Medal of Honor (2010) single-player campaign I played through many years ago).

A horror shooter from the olden days

The protagonist of Undying is Patrick Galloway, an Irish World War I veteran who works as sort of a paranormal investigator. His friend from a long while back, Jeremiah Covenant, has requested his help, and Patrick has just arrived at the Covenant Manor somewhere on the coast of Ireland.

Undying doesn't jump right into action. Instead it spends a good while building up its atmosphere. It's quite successful at it, too: despite the quarter-century old graphics and other technical limitations, the game felt quite spooky. Eventually the horror element does wear off but in the early game it definitely works.

The lack of subtitles didn't surprise me even if it was still annoying. There are a lot of notes and journal entries, though -- largely narrated, too, as I recall -- so that you can follow the story even if you missed what someone was mumbling about.

Compared to The Wheel of Time, Undying seems to have needed less maintenance to stay functional over the years. I didn't encounter any odd technical issues, the UI is not illegible on 1080p, and loading times were this time as short as expected for a title with low definition assets. The last one is good because the manor is made up from so many small levels consisting of few rooms that sitting through any more than a brief loading screen at every transition would've become unbearable. The area segmentation is not great for navigation purposes but you will eventually be led to where you need to go because the game locks up most of the at-that-time irrelevant doors.

Like in The Wheel of Time, Undying has plenty of functional mirrors -- it clearly was so easy to make surfaces reflective back in the first iteration of the Unreal Engine. It's sort of coming back to games now, I've noticed, despite the higher performance cost in modern UE titles and the like. At one point in Undying, there's a jump-scare of a specter appearing in a mirror and then not being there when you turn around. Many newer games would have had the ghost to actually be only in the mirror but in this one it's actually there behind you -- I managed to catch it just at the edge of the field of view before it disappeared.

Another apparently common "feature" in these early UE titles seems to have been very low resolution on the skybox texture when it's trying to portray a vista that is more than the sky: it can be nigh impossible to tell what you're looking at. For instance in The Wheel of Time, when I was high up on the outside of the White Tower's walls, I expected to see the city of Tar Valon below me but it was such a pixel mess. Undying has similar imagery at places. Paintings seem oddly high definition, though. The Covenant family portraits are so striking that I thought they were added by a mod or something.

As difficult as it says on the tin

I set Undying on Easy difficulty expecting it to still be plenty challenging like The Wheel of Time. However, Undying turned out to actually be easy on the setting. Only at the very final boss I had to reload multiple times due to dying. A couple of times I had to look up what I was supposed to do to progress in the game but if I had just gone through all the options I had, I could've figured it out on my own just fine.

Over the game, you gather up a handful of different weapons as well as consumables and spells. Amplifier stones permanently upgrade a spell's level by 1 when used -- I hadn't expected such freedom of choice. The shield spell seemed like the obvious one to prioritize, though.

Patrick wields guns in his left hand, which to right-handed me felt weird. The protagonists of the Dishonored games do that, too, but in those the right hand always wields the knife, which also requires good hand coordination. Meanwhile Patrick here uses his right for spells, making it seems he's more left-handed.

Clive Barker's Undying wasn't a terrible time but it's simply impossible for a first person shooter this old to feel great to play, even if does have a convincing presentation (for its time). The game wasn't a success commercially even if it seem to have reviewed pretty well. A horror game -- even if a shooter -- is unlikely to appeal to a wide audience.