Scholar’s Mate Review (PC)

I absolutely adore escape rooms—so much, that I’m often willing to let an anonymous stranger slump me into a pair of handcuffs and lure me into a shadowy abyss where they’ll abandon me with only sixty minutes to escape, and a rather daunting note reminding me that, should I fail, I’ll wind up falling into the hands of some sinister presence of an evil jail keeper. Naturally, this newfound obsession with the act of having to curdle up next to a lockbox and decoder disk eventually led me to peruse a collection of other, slightly more virtualized experiences on a multitude of platforms. To cut a long story short, I finally found myself knocking at a new door of unprecedented heights—Scholar’s Mate, of all things—where I’d soon be able to lay my hat and watch the grizzly theatrics of a new dawn break. Well, sorta.

Scholar’s Mate, in case you’ve yet to put two and two together, is an independent escape room-like horror game, and one that slots you into the rather unfortunate shoes of a girl who’s trapped in the depths of an old psychiatric hospital. Think Outlast, and perhaps remove the nude giants playing basketball with a severed head, and you’ll have a vague idea of what I’m talking about. That, for the most part, is Scholar’s Mate, and I’m honestly on the fence with it — perhaps due to the lack of severed heads, maybe. Even still, you get the picture; it features a derelict hospital, a looming monster, and the desperate efforts of one person‘s attempts to escape from its clutches.

Anyway, if you are thinking of picking up a copy of JanduSoft’s latest horror game, then be sure to read on for a few quick pre-purchase pointers. Let’s get puzzling!

Questions & Questions

As with any survival-horror journey that provides little to no context for the events that have occurred in previous seasons, Scholar’s Mate begins with asking you a very simple question: who are you? After that, it’s merely the case of figuring out where you are, and what your actual purpose is. Full disclosure: you are Judith, a young woman whose sole focus is to flee from the confines of an eerily vacant psychiatric ward. And that’s about it, as far as storylines travel, sadly. With scarcely any preliminary information or lore to chew through, you begin your dive into the nexus with a simple objective, and a myriad of locked doorways and puzzles standing between yourself and the exit. But there’s a catch: you’re not the only one who’s tiptoeing around the shadowy crags and crevices of the old medical institution. Shock horror.

The bulk of your expedition in Scholar’s Mate is spent doing one of two things: outsmarting the foe that roams in a predictable manner—circling back and forth and between areas, for the most part—and wracking your brain for clues and answers to questions that, at this point, might as well be written in Latin and smothered in an array of inkblots of random numbers and phrases. Herein lies the first problem of the game: the puzzles — they’re a total nightmare—so much, that a lot of the solutions don’t necessarily make sense, and are often solved by either luck alone, or by connecting dots that, quite frankly, shouldn’t exist, to begin with. Sure enough, a bit of detective work does go a long way with this one, but, man — there’s difficult and then there’s unfairly disadvantageous and frustratingly complex, of which I found the latter to be commonplace.

Explore at Your Own Risk

Aside from the treasure trove of illogical puzzles, the rest of the journey isn’t all that difficult to crack; in fact, if you’re not out trying to solve a riddle, then you’re out exploring the hollow wards of the hospital—a task that mostly involves brushing through areas with a fine-tooth comb, and playing hooky with the towering humanoid who lurks in your footsteps. Granted, this isn’t anything we haven’t seen before, and to be fair, if you have ever made the effort to slug through the likes of Outlast, Amnesia, or just about any other survival-horror game, for that matter, then you’ll know exactly what to expect when stepping into this pair of oh-so familiar shoes. It isn’t in receipt of anything original, is what I’m saying, and so, whilst the puzzles are of their own merits, the remainder of its content is mostly by the book and emulated.

As for the foe that wallows in the pits of the ward — eh, it isn’t anything to be concerned about, as it more or less keeps to the same routines and practices, and does so by patrolling the same loops, and using the same tactics to lure you into its territory. Suffice it to say that, if you’re able to stick around long enough to learn the basics, as well as its body language, then you’ll have no trouble with, well, most of the exploratory work and whatnot. That is, of course, provided that you have the patience to knuckle in on the answers to the copious amounts of questions that flesh out the lion’s share of the experience, anyway. For the record — I didn’t; I had to pop a couple of paracetamol pills to alleviate the headaches, of which there were plenty, thanks to the nature of the design.

It Isn’t All Doom and Gloom

I clearly have a few bad things to say about Scholar’s Mate—its predictable AI, convoluted puzzles, and overbearing inventory system, to list just a few of its greatest weaknesses. Having said all that, the game does have its fair share of positives, and it simply wouldn’t feel right to gloss over such things without giving them the chance to shine in their own way. On that note, Scholar’s Mate has some solid features—a relatively clean visual palette, being the standout element of the bunch. It also performs rather nicely, and isn’t overly bogged down by mechanical bugs or overarching technicalities, either. Don’t get me wrong, I did struggle to wrap my head around certain aspects of the UI—the inventory system, again, proved to be a bit of a headache—but I didn’t find myself raking through copious amounts of information to be able to understand it, either.

With all of the above said, I’m still finding it difficult to praise Scholar’s Mate, as its undignified lack of depth is arguably its greatest weakness. It isn’t the longest game out there; in fact, you ought to be able to sweep a good portion of its trials beneath the rug in an hour or two. Well, you would be able to beat a lot of the game’s puzzles in an hour or two, if they weren’t so incredibly hard and perplexing. If you love intense escape rooms, though, then you’ll probably get a good kick out of this one.

Verdict

Scholar’s Mate has made an effort to replicate a lot of the same basic mechanics and trappings of a cult classic survival-horror game, but is ultimately marred by its lack of originality and a bottomless scroll of ludicrously complicated puzzles and illogical tidbits. Don’t get me wrong, I can see what it was aiming for, but the fact that I left the experience feeling slightly jaunted and frustrated was all the more reason for me to transfer my attention to the downfalls of the game. Sure, it had its moments, but unfortunately that novelty soon wore off just as soon as I had mastered the issues pertaining to the enemy’s patterns and the way the world wanted me to progress. After that, it was merely the case of wracking my brain for inconclusive answers to mind-numbing riddles, and enduring the torment of a structure that didn’t want me to succeed.

There’s a good amount to enjoy here, to be fair, so don’t let these words sway you into believing that everything in its casket is bad. It isn’t all bad, and from an atmospheric point, at least, it is actually rather good—passable, even, though nothing particularly invigorating by any stretch. To say that it’s a fantastic survival-horror game wouldn’t be right; it’s borderline mediocre at best, and so, while I can offer some complimentary words for it, I can’t quite bring myself to say that it’s something of a show-stopping phenomenon. If you love horror, then sure, you’ll probably get a kick out of this one, but if you despise puzzles, then boy, allow me to introduce you to the friggin’ Da Vinci Code of raw puzzlers.