True Virus Review (Xbox One & Xbox Series X|S)

There’s something awfully unnerving about the concept of traipsing through the corridors of an abandoned psychiatric ward in search of memorabilia pertaining to a dark, cruel, and sinister series of distant events. This is, more or less, the setup that developers Farmind Studios and 100 GAMES present in its latest point-and-click survival-horror, True Virus. Question is, does it extract all the right toxins and tropes to conjure up an award-winning and memorable elixir, or does it add salt to an already incredibly saturated formula?

To put you in the picture, True Virus is a traditional point-and-click horror game that taps into a Flash-centric art style—a style that, in all honesty, could make anyone with fond memories of Newgrounds’ library of animated shorts blush a cherry-apple red. Suffice to say that, as far as leaning on the roots of the nostalgia factor goes, 100 GAMES’ newly carved indie certainly brings “it” — and then some. Having said that, does its raw power to reinstate old memories make it a genuinely good game, or is that all it really has to offer?

Having spent a good few hours roaming said corridors of the unruly settlement and picking the bones of all its leftover puzzles and clues, I can safely that, as far as answering the above question goes, I can just about bring myself to cough up a few closing words for my half-baked doctoral thesis. Care to read the full report? Then let’s go ahead and jump right in to the epicenter of the pandemic.

Good Morning, Patient

True Virus rolls out the blood-soaked carpet for a run-of-the-mill point-and-click thrill fest—a horrifying series of episodic tales that gravitate toward the vacant rooms and facilities of an old psychiatric institution. Shackled to a bed and with little memory of the past, you awaken in the aftermath of a violent scenario, desperate for answers, and with two questions in mind: who is that girl standing in the window, and why can I only see her when I turn out the lights?

Your ultimate goal in True Virus is to investigate the origins of a catastrophic disease, and learn how to adapt to a tainted world in which things often go bump in the night, and former patients freely roam the nooks and crannies of each and every quarter. With only a small bag to carry the bare essentials, you must depart from the “safety” of your bed, and set out to find the source of the disturbances. Or at least, that’s what you’re led to believe during the preliminary phases of the quest for knowledge, anyway.

In a typical point-and-click fashion, the bulk of the gameplay revolves around interacting with items in a room, and searching for ways to combine them to unlock additional areas and puzzles. For example, the opening chapter sees you searching for a way to escape from your room — a task that involves sliding a piece of paper beneath the doorframe and obtaining the key that just so happens to be sitting on the other side. With little to no guidance to scoot you along your way, however, you’ll come to find relatively early on that trial-and-error, really, is the grease that powers the game’s wheels; you’ll try, and you’ll try again, until you’re finally able to knuckle in on the best route forward.

Room for a Little More

Atmospherically, True Virus does manage to pull on all the right heart strings, which, for me personally, makes a mediocre horror game that much more appealing. What’s more, with each room in the game having its own theme and selection of eerie aesthetics, I often found that, in spite of the world’s fairly small-scale size, every zone came across as unique and, above all, interesting to explore. That is, of course, until I spent too long in any particular room, after which the music would often cut out and I’d be forced to either drop out and back in, or settle for the silence and, you know, just get on with it.

Puzzle-wise, True Virus has more than enough pieces to make up a network that’s anything but rudimental. Think Silent Hill, complete with all the oddly-placed trimmings and unconventional riddles, and you’ll have a vague idea of what the lion’s share of True Virus aims to replicate. Like the source, it often tasks you with locating one item, and then figuring out how or where it fits in with another set piece. It’s often confusing, to say the least, which meant I did in fact spend a great deal of time clicking on every square inch of each room until I finally activated the next story beat that would usher me into the next scene.

Exploration-wise, a fairly large chunk of the game is set around several rooms within the facility itself, one of which is sealed shut, and another which is barricaded with two wooden planks. For the most part, I found that I needed to comb through each of the available rooms several times over in order to locate the appropriate keys or tools needed to complete the next step. Again, trial-and-error, in its simplest form.

Could You Repeat That, Please?

True Virus doesn’t contain any dialogue, but instead relies on its ability to cast an umbrella of ominously unnerving sound effects to elevate ambience and emotion. It’s also littered with text boxes and writing that, in all honesty, never exactly struck me as being the slightest bit convincing or thought-provoking. Sadly, I found that, due to the on-screen dialogue being a little wishy-washy and flat, I couldn’t ever quite come to care so much about my character, let alone their predicament in which they found themselves imprisoned. And unfortunately, that same one-note connection sort of remained for the duration of the story, right up until I discovered the last room and lifted the lock on the final piece of the jigsaw.

As far as character development goes, the silent protagonist of whom you play never really breaks the fourth wall between the world and the consumer. Rather, the connection mostly consists of acknowledging portions of spewed out wooden dialogue that’s scarcely believable or compelling, which unfortunately dampens the overall immersion, and thus, spoils an otherwise genuinely terrifying story-driven world.

Dialogue aside, the classic, albeit slightly outdated hand-drawn art style and pitch-perfect soundboard are certainly enough to redeem the game’s few shortcomings. What’s more, its characters, as vocally wooden as they are, also make up for surprisingly compelling poster children for the game — at least in a visual sense, anyway.

Verdict

In spite of its rather dated Flash-like art style and somewhat rehashed storyline, True Virus is, for lack of a better word, unsettling, to say the least. It’s effortlessly atmospheric in all the right places, and it delivers a true sense of horror that, quite frankly, you’d often struggle to locate in a lot of indie IPs. And while I can’t exactly sing the storyline’s praises all that much, I can say that, as far as puzzle-solving and jump scares travel, True Virus was definitely something I felt I could write home about — if only in small verses.

True Virus isn’t a perfect game by any means, but it does provide enough of an incentive to keep you hooked for a short period of time. And that, to me, makes it worth picking up — even if it means having to maneuver around all the bad dialogue and audiovisual technicalities along the way. Point is, at no point does it set the benchmark for modernized horror, but it does, in some ways, encapsulate many of the elements that make standout indies the hidden jewels that they are. Does that make True Virus a pioneer in the field? No. Having said that, it does pay tribute to it in its own special way — even with its blatant flaws and mechanical shortcomings.

To answer the question, is True Virus worth playing? Yes, yes it is, though only if you’re hell-bent on scraping the barrel for a point-and-click adventure that’ll kill a few hours of your time. However, if you’re after the be-all, end-all of psychological horrors, then you may want to write yourself a doctor’s note and call in a sick day.