Correcting a slight faux-pas here: Persona *had* of course been invented. The first one came out in 1996. Slapping my forehead over this, because I actually knew this, mea culpa.
One of the first survival horrors I played was "Pacman". You're trapped in an area being chased by Ghosts while trying to gather all the items needed to allow you to leave. Sure you can grab items to let you get rid of the Ghosts temporarily, but they always come back to try and kill you. And when you collect all the required items you just get locked in another similar area getting chased by the same Ghosts...
Fr. You could make a few tweaks to the artstyle/soundtrack, and maybe alter the pacing a little, and you would have a full on survival horror game. Somebody should do that.... Pacman: Halloween edition.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 There’s a lot of those games, gonna see about finding one, they’re pretty amusing. Edit: I humbly recommended Dark Deception. I’m pretty sure it’s probably the most developed version of the type of game you’d be looking for.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 I'm pretty sure I have read about a first person Pacman somewhere, can't remember the source tho... and yeah that sound very survival horror to me 😱
They actually do explain the food situation! If you play the original Japanese version there are multiple references to mysterious figures called "ブルーエプロン" who deliver food to the residents. Not much is known about them aside from speculation they are from the group that did all the mutant experiments and their distinctive garb, brightly colored full-body aprons dyed a stark blue color.
This wasn't developed by Atlus, Atlus was only a publisher for the title in a collaboration with Konami. The developers were Dennou Eizo Ltd. Not much is known about them other than they made an RPG on the NeoGeo color and a what I believe is a cyberpunk horror rpg called DeSpiria for the Dreamcast using the same engine as Hellnight.
From what little information we have on them, it would appear it was a small subteam that was likely a part of Atlus. Many of the staff credited with working on Hellnight and deSpiria have credits on other Atlus titles, such as deSpiria’s director Hoshito Yukizawa who was a designer on the 2001 PS1 remake of the first SMT. deSpiria’s producer has managed or produced Atlus games to this day. It seems like it’s fair to say they were a team within Atlus that made more experimental horror titles. Considering they only developed 2 titles and both of them were published by Atlus, and many of the team members worked on other Atlus titles, that seems like a safe assumption. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say it was an Atlus developed game. Many other team members who worked on both Hellnight and deSpiria appear as designers on the SMT PS1 remake as well. Same goes for many programmers. Honestly though this is all speculation. It’s honestly strange how little information there is on this team. EDIT: I totally forgot about the weird NeoGeo game published by SNK. What a mysterious game dev.
@@LongSinceDead1 There's gotta be more info on some Japanese article from back in the day. One of these days I'm gonna try my luck with google searches and auto translates. Many years ago, somewhere (I think it was a blog), I read about this game journo who went to Japan and got a scoop on deSpiria before release and got to interview the producer/director/whatever it was. He said the guy was suprised that a westerner had even heard about the game.
The monster being tethered to the player was the biggest problem of Alien Isolation. Nothing worse than seeing the alien walk out of a door and then immediately wander back in because the tether said so.
It's an incredibly cheap and repetitive game with the name Alien on it and basically astro turfed. No need to study horror dynamics at all just a friggin AI stuck to your butt.
That's what I was thinking! The way the camera is first person and the surrounding is a sqaure tunnel looks like a 3D from one the earlier Megaten games. Pretty cool to see how they both stuck to their roots, and changed it up.
Also, the whole "Mesh is a city below the city, where people have descended to the depths to hide" is pretty much the synopsis of ... several SMT/Devil Summoners games
I honestly agree the thing is Atlus if they went back to experimenting horror they could make a hit, they kinda know a thing or two about dungeon making and a great set designs of monsters that they could use or something completely new idk if it’s just me but in smt v when visiting jounin high it was pretty unsettling with the gloomy atmosphere and blood splatter without even showing corpses which could mean that the demons had not only killed but could’ve possibly ate them
I am pretty sure that the designs of those dungeons were re-used in Persona: Revelations, in 1996. Makes sense from a design and financial standpoint, a very typical approach in game dev.
This is why I like to call the 90s the "golden age" of creativeness in games. You could be casually browsing in a game store and find all sorts of neat concepts, even some that were ahead of its time like this one. There were very few "safe zones" and everybody was trying their ideas with a lot more freedom.
Yeah it was the golden age of creativity, but it also created a lot of flops. This game included. Something that RagnarRox doesn't seem to get or is in actual denial of is that the horror genre in the past had a lot of problems with controls or just boring gaming loops. It wasn't just Game Journos back then but also the simple word of mouth among gamers that panned those kinds of games simply because games with smoother or smarter controls, more engaging stories and more fun gaming loops existed at that time. Today with emulators and the death of creativity in mainstream gaming this game may look like a great and interesting title, but back in it's own time and on the original hardware this game was just a boring chore. You really have to be in the right kind of moot and on the lookout for a novelty to get enjoyment out of a game like Hellnight.
@@roberthartburg266 I agree on this point. I’m all for accepting a game as it was for the time, but I’m tired of people looking at objectively poorly-designed games and overlooking every single negative aspect, opting instead to turn it into a fake art thesis that other people just “don’t get”.
@@Pleasestoptalkingthanks I agree, some of these old games weren't paladins of good game design, but they did try to bring forth different ideas without turning the genre into something else or regressing to some of the simplistic arcade-ish ideas of the 80s.
@@Pleasestoptalkingthanks It's not about "not getting it", it's about focusing entirely on how much enjoyable it is at a casual gameplay level rather than, you know, actually engaging with the game on what it triese to do. Haven't played this one, but Haunting Ground is the perfect example. It is a truly great survival horror yet it received next to no attention if not for the costant and repetitive discourse about sexuality. Similarly Rule of Rose. Hell, Haunting Ground is possibly the best example because its gameplay loop is also extremely good (for the genre, of course, if you went in expecting RE4 it's your issue), while at least Rule of Rose had the issue of being played in an extremely rigid and clunky system (It would have had a lot to gain from being a straight up Adventure game in 3d rather than having those goddamn fights)
pretty sad that it is forgotten since it is my favorite horror game of all time. Great story, unique horror for it's time and great characters. I played it so many times it's crazy
This game's monster looks like if H R Geiger made fanart of a Dragon Ball villain. The fact that such a thing came out looking so cool and genuinely threatening is a testament to how special this game is.
Ragnar is like that one friend that every group seems to have, who worked at a record store for a summer and now knows where to find the most obscure albums no one has ever heard of before but are amazing. But like, with horror games.
Hellnight and Martian Gothic are those games that scream REMAKE so loud, and yet so muted. I'd really love their concepts be brought into good games, they really deserved better, the former, mostly on attention, the latter, on both attention and gameplay, while it was interestingly built, it was way beyond clunky
Nah, you could have said "Cease and desist", more sophisticated and different. (Not directed to insult but to add more to the joke) Let's go all play Martian Gothic, like Accursed farms.
Great review!😊 I would like only to point out that, theoretically, there IS a "spiritual sequel" to Hellnight, made by Atlus. It's just a "spiritual" sequel, since the plot has nothing in common with Hellnight. The gameplay is the same, though: first person view, dungeon crawling in a lethal maze... et cetera. There are also some RPG's traits. The game is named "deSPIRIA". Regretfully, it's for Dreamcast only AND in japanese language only. Yup, it never left Japan! 😟 I played it but, until the release of a translation patch, I could grasp very little of the plot.
I love it when a non horror games have horror elements or at least elements that are very creepy. One example is Zelda ocarina of time, in which, there was a dungeon that had blood, torture themes, and Silent Hill like monsters. It was so creepy that Nintendo later censored the blood. But the funny thing is that Zelda majora's mask ended up being very creepy and depressing the entire game, with its themes of end of the world, suicide, grief, and agony. To my knowledge, majora's mask was never censored by Nintendo other than maybe altering a section that had a religious theme.
I’m so happy you covered this game. This is by far one of the most unsettling experiences of gaming I’ve ever played. The environments, the stalking terror, the echoing horror of the soundtrack. There are flaws but one can see how this game really influenced so many things
The party system seems to be an iteration of the SMT:If, which also gave you a partner who affected your story. But this game made the system even more important.
In another timeline, in the 2000s Atlus would have propelled SMT to lean more to violence and horror, with high production standards, while keeping Persona the way it is, for a much stronger contrast between the two games and make SMT stand out in its own franchise and in rpgs in general. Even in a parallel reality it's hard for me to imagine Atlus working that way with actual horror games, but it's not hard to see them integrating horror to SMT, mainline or not, after all it was always sold as a more adult and darker line of games and all.
This game looks _right_ up my alley. I adore the whole first person, sparsely-detailed dungeon crawl setup. It makes you wonder just how many coulda-been classics failed to blossom and were lost to the mists of time. Rather sad, if you think about it too much.
I think the reason why developer at that time didn't make a lot of copies of some obscure games is because they don't want to risk having too many unsold copies of the game if it's end up failing to get attention. I think today's culture of selling and buying digital copies really help with that. Developer don't need to worry about unsold copies and instead can put their effort towards advertising.
Regarding the reviews, i think people back then perceived video games a bit differently. Expectations played a big part without the internet. Most things different from genre & expectation defining games like RE1 would create dissapointment and demanded a lot more open mindedness than what we are used to today. I think having fun with experimental games is something that needs to be learned and comes with experience. Some games evoke fun in a more natural way regarding expectations imo and others require maybe even some advice or thinking effort on how to interpret the games mechanics and presentation. That's also the reason why I'm sometimes searching for positive reviews of games that i want to enjoy, in order to set expectations and perspectives on the games design.
Not sure I agree. There's always been a demand for alternative, weird styles of art. Just look at giger or francis bacon. Games are no different. As a 9 year old I remember thinking silent hill was a sign that games were finally going to be taken seriously, and in hindsight that was at least mostly true. What's changed in my opinion is the fact people with a taste for the weird can find games they'll like far more easily, whereas in the 90's you had to rely on magazines or tv adverts to tell you what you "might" enjoy.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 The difference between Art and videogames though is the length of time they've had to mature, and so too the criticism of them. Don't forget that, while we're quite happy to have experimental art now, there was a time where even the slightest deviation from the accepted norm in the art world would get the work ridiculed and the artist themselves shunned. I think early games criticism was more conservative with experimental games, because they were often kinda janky, so were warning people against such things. We can say in hind-sight that it was foolish, but it was probably the correct opinion at the time. If they told people to give all the experimental stuff a go, people probably wouldn't hold their opinions in an sort of regard.
@@SoftBoiledArt Amen... I think Konami's treatment of SH and MSG is literally evil. I cannot overstate how morally and ethically wrong I personally believe it is. I wish there was a law against doing something like that to an intellectual property. Especially what they did to P.T and Silent Hills.
The point behind adaptive difficulty systems in horror are to serve one purpose: Make sure you don't die too much. Dying too much breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds contempt for the game. Not that you don't like it, but contempt for the horror aspects. Survival horror doesn't work when it kills the player, it works when the player thinks they're going to die. If you die too much or too many times too quickly the magic is gone.
This is gonna sound weird but your videos have helped me through like the worst past 5 years of my life and opened my eyes to a new way to think and talk about gaming while applying critical theory. Your channel is amazing and you create true works of critical art.
I was introduced to this game by way of an early UA-cam LPer named MikeNnemonic and I was quite entertained by it. Seeing as it was a rare game, I busted my ass looking for a rom of it. I still have that file all these years later and I suggest everyone at least give it a try if they enjoy horror games. Its format is something I think could be revisited and made into something even more immersive and creepy. Maybe some indies will give it a go.
Some for me, I started watching him because he was one of the first (if not first) person to play my childhood nightmare, Martian Gothic. His playthroughs then introduced me to the other hidden gems like this one or "The Note". Would love to see coverage for both of them here, especially Martian Gothic, since it was the Resident Evil that the press wanted, but it also flopped incredibly.
RagnarRox, thank you so much for telling us that the Alien untethering mod exists. I recently started replaying Alien: Isolation, and was yet again frustrated at how the Alien’s presence is so scripted.
21:00 the adaptive difficulty arguments for resident evil are kinda funny because this is a mechanic that's pretty much in every shoot em up from the 90s onward (called ranking in those games) and no one has issue with it there. It's a perfect mechanic because difficulty selection is garbage at actually demonstrating how hard something would be in advance.
quick correction to 2:00 : persona 1 was 96 and Persona 2 was 1999...So yeah it was actually out and you'd be surprised how some of these themes you praise abut the modern set post apocalypse stuff with the SEBEC route of 1 and come back around in p2's first game, sin/innocent sin.
and before you say "it was vastly different" Nah persona was always about a group of high schoolers( or in the case of punishment/eternal punishment young adults) who stumble on to a supernatural mystery that are revealed to be the threat of forces that are threatening all existence, the only thing that's really changed is how much of a focus the supernatural forces aspects play and the stylized presentation that 3 started but even then the games starting with 3 all go for notable different tones with 3 all about accepting death, 4 being about moving on form a traumatic incident and 5 being about breaking from society.... at least until the end when it becomes about reintegration into normal society.
Thank you for reminding me of this game! Years ago I was deep into Japanese horror games and researched to try to learn about as many of them as I could. This was one of the saddest cases, where it was a game that was so interesting, yet was nearly impossible to get ahold of. There was only one full playthrough of the game, which I gratefully watched and enjoyed, but it was a Naomi run. As in, there was zero interaction with any of the other three characters. I was sad, because I could also tell that this game had extreme replay value, yet I felt like I had no way of ever getting to see the other three paths. Now that I'm reminded of it, I will bet some amazing video game archivist has recorded it somewhere. Great, unique stories like this are sometimes so difficult to find, experience, and save! Talking about them helps.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but if you want to see a very early example of a survival horror game look up "Oh Mummy" on the zx spectrum from 1984. This came with the first computer my family ever owned nearly 40 years ago and had you run around an area unlocking rooms to find the key to the exit while being chased by a mummy. Some rooms contained treasure, some contained another mummy that would chase you, and one room contained the key. It was a lot of fun at the time.
!! I actually played this when I was 5 or so on my brother's Amstrad CPC and impressionable young me found it ridiculously scary. Funny thing is that I had not seen this game in decades after that and thought back on it about 20 years later and my mind had remembered its graphics to look almost photo realistic.
@@RagnarRoxShow Oh Mummy and Crazy Golf were the first games I ever played on a home computer, which was a 48k ZX Spectrum. The first ever handheld I played was a pacman knockoff called Mini Munchman. Those were the days...
had a good chuckle at the intonation of "how resident evil did it" and those review quotes for silent hill 1 and 2. the opening narration + these bits are already a great start to this video.
Conceptually, this sounds really cool, even if i doubt i would want to sit down and play it now. Back in the day when it was new, absolutely I'd have gotten into it big time tho. I'm more just glad it exist as a part of games history and I'm perfectly happy to see someone else tackle it with the love and passion it deserves.
you could always just play it. Never understood the old game mentality you can even use save stages.(I kinda don't like that but I won't stop other people from doing it)
@@rafresendenrafresenden.1644 that's fine for anyone else to play it. I'm not encouraging them not to, but i only have a limited amount of time in my day to devote to video games. I don't really need to go back to play games that were flawed but interesting for the time they were made in. I'm just fine with getting to know about them and enjoying them vicariously. I'm also a fan of some sports, but i don't need to go out and play basketball to enjoy them
@@rafresendenrafresenden.1644 you know what REALLY gives me more free time? Minding my own business and not trying to shit-post randos on the internet because I'm butt hurt they don't wanna play a game i like. You should try it lol 🤷♂️
I dreamed about doing a video about this game for years! This game is criminally underrated and I'm glad it's finally getting the attention it deserves.
This is not the ATLUS game that you think about if you hear "Survivor" Horror is a common theme on ATLUS games but in the end, the most scary thing you can find is always ANOTHER human...
Here is the thing most people do not know about game journalists: They are *not* enthusiast gamers writing for enthusiast gamers. They are useful to get mainstream audiences to go and buy games, i.e. they are kind of an outsourced PR department for publishers, while small fry developers and fresh ideas have to hope they get a slice of the limelight during times of mainstream draught. As such, game journalists (or rather: game copywriters) are harbingers of the mainstream: They laud games that are easy to pick up, easy to digest, and that Joe Everyman can play for an hour on his third beer without overheating his few remaining brain cells: Blockbuster games. "It's everything you have seen and done before. 11/10 - IGN". Source: I used to write for a gaming mag - long ago, and in a country far, far away.
Ah - great to see you cover this! I first played it via a pirate copy back in 2000 and then wrote about it on Hardcore Gaming 101 back in 2004 :) I have a grown on fondness for it since then where I feel I was rather scathing.
Clock Tower (SNES) and D (Panasonic 3DO) both predate the first Resident Evil. They weren't trying to latch onto the survival horror craze that RE had started.
Hey there RagnarRox, Thank you for this video. It still haunts me to this day that I've never finished this game and you did it justice. A friend of mine lended me this game in middle school and I "forgot" to give it back. I used to have a crush with Naomi and the fear of losing her prevented me to make any serious progress in the game. Loved the blank protagonist too, it was so easy to imagine myself in those dark corridors.
This is my first time hearing about this game. I am a huge fan of the developer. This is also my first time on your Channel. Of course I subbed.... thanks for putting the time in. I look forward to occupying more of your material.
Huh. I can see the bones of this in their SMT: Strange Journey game. While it's not survival horror, every SMT story I've ever touched IS horror to some degree. And, let's be frank, Atlus has a bad habit of small releases of titles they don't think will do well, or are too experimental, and if that title does well, an updated rerelease a few years later. See, Devil Survivor 1&2, Strange Journey, Persona 3, 4... hell, persona 3 had TWO updated rereleases with content exclusive to both.
Seriously, I’m so tired of online games. Even if I had friends to play with I don’t like gaming with other people. I’m slow as hell and I like to take my time
ATLUS messing up when it comes to how to distribute their games is such an ATLUS move to this day...but seriously from what I just heard? I'd actually trade in one of the next Persona titles they are probably cooking up in exchange to remake this one or make a new Dark Messiah game. This sounds kinda dope actually💥
Lol! *Gets brutally slain by creature* "Naomi will remember that." Great work as always RagnarRox! I have felt for years now that Hellnight is an underrated gem, so it's great to see some recognition. The extremely minimalistic 3-4 note repeating songs in the soundtrack is a stroke of genius in my opinion. It just sets this incredibly eerie tone with barely any actual music in the traditional sense.
Dark Messiah is an amazingly unique experience and a bold one at that. Glad more people are talking about it. Just one note I'd like to make. You gave credit to Atlus for the game but they weren't the developers, only the publishers in Japan. In Europe for example Konami published the game. The company who made this is called Dennou Eizou Seisakusho. They worked with Atlus on a few games but they weren't owned by them. Their last game was a game called deSpiria for the Dreamcast.
Seeing how limited its release was i'm glad i still got to play when it came out. I was about 9 years old when my cousin showed up with this game. It looked so real to us and the atmosphere made it very eerie to play.
My dad played this with me when I was young. Still terrifying and frustrating, one of the reasons the disc got fribeed into the neighbours garden. A pirate copy, luckily, official discs are now very expensive.
Never heard of Hellnight before but this looks amazing! Haven't used an emulator yet but I think I'm going to try this one out, I love stalker horror games and this looks like an incredible experience. Definitely see what you mean by saying it's ahead of its time, honestly if you'd shown me a clip of this and told me it was part of the recent low-poly horror movement I'd believe you. Also, very excited that you're finally tackling that other horror game with a dog, can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.
Ragny you have the inner talent to showcase and explain in great detail obscure (horror) videogames in the best possible way.Also I admire the fact that you defend underappreciated (horror) videogames in an unbiased way that few UA-camrs can , like in your previous video about Castlevania 64.It goes without saying that you convinced me to give Hellnight a try.I can't wait for your next video 😁
I've played a lot of horror games in my life, and I finished them all. But this game, together with amnesia, are the two games that I never get to finish because it was too horrifying and scary. But right now, I'm thinking of playing this game again and try to finish it.
Part of the problem, I feel, is that video game journalists in the past (and arguably even today) mostly take on a weird, awkward, faux pas type of elitism that echoes "These are just games, games are meant for children, just say things I think parents can use to gauge a game's purchase" instead of trying to analyse the video games as they were - mediums in which expression is possible, media catered to the experience of the one playing the game; not the one spending for it, as is the case for most parents then. Most tend to analyse the game they're covering through a disinterested PoV. In the process, they almost always fail to take a populist or a postmodern approach to view or assess the gaming medium itself, most are a 'means to an end' to hit a company quota which fails to bring out the best parts of the experience. Their craft often demands technical expertise in journalism and report-writing (knowing the right words, how to arrange text) whereas the audience, especially children easing into the gaming scene given that games are a component of culture, expect engagement. Eventually this changed to refocus around the cultural consumers, not the spenders, but the awkward elitism is still there; Valkyrie Chronicles 4 went through the same politicised lens, being called 'sexist' for one offensive scene and taking on the "everything is sexist" lens by Alicia Haddick. Its powerful message on the nature of terrorism becomes dampened by the highly-politicised oppositional code of feminism as a result. At times I feel that the real hurdles that games need to clear isn't just the marketing; it's the initial responses as captured by those making 'first contact', namely these journalists that can deter those without time / criticality to examine the game themselves. It's almost as though having the backing of their company to protect their position emboldens them to make those elitist remarks without actually engaging in the medium itself, a clear example of examining the game with disinterest. Ciconia When They Cry comments on this astute observation that people are averse to knowledge and information (to minimise pain) and that people are more willing to listen to these 'first contact' cases than they are to perform actual research themselves, since the cost of time is too high. As a result, people of the world (today) are trapped in a system that dehumanises them gradually by the sheer scale and size of the world, causing them to become unthinking and uncritical. Until companies recognise the significance of the cultural capital that their reporters need to possess for a decent review, we're stuck with shit on both sides of the aisle; both companies mismatching the hype a game offers, and the reporters misrepresenting these games in a lens unsuitable for the actual consumers.
I have never seen this game before and I'm surprised for something so well made fell off the radar. Also I was so happy you mentioned Gelarians! Hope you get to cover it someday Great videos as always! Makes my day to see you pop up on my youtube notifications!
Oh my god, I played this in Japanese version back in the 90s, its name was "Dark Messiah". Didn't understand shit back then, didn't know it was translated eventually. The opening theme was so compelling, but I didn't even get past the very first level as I don't know what to do and when the monster caught you = game over. my mind was accustomed to horror game that you could at least struggle with the monster a bit to get away or outright kill them, but this game.... no this game was an instant KO. I kinda dropped it and move on to other games, so I didn't get to see what stories the game had to offer. This game would forever get stuck in my mind as an unraveled mystery, hadn't you come along and making a vid on it. Thank you so much.
I'm not going to lie if there's a horror game with like the mechanics of Shin megami tensei I can just imagine it dungeon crawling trying to escape demons using guns weapons and Buffs to try and help you survive only to be killed by some low level demon you never saw coming like jack frost or succubus
Horror games and JRPGs that aren't Final Fantasy are more often than not panned by reviewers that don't understand them or hate the entire premise. It's unfortunate but, I've learned to just completely disregard any metacritic scores from those genres.
So I went and bought a PSCLASSIC and loaded this game in; Clock Tower, Silent Hill 1, Juggernaut and Baroque. If you know about the last two, You have officially dug into the depths of PS1’s mine shaft.. congratulations
wake up babe, new ragnar rox video dropped.. i know most the games that you cover in your videos from other videos or just heard about them but i still enjoy the whole content on this channel and anytime i run out of stuff in my watch later playlist you happen to upload something.. gratefull for that dude~~!! you save my attention span with your long video essays
It's one of my all-time favorite games of all time. I still think about it. A true gem. I got it in 1999, and I have finished 12+ times. One of the kind.
Sailor of the murky seas of game preservation here, I'd recommend using Duckstation instead of ePSXe (it's pretty much dead imo). The quality of life improvements (such as PGXP corrections) are INSANE if you don't consider the jittery animation of the original PS1 a feature instead of an annoyance. Personally, I think it really brings out the beauty in those graphics. I almost cried when I booted WipEout 3 for the first time and I haven't even played it when it came out (wasn't even born yet).
I liked this game but never got to finish it, thankfully I'm now replaying it on the steam deck using duckstation emulator (which is my goto ps1 emulator on Windows 10) and loving every minute of it. Thanks for the video.
The note about "game journalism" being overwhelmingly negative and hard to use as a good basis for judgement is so interesting. As researchers, we often are told to only use "scholarly" types of sources, but, with so much media (just like this video!!) being published, the definition of what that means has to change
I actually love the idea of adaptive difficulty; I do no damage professional runs of RE4 all the time with a friend, and we always joke and call it “big brother mode.” (Because it would be suited for the big brother you hand the controller to as a child.) I usually don’t feel it’s executed very well, but I love the idea. However I don’t believe in scaling difficulty *back, (unless you manually choose easier modes that are an option like in dmc3, for instance.) harder gameplay is actually a reward for people who really enjoy and/or are more adept at a certain game. I wish there were official modes that were harder for Resident Evil titles specifically. The Evil Within and Resident Evil 1+7 had some super awesome extra hard content for people who love difficult survival horror. Ethan Must Die is very difficult, and madhouse was difficult my first few play throughs. Now I wouldn’t play 7 any other way. That’s probably why those two are my favorites in the series besides 4. (Closely followed by 2r and 2.)
With how creepy SMT can be i strongly believe Atlus show throw their hand in the ring again with a horror game. I never got t play this bc I’m in America. Need to try and emulate.
Ah no, the 1st Persona game came out 2 years before this game. If you consider Persona just an extension of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, then the first game came out LONG LONG before this game.
Great vid! I think Ecstatica was the first stalker horror game though. People don't take it seriously because of its ellipsoids, but it was brilliant in many ways.
Great video as always! It's funny that I actually kept thinking "huh, just like Resident Evil/ Silent Hill" during certain segments, which is why I'm so shocked that the game flew completely under the radar. Not just because of bad distribution, but also later on, when youtubers would make videos about the most obscure things that could/would become quite popular. Even when watching videos about retro or '90s games, I never once heard about it. What a shame! 24:25 "normal, attractive Ragnar voice again" man, I live for these little jokes
as much as you want to paint this game in a bright light... you have to consider the time it came out. In the EU the game came out around December 99 so one year after RE Nemesis (bad comparison but you know... THIS game had a Monster which followed you as well one year BEFORE that) BUT as well SILENT HILL ... so graphically this game was WAY to late with it's simple images as NPCs, the wonky controls as well as the bad FMVs compared to other games which were already avilable.
I watched this while working out and lifting and was a great video. This game is definantly now on my list of "retro/old games I must play" especially since I plan on delving into Horror experiences from different genres and time frames. I've been rekindling my love for games this year by setting a goal of beating 50 games ive had on my backlog, unfinished or not started before 2023. I was born late into the console generations, I'm barely around the corner to being 18 within a bit of a year, so I've missed quite a lot. Interesting and niche games like this keep my interest in gaming waning in the current landscape (mainly triple A, indies be bussin). I'm a nerd for games as an artform and the history of said games, so this kind of game is up to my alley. Thanks for talking about this game, you've given me a game I'll probably fall in love with very soon.
(a comment on why some gems remained unknown) : Back then you had to purchase any original title on dvd which was relatively expensive; so you had to be carefull. Also, gaming was somehow unpopular overall for our parents' generation so we were not allowed to have as much time with games as we would like... which was approximately 1 to 5 hours tops per day and then the killing began.
Most games are unnacessible without emulation, the biggest part of an entire art form cannot be accessed by the average person legally or without emulation. I know this is kinda obvious, but I just realized this for real after watching this video. Almost every time I see a gaming oddity, or a misunderstood classic too ahead of it's time for it's own good, or a high quality genre pushing classic whose devs weren't afraid to take risks, they're almost always unavailable in the market currently. Most games I played I had to emulate because I've no way to play them otherwise, the notion that I have to track down hardware that's older than I am just to play something I can find with a simple google search is absolutely ridiculous to me. Thank you for talking about this game, I fell in love with it after this video, I'm at a place where I can't afford hardware powerfull enough to play modern games , but what I have is incredibly good to play old ones, and channels like yours are always very helpful.
Nice! you did it, I have it on ps1 to play backwards compatible on ps2 and for some reason the screen the screen is shifted so I can only see the top half. The atmosphere in HELLNIGHT is 2nd to none though. Great game even if I haven’t completed it. Just feels so interesting to play
I want to thank you deeply, besides all that you do, for the mention and picture of the Tokyo sewer/flood prevention system. It's a beautiful space, and something like that will fit perfectly into my horror game. You have just directly enriched its design, since until now I thought all 3 (building) levels the game is set in will have the same visual style, which I already have defined, but thanks to that picture, I realized that the middle (containment) level NEEDS to look like that. Thank you.
This was the first video I saw in your channel and I'm really interested on seeing more. Playing horror games is not my forte (I'm a coward) but I like seeing other people playing them, and even more, going deep into the game and taking the time to explain it. I like your channel and I want to see more.
Super interesting! I'll never play this one, but as a bit of an Atlus fanboy seeing this obscure gem is fascinating. I feel like some of the ideas here definitely influenced their future titles, if not in terms of mechanics then by way of atmosphere and presentation. Like, Nocturne seems like quite a natural evolution from a lot today the world design philosophy at play here.
I remember going over to a friend's house when I was about 10 years old and the excited look on his and his older brother's face when they told me they had a new game to try out. I remember a schoolgirl, I remember a dark tunnel and--- the silence. So much silence. Just walking around a gray tunnel and nothing else but then... the joystick would start to vibrate and the school girl would say something. Out of the darkness a grey creature jumped at me and I had never been more scared in my life up until that point. This was like 20 years ago btw. But all those images stuck with me, never knew the name of the game tho so when I finally got into gaming a few years after that I would think about that game but still couldn't find it until, only last year I think or the year before, right in the midst of the pandemic, I came across a list of old forgotten PS1 survival horror games and I screamed with excitement to see screenshots that had lived only in my head for so long. Got myself a copy AT WALMART and settled a debt due 20 years. I finally beat the game and saw it through. With as much hindsight, Hellnight was so far ahead of the competition. An utter shame it has been left in the dark. Thank you for shining a light on it.
I don't know if it's my TV's post processing but the darkness at the end of the tunnel looks absolutely amazing for PS1, it really looks like the end of the tunnel disappears in darkness, unlike some games on PS1 and N64 where the draw distance limit of the hardware turns into ugly fog.
I was going to comment questioning calling this a Survival Horror game, but as I was writing I thought about it more and am not so sure. It's sort of one, but it'd be the most genre breaking one ever made (to the point that it kind of needs searching and stretching to be called one). I'm not giving up on my initial post so it's at the bottom, but to go into how it fits (I guess): It's sort of fits the letter of the genre in the form of having a limited defense against the horror through the companions. Rather then having separate ammo and health, they exist as one along with you're health/weapon having story implications. Although you can't remove threats, can delay them at the cost of health. But I am going to say that it still fails in the spirit of S.Horror, since S.Horror generally gives more of an active role rather then pure avoidance. Merely having a threat you work to avoid doesn't really fit the need of this genre specifier, otherwise it seems that all you have left for any other horror game is jump-scares and threat-less unease. I guess you can boil down the genre of Survival Horror to just being horror games where you have threats, but it kinda just downplays the 'Survival' modifier (and also might start a precedent where any game where threats exist fits into a type of 'Survival-' genre). [Although this is a nice Hidden Gem Horror, I don't think this really counts as a Survival Horror game. S.H.G.s generally work off a mix of aspects found in Horror, Action, and Survival gameplay. Action in your (often limited) ability to fight off the horror, Survival through the enforcement of heavy resource management, and Horror through the feeling of your power being limited (along with other horror elements). The closest thing that Dark Messiah has to fitting these bare bone features (at least from what I can gather from your video) is the companions, but even then as you admit they more act as extra lives with story effects and sometimes the ability to ]
You hooked me man. A survival horror game about running away from Resident Evil-esque biological abomination, and made by ATLUS in addition, that's literally my favorite things combined upd: Finished that a while ago, really great, really scary
The party member system actually reminds me a little bit of the party members of SMT if... , primarily with the fact that each party member effects the ending and trajectory of the plot. I wonder what an Akira route for this game would be like...
This is such a nostalgic game for me, for many reasons. I have vivid memories of playing this at my grandparent's house in London, they had a big old victorian house that was old and dark and had just the right atmosphere. Also the millennium was fast approaching and although I never really believed the doomsday prophesy and Y2K scare some of that fear of what would happen did create a general feeling of anxiety. But it's an awesome game and I enjoyed replaying it age 41 some 25 years after it's release. There's something really spooky about those PS1 graphics that I absolutely love.
Correcting a slight faux-pas here:
Persona *had* of course been invented. The first one came out in 1996. Slapping my forehead over this, because I actually knew this, mea culpa.
Yo homie, what is you saying @ 3:59??
@@datboigiro3849 You can just turn on captions
Why do you use epsx instead of Duckstation? It's a way more feature complete and user friendly emulator.
Mi culpa "
@@mkarg5012 No, mea culpa. It's a Latin expression.
One of the first survival horrors I played was "Pacman". You're trapped in an area being chased by Ghosts while trying to gather all the items needed to allow you to leave. Sure you can grab items to let you get rid of the Ghosts temporarily, but they always come back to try and kill you. And when you collect all the required items you just get locked in another similar area getting chased by the same Ghosts...
Fr. You could make a few tweaks to the artstyle/soundtrack, and maybe alter the pacing a little, and you would have a full on survival horror game. Somebody should do that.... Pacman: Halloween edition.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 There’s a lot of those games, gonna see about finding one, they’re pretty amusing.
Edit: I humbly recommended Dark Deception. I’m pretty sure it’s probably the most developed version of the type of game you’d be looking for.
@@cookiesmcsalsa1281 Sweet, thanks for the recommendation.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 I'm pretty sure I have read about a first person Pacman somewhere, can't remember the source tho... and yeah that sound very survival horror to me 😱
Shamelessly copying that reddit copypasta
They actually do explain the food situation! If you play the original Japanese version there are multiple references to mysterious figures called "ブルーエプロン" who deliver food to the residents. Not much is known about them aside from speculation they are from the group that did all the mutant experiments and their distinctive garb, brightly colored full-body aprons dyed a stark blue color.
This wasn't developed by Atlus, Atlus was only a publisher for the title in a collaboration with Konami.
The developers were Dennou Eizo Ltd.
Not much is known about them other than they made an RPG on the NeoGeo color and a what I believe is a cyberpunk horror rpg called DeSpiria for the Dreamcast using the same engine as Hellnight.
It feels like this game being put onto modern digital store fronts even less likely to me
Truly one of the most mysterious game companies. Not even the game director is credited.
From what little information we have on them, it would appear it was a small subteam that was likely a part of Atlus. Many of the staff credited with working on Hellnight and deSpiria have credits on other Atlus titles, such as deSpiria’s director Hoshito Yukizawa who was a designer on the 2001 PS1 remake of the first SMT. deSpiria’s producer has managed or produced Atlus games to this day.
It seems like it’s fair to say they were a team within Atlus that made more experimental horror titles. Considering they only developed 2 titles and both of them were published by Atlus, and many of the team members worked on other Atlus titles, that seems like a safe assumption. I don’t think it’s incorrect to say it was an Atlus developed game. Many other team members who worked on both Hellnight and deSpiria appear as designers on the SMT PS1 remake as well. Same goes for many programmers.
Honestly though this is all speculation. It’s honestly strange how little information there is on this team.
EDIT: I totally forgot about the weird NeoGeo game published by SNK. What a mysterious game dev.
dennou ezzou has also been credited to have worked on an entry of the Junji Inagawa horror adventure titles, Specifically Midnight Taxi.
@@LongSinceDead1 There's gotta be more info on some Japanese article from back in the day. One of these days I'm gonna try my luck with google searches and auto translates.
Many years ago, somewhere (I think it was a blog), I read about this game journo who went to Japan and got a scoop on deSpiria before release and got to interview the producer/director/whatever it was. He said the guy was suprised that a westerner had even heard about the game.
The monster being tethered to the player was the biggest problem of Alien Isolation. Nothing worse than seeing the alien walk out of a door and then immediately wander back in because the tether said so.
Yeah it kind of ruined the game for me when I noticed, I also hated how it would teleport around when watching it on radar when it climbs into a vent
Good to know about this and the mod mentioned in the video, whenever I have a chance to play the game I'll install the mod.
It's an incredibly cheap and repetitive game with the name Alien on it and basically astro turfed. No need to study horror dynamics at all just a friggin AI stuck to your butt.
Though to be honest, if you learn how anything works in games then the magic can disappear like that.
Yeah that shit annoyed me so much I couldn't finish due to this aspect pissing me off so much legit that's how much it annoyed me.
One thing I find interesting about this game is how much its level design feels like a dungeon from SMT repurposed as a horror game.
That's what I was thinking! The way the camera is first person and the surrounding is a sqaure tunnel looks like a 3D from one the earlier Megaten games. Pretty cool to see how they both stuck to their roots, and changed it up.
Also, the whole "Mesh is a city below the city, where people have descended to the depths to hide" is pretty much the synopsis of ... several SMT/Devil Summoners games
I honestly agree the thing is Atlus if they went back to experimenting horror they could make a hit, they kinda know a thing or two about dungeon making and a great set designs of monsters that they could use or something completely new idk if it’s just me but in smt v when visiting jounin high it was pretty unsettling with the gloomy atmosphere and blood splatter without even showing corpses which could mean that the demons had not only killed but could’ve possibly ate them
I am pretty sure that the designs of those dungeons were re-used in Persona: Revelations, in 1996. Makes sense from a design and financial standpoint, a very typical approach in game dev.
This is why I like to call the 90s the "golden age" of creativeness in games. You could be casually browsing in a game store and find all sorts of neat concepts, even some that were ahead of its time like this one. There were very few "safe zones" and everybody was trying their ideas with a lot more freedom.
Yeah it was the golden age of creativity, but it also created a lot of flops. This game included. Something that RagnarRox doesn't seem to get or is in actual denial of is that the horror genre in the past had a lot of problems with controls or just boring gaming loops. It wasn't just Game Journos back then but also the simple word of mouth among gamers that panned those kinds of games simply because games with smoother or smarter controls, more engaging stories and more fun gaming loops existed at that time. Today with emulators and the death of creativity in mainstream gaming this game may look like a great and interesting title, but back in it's own time and on the original hardware this game was just a boring chore. You really have to be in the right kind of moot and on the lookout for a novelty to get enjoyment out of a game like Hellnight.
@@roberthartburg266 I agree on this point. I’m all for accepting a game as it was for the time, but I’m tired of people looking at objectively poorly-designed games and overlooking every single negative aspect, opting instead to turn it into a fake art thesis that other people just “don’t get”.
Contrarians
@@Pleasestoptalkingthanks I agree, some of these old games weren't paladins of good game design, but they did try to bring forth different ideas without turning the genre into something else or regressing to some of the simplistic arcade-ish ideas of the 80s.
@@Pleasestoptalkingthanks It's not about "not getting it", it's about focusing entirely on how much enjoyable it is at a casual gameplay level rather than, you know, actually engaging with the game on what it triese to do.
Haven't played this one, but Haunting Ground is the perfect example. It is a truly great survival horror yet it received next to no attention if not for the costant and repetitive discourse about sexuality. Similarly Rule of Rose.
Hell, Haunting Ground is possibly the best example because its gameplay loop is also extremely good (for the genre, of course, if you went in expecting RE4 it's your issue), while at least Rule of Rose had the issue of being played in an extremely rigid and clunky system (It would have had a lot to gain from being a straight up Adventure game in 3d rather than having those goddamn fights)
Oh that opening is just perfect “always online single player games” hits close to home 😅
It do be like that.
How the fuck do singleplayer online games exist
I played Hellnight 5 years ago and survived until the end with Naomi, but man what an adventure, it was one of the best I've played.
pretty sad that it is forgotten since it is my favorite horror game of all time. Great story, unique horror for it's time and great characters. I played it so many times it's crazy
Absolute shame how overlooked this game is!
I'm a huge ATLUS fan, and an even bigger survival horror fan, so you're saying I should hoist the flag and give it a go?
@@CausticMedeim Oh yes! If you can handle the older titles from Atlus this one is a true gem! Completely ahead of it's time yet so familiar classic
This game's monster looks like if H R Geiger made fanart of a Dragon Ball villain. The fact that such a thing came out looking so cool and genuinely threatening is a testament to how special this game is.
Ragnar is like that one friend that every group seems to have, who worked at a record store for a summer and now knows where to find the most obscure albums no one has ever heard of before but are amazing. But like, with horror games.
Phenomenal voice acting in that intro, you should hire him.
I'm gonna offer that voice actor so much money
Hellnight and Martian Gothic are those games that scream REMAKE so loud, and yet so muted. I'd really love their concepts be brought into good games, they really deserved better, the former, mostly on attention, the latter, on both attention and gameplay, while it was interestingly built, it was way beyond clunky
I'm really looking forward to tackling Martian Gothic sometime soon
Nah, you could have said "Cease and desist", more sophisticated and different.
(Not directed to insult but to add more to the joke)
Let's go all play Martian Gothic, like Accursed farms.
Great review!😊
I would like only to point out that, theoretically, there IS a "spiritual sequel" to Hellnight, made by Atlus.
It's just a "spiritual" sequel, since the plot has nothing in common with Hellnight. The gameplay is the same, though: first person view, dungeon crawling in a lethal maze... et cetera. There are also some RPG's traits.
The game is named "deSPIRIA". Regretfully, it's for Dreamcast only AND in japanese language only. Yup, it never left Japan! 😟 I played it but, until the release of a translation patch, I could grasp very little of the plot.
Nice game saint.
I have to say, companions serving as an extra life in a pinch, but there are story-altering consequences to them dying, is a genius gameplay mechanic.
this genuinely looks scary, I hate how low the draw distance is so you can never see the enemy coming
*sings*
You never see it comiiiing!!
I love it when a non horror games have horror elements or at least elements that are very creepy. One example is Zelda ocarina of time, in which, there was a dungeon that had blood, torture themes, and Silent Hill like monsters. It was so creepy that Nintendo later censored the blood. But the funny thing is that Zelda majora's mask ended up being very creepy and depressing the entire game, with its themes of end of the world, suicide, grief, and agony. To my knowledge, majora's mask was never censored by Nintendo other than maybe altering a section that had a religious theme.
"when non horror games have horror elements". Do you mean like FIFA when you look at your bank account afterwards?
I agree so much! This is one of my favorite things.
Respect for being open and honest about emulation, and for putting in the work to make it easier for people to access this game.
I’m so happy you covered this game. This is by far one of the most unsettling experiences of gaming I’ve ever played. The environments, the stalking terror, the echoing horror of the soundtrack. There are flaws but one can see how this game really influenced so many things
The party system seems to be an iteration of the SMT:If, which also gave you a partner who affected your story. But this game made the system even more important.
Oh, I remember this game.
As you said, you really put a less-known Atlus game for this video. Way more obscure than I expected too.
Damn, in another timeline Atlus could've been a household name for survival horror games. This is pretty cool, thanks for sharing this.
I'm kinda glad Sega is struggle snuggling them into porting their games to PC. I'm never buying a console again.
In another timeline, in the 2000s Atlus would have propelled SMT to lean more to violence and horror, with high production standards, while keeping Persona the way it is, for a much stronger contrast between the two games and make SMT stand out in its own franchise and in rpgs in general. Even in a parallel reality it's hard for me to imagine Atlus working that way with actual horror games, but it's not hard to see them integrating horror to SMT, mainline or not, after all it was always sold as a more adult and darker line of games and all.
It was made by Dennou Eizo Ltz. and published by Atlus, but one could basically say it was a sub-team
This game looks _right_ up my alley. I adore the whole first person, sparsely-detailed dungeon crawl setup. It makes you wonder just how many coulda-been classics failed to blossom and were lost to the mists of time. Rather sad, if you think about it too much.
I think the reason why developer at that time didn't make a lot of copies of some obscure games is because they don't want to risk having too many unsold copies of the game if it's end up failing to get attention. I think today's culture of selling and buying digital copies really help with that. Developer don't need to worry about unsold copies and instead can put their effort towards advertising.
Regarding the reviews, i think people back then perceived video games a bit differently. Expectations played a big part without the internet. Most things different from genre & expectation defining games like RE1 would create dissapointment and demanded a lot more open mindedness than what we are used to today. I think having fun with experimental games is something that needs to be learned and comes with experience.
Some games evoke fun in a more natural way regarding expectations imo and others require maybe even some advice or thinking effort on how to interpret the games mechanics and presentation. That's also the reason why I'm sometimes searching for positive reviews of games that i want to enjoy, in order to set expectations and perspectives on the games design.
Not sure I agree. There's always been a demand for alternative, weird styles of art. Just look at giger or francis bacon. Games are no different. As a 9 year old I remember thinking silent hill was a sign that games were finally going to be taken seriously, and in hindsight that was at least mostly true. What's changed in my opinion is the fact people with a taste for the weird can find games they'll like far more easily, whereas in the 90's you had to rely on magazines or tv adverts to tell you what you "might" enjoy.
What you said about SH is exactly what I thought. Then the american industry happened.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 The difference between Art and videogames though is the length of time they've had to mature, and so too the criticism of them. Don't forget that, while we're quite happy to have experimental art now, there was a time where even the slightest deviation from the accepted norm in the art world would get the work ridiculed and the artist themselves shunned.
I think early games criticism was more conservative with experimental games, because they were often kinda janky, so were warning people against such things. We can say in hind-sight that it was foolish, but it was probably the correct opinion at the time. If they told people to give all the experimental stuff a go, people probably wouldn't hold their opinions in an sort of regard.
@@SoftBoiledArt Amen... I think Konami's treatment of SH and MSG is literally evil. I cannot overstate how morally and ethically wrong I personally believe it is.
I wish there was a law against doing something like that to an intellectual property. Especially what they did to P.T and Silent Hills.
@@nellkellino-miller7673 Konami has become such a joke it can't even pull off the image of corporate evil, they're just a company of clowns.
The point behind adaptive difficulty systems in horror are to serve one purpose: Make sure you don't die too much. Dying too much breeds familiarity and familiarity breeds contempt for the game. Not that you don't like it, but contempt for the horror aspects. Survival horror doesn't work when it kills the player, it works when the player thinks they're going to die. If you die too much or too many times too quickly the magic is gone.
The uniqueness of this era of gaming is just, breathtaking.
This is gonna sound weird but your videos have helped me through like the worst past 5 years of my life and opened my eyes to a new way to think and talk about gaming while applying critical theory. Your channel is amazing and you create true works of critical art.
I was introduced to this game by way of an early UA-cam LPer named MikeNnemonic and I was quite entertained by it. Seeing as it was a rare game, I busted my ass looking for a rom of it. I still have that file all these years later and I suggest everyone at least give it a try if they enjoy horror games.
Its format is something I think could be revisited and made into something even more immersive and creepy. Maybe some indies will give it a go.
Some for me, I started watching him because he was one of the first (if not first) person to play my childhood nightmare, Martian Gothic. His playthroughs then introduced me to the other hidden gems like this one or "The Note". Would love to see coverage for both of them here, especially Martian Gothic, since it was the Resident Evil that the press wanted, but it also flopped incredibly.
RagnarRox, thank you so much for telling us that the Alien untethering mod exists. I recently started replaying Alien: Isolation, and was yet again frustrated at how the Alien’s presence is so scripted.
21:00 the adaptive difficulty arguments for resident evil are kinda funny because this is a mechanic that's pretty much in every shoot em up from the 90s onward (called ranking in those games) and no one has issue with it there.
It's a perfect mechanic because difficulty selection is garbage at actually demonstrating how hard something would be in advance.
quick correction to 2:00 : persona 1 was 96 and Persona 2 was 1999...So yeah it was actually out and you'd be surprised how some of these themes you praise abut the modern set post apocalypse stuff with the SEBEC route of 1 and come back around in p2's first game, sin/innocent sin.
and before you say "it was vastly different" Nah persona was always about a group of high schoolers( or in the case of punishment/eternal punishment young adults) who stumble on to a supernatural mystery that are revealed to be the threat of forces that are threatening all existence, the only thing that's really changed is how much of a focus the supernatural forces aspects play and the stylized presentation that 3 started but even then the games starting with 3 all go for notable different tones with 3 all about accepting death, 4 being about moving on form a traumatic incident and 5 being about breaking from society.... at least until the end when it becomes about reintegration into normal society.
Thank you for reminding me of this game! Years ago I was deep into Japanese horror games and researched to try to learn about as many of them as I could. This was one of the saddest cases, where it was a game that was so interesting, yet was nearly impossible to get ahold of. There was only one full playthrough of the game, which I gratefully watched and enjoyed, but it was a Naomi run. As in, there was zero interaction with any of the other three characters. I was sad, because I could also tell that this game had extreme replay value, yet I felt like I had no way of ever getting to see the other three paths. Now that I'm reminded of it, I will bet some amazing video game archivist has recorded it somewhere. Great, unique stories like this are sometimes so difficult to find, experience, and save! Talking about them helps.
Its crazy this game doesnt get talked about enough, ive loved it for years
I mentioned this elsewhere, but if you want to see a very early example of a survival horror game look up "Oh Mummy" on the zx spectrum from 1984. This came with the first computer my family ever owned nearly 40 years ago and had you run around an area unlocking rooms to find the key to the exit while being chased by a mummy. Some rooms contained treasure, some contained another mummy that would chase you, and one room contained the key. It was a lot of fun at the time.
!!
I actually played this when I was 5 or so on my brother's Amstrad CPC and impressionable young me found it ridiculously scary.
Funny thing is that I had not seen this game in decades after that and thought back on it about 20 years later and my mind had remembered its graphics to look almost photo realistic.
@@RagnarRoxShow Oh Mummy and Crazy Golf were the first games I ever played on a home computer, which was a 48k ZX Spectrum. The first ever handheld I played was a pacman knockoff called Mini Munchman. Those were the days...
had a good chuckle at the intonation of "how resident evil did it" and those review quotes for silent hill 1 and 2.
the opening narration + these bits are already a great start to this video.
Conceptually, this sounds really cool, even if i doubt i would want to sit down and play it now. Back in the day when it was new, absolutely I'd have gotten into it big time tho. I'm more just glad it exist as a part of games history and I'm perfectly happy to see someone else tackle it with the love and passion it deserves.
you could always just play it. Never understood the old game mentality you can even use save stages.(I kinda don't like that but I won't stop other people from doing it)
@@rafresendenrafresenden.1644 that's fine for anyone else to play it. I'm not encouraging them not to, but i only have a limited amount of time in my day to devote to video games. I don't really need to go back to play games that were flawed but interesting for the time they were made in. I'm just fine with getting to know about them and enjoying them vicariously. I'm also a fan of some sports, but i don't need to go out and play basketball to enjoy them
@@retsz try using the internet less, that always gets me more free time.
@@rafresendenrafresenden.1644 you know what REALLY gives me more free time? Minding my own business and not trying to shit-post randos on the internet because I'm butt hurt they don't wanna play a game i like. You should try it lol 🤷♂️
@@retsz you are STILL responding to me instead of going your way, it looks like you have enough free time
I dreamed about doing a video about this game for years! This game is criminally underrated and I'm glad it's finally getting the attention it deserves.
Now that you covered HELLNIGHT, feel free to check out the Hellnight successor horror RPG game deSpiria :]
This is not the ATLUS game that you think about if you hear "Survivor"
Horror is a common theme on ATLUS games but in the end, the most scary thing you can find is always ANOTHER human...
Here is the thing most people do not know about game journalists: They are *not* enthusiast gamers writing for enthusiast gamers. They are useful to get mainstream audiences to go and buy games, i.e. they are kind of an outsourced PR department for publishers, while small fry developers and fresh ideas have to hope they get a slice of the limelight during times of mainstream draught.
As such, game journalists (or rather: game copywriters) are harbingers of the mainstream: They laud games that are easy to pick up, easy to digest, and that Joe Everyman can play for an hour on his third beer without overheating his few remaining brain cells: Blockbuster games. "It's everything you have seen and done before. 11/10 - IGN".
Source: I used to write for a gaming mag - long ago, and in a country far, far away.
Ah - great to see you cover this! I first played it via a pirate copy back in 2000 and then wrote about it on Hardcore Gaming 101 back in 2004 :)
I have a grown on fondness for it since then where I feel I was rather scathing.
I like the idea that the stalker monster has literally nothing to do with the cult but has its own origin that is separate.
It does? The cult are basically worshipping it.
Clock Tower (SNES) and D (Panasonic 3DO) both predate the first Resident Evil. They weren't trying to latch onto the survival horror craze that RE had started.
Hey there RagnarRox, Thank you for this video. It still haunts me to this day that I've never finished this game and you did it justice. A friend of mine lended me this game in middle school and I "forgot" to give it back. I used to have a crush with Naomi and the fear of losing her prevented me to make any serious progress in the game. Loved the blank protagonist too, it was so easy to imagine myself in those dark corridors.
This is my first time hearing about this game. I am a huge fan of the developer. This is also my first time on your Channel. Of course I subbed.... thanks for putting the time in. I look forward to occupying more of your material.
Huh. I can see the bones of this in their SMT: Strange Journey game. While it's not survival horror, every SMT story I've ever touched IS horror to some degree. And, let's be frank, Atlus has a bad habit of small releases of titles they don't think will do well, or are too experimental, and if that title does well, an updated rerelease a few years later. See, Devil Survivor 1&2, Strange Journey, Persona 3, 4... hell, persona 3 had TWO updated rereleases with content exclusive to both.
Seriously, I’m so tired of online games. Even if I had friends to play with I don’t like gaming with other people. I’m slow as hell and I like to take my time
Yup me too
I had this game as a kid. It was terrifying, but I never forgot it, it definetly felt different from what I was used to see and play.
ATLUS messing up when it comes to how to distribute their games is such an ATLUS move to this day...but seriously from what I just heard? I'd actually trade in one of the next Persona titles they are probably cooking up in exchange to remake this one or make a new Dark Messiah game. This sounds kinda dope actually💥
Finally someone feeding my boy Ragnar.
Lol!
*Gets brutally slain by creature*
"Naomi will remember that."
Great work as always RagnarRox! I have felt for years now that Hellnight is an underrated gem, so it's great to see some recognition. The extremely minimalistic 3-4 note repeating songs in the soundtrack is a stroke of genius in my opinion. It just sets this incredibly eerie tone with barely any actual music in the traditional sense.
Dark Messiah is an amazingly unique experience and a bold one at that. Glad more people are talking about it. Just one note I'd like to make. You gave credit to Atlus for the game but they weren't the developers, only the publishers in Japan. In Europe for example Konami published the game. The company who made this is called Dennou Eizou Seisakusho. They worked with Atlus on a few games but they weren't owned by them. Their last game was a game called deSpiria for the Dreamcast.
Seeing how limited its release was i'm glad i still got to play when it came out. I was about 9 years old when my cousin showed up with this game. It looked so real to us and the atmosphere made it very eerie to play.
My dad played this with me when I was young. Still terrifying and frustrating, one of the reasons the disc got fribeed into the neighbours garden. A pirate copy, luckily, official discs are now very expensive.
Crazy thing that in our little town in Saudi Arabia we have two or 3 copy of hellnight I don’t know it’s was rare game
Good video as always ❤️
Never heard of Hellnight before but this looks amazing! Haven't used an emulator yet but I think I'm going to try this one out, I love stalker horror games and this looks like an incredible experience. Definitely see what you mean by saying it's ahead of its time, honestly if you'd shown me a clip of this and told me it was part of the recent low-poly horror movement I'd believe you.
Also, very excited that you're finally tackling that other horror game with a dog, can't wait to hear your thoughts on it.
Ragny you have the inner talent to showcase and explain in great detail obscure (horror) videogames in the best possible way.Also I admire the fact that you defend underappreciated (horror) videogames in an unbiased way that few UA-camrs can , like in your previous video about Castlevania 64.It goes without saying that you convinced me to give Hellnight a try.I can't wait for your next video 😁
Man the music from these old horror games are so fire too..
I've played a lot of horror games in my life, and I finished them all. But this game, together with amnesia, are the two games that I never get to finish because it was too horrifying and scary. But right now, I'm thinking of playing this game again and try to finish it.
Part of the problem, I feel, is that video game journalists in the past (and arguably even today) mostly take on a weird, awkward, faux pas type of elitism that echoes "These are just games, games are meant for children, just say things I think parents can use to gauge a game's purchase" instead of trying to analyse the video games as they were - mediums in which expression is possible, media catered to the experience of the one playing the game; not the one spending for it, as is the case for most parents then.
Most tend to analyse the game they're covering through a disinterested PoV. In the process, they almost always fail to take a populist or a postmodern approach to view or assess the gaming medium itself, most are a 'means to an end' to hit a company quota which fails to bring out the best parts of the experience. Their craft often demands technical expertise in journalism and report-writing (knowing the right words, how to arrange text) whereas the audience, especially children easing into the gaming scene given that games are a component of culture, expect engagement.
Eventually this changed to refocus around the cultural consumers, not the spenders, but the awkward elitism is still there; Valkyrie Chronicles 4 went through the same politicised lens, being called 'sexist' for one offensive scene and taking on the "everything is sexist" lens by Alicia Haddick. Its powerful message on the nature of terrorism becomes dampened by the highly-politicised oppositional code of feminism as a result. At times I feel that the real hurdles that games need to clear isn't just the marketing; it's the initial responses as captured by those making 'first contact', namely these journalists that can deter those without time / criticality to examine the game themselves. It's almost as though having the backing of their company to protect their position emboldens them to make those elitist remarks without actually engaging in the medium itself, a clear example of examining the game with disinterest.
Ciconia When They Cry comments on this astute observation that people are averse to knowledge and information (to minimise pain) and that people are more willing to listen to these 'first contact' cases than they are to perform actual research themselves, since the cost of time is too high. As a result, people of the world (today) are trapped in a system that dehumanises them gradually by the sheer scale and size of the world, causing them to become unthinking and uncritical.
Until companies recognise the significance of the cultural capital that their reporters need to possess for a decent review, we're stuck with shit on both sides of the aisle; both companies mismatching the hype a game offers, and the reporters misrepresenting these games in a lens unsuitable for the actual consumers.
Excellent Video! I had never heard of this one before; Loved the Detailed Information on the Mechanics and in depth look. Thank you! (Keep it up!!!)
Hey this is off topic, just wanted to tell you I actually went and played Castlevania (1999) and that game totally owns, so thanks lol.
I have never seen this game before and I'm surprised for something so well made fell off the radar.
Also I was so happy you mentioned Gelarians! Hope you get to cover it someday
Great videos as always! Makes my day to see you pop up on my youtube notifications!
Oh my god, I played this in Japanese version back in the 90s, its name was "Dark Messiah". Didn't understand shit back then, didn't know it was translated eventually.
The opening theme was so compelling, but I didn't even get past the very first level as I don't know what to do and when the monster caught you = game over.
my mind was accustomed to horror game that you could at least struggle with the monster a bit to get away or outright kill them, but this game.... no this game was an instant KO.
I kinda dropped it and move on to other games, so I didn't get to see what stories the game had to offer.
This game would forever get stuck in my mind as an unraveled mystery, hadn't you come along and making a vid on it.
Thank you so much.
I'm not going to lie if there's a horror game with like the mechanics of Shin megami tensei I can just imagine it dungeon crawling trying to escape demons using guns weapons and Buffs to try and help you survive only to be killed by some low level demon you never saw coming like jack frost or succubus
Horror games and JRPGs that aren't Final Fantasy are more often than not panned by reviewers that don't understand them or hate the entire premise. It's unfortunate but, I've learned to just completely disregard any metacritic scores from those genres.
So I went and bought a PSCLASSIC and loaded this game in; Clock Tower, Silent Hill 1, Juggernaut and Baroque. If you know about the last two, You have officially dug into the depths of PS1’s mine shaft.. congratulations
wake up babe, new ragnar rox video dropped..
i know most the games that you cover in your videos from other videos or just heard about them but i still enjoy the whole content on this channel and anytime i run out of stuff in my watch later playlist you happen to upload something..
gratefull for that dude~~!! you save my attention span with your long video essays
It's one of my all-time favorite games of all time. I still think about it. A true gem. I got it in 1999, and I have finished 12+ times. One of the kind.
Sailor of the murky seas of game preservation here, I'd recommend using Duckstation instead of ePSXe (it's pretty much dead imo). The quality of life improvements (such as PGXP corrections) are INSANE if you don't consider the jittery animation of the original PS1 a feature instead of an annoyance. Personally, I think it really brings out the beauty in those graphics. I almost cried when I booted WipEout 3 for the first time and I haven't even played it when it came out (wasn't even born yet).
I remember watching Purmello stream this and thinking "wow this looks like something Ragnar would make a video about."
I liked this game but never got to finish it, thankfully I'm now replaying it on the steam deck using duckstation emulator (which is my goto ps1 emulator on Windows 10) and loving every minute of it. Thanks for the video.
The note about "game journalism" being overwhelmingly negative and hard to use as a good basis for judgement is so interesting. As researchers, we often are told to only use "scholarly" types of sources, but, with so much media (just like this video!!) being published, the definition of what that means has to change
I loved watching an LP of this back in the early '10s. Glad to see I'm not the only one that remembers this.
I actually love the idea of adaptive difficulty; I do no damage professional runs of RE4 all the time with a friend, and we always joke and call it “big brother mode.” (Because it would be suited for the big brother you hand the controller to as a child.) I usually don’t feel it’s executed very well, but I love the idea. However I don’t believe in scaling difficulty *back, (unless you manually choose easier modes that are an option like in dmc3, for instance.) harder gameplay is actually a reward for people who really enjoy and/or are more adept at a certain game. I wish there were official modes that were harder for Resident Evil titles specifically. The Evil Within and Resident Evil 1+7 had some super awesome extra hard content for people who love difficult survival horror. Ethan Must Die is very difficult, and madhouse was difficult my first few play throughs. Now I wouldn’t play 7 any other way. That’s probably why those two are my favorites in the series besides 4. (Closely followed by 2r and 2.)
Played this back in the winter of 2020 on my MacBook. Had an absolute blast playing this. Very unique and atmospheric.
With how creepy SMT can be i strongly believe Atlus show throw their hand in the ring again with a horror game. I never got t play this bc I’m in America. Need to try and emulate.
Ah no, the 1st Persona game came out 2 years before this game. If you consider Persona just an extension of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, then the first game came out LONG LONG before this game.
Great vid! I think Ecstatica was the first stalker horror game though. People don't take it seriously because of its ellipsoids, but it was brilliant in many ways.
Great video as always! It's funny that I actually kept thinking "huh, just like Resident Evil/ Silent Hill" during certain segments, which is why I'm so shocked that the game flew completely under the radar. Not just because of bad distribution, but also later on, when youtubers would make videos about the most obscure things that could/would become quite popular. Even when watching videos about retro or '90s games, I never once heard about it. What a shame!
24:25 "normal, attractive Ragnar voice again" man, I live for these little jokes
as much as you want to paint this game in a bright light... you have to consider the time it came out. In the EU the game came out around December 99 so one year after RE Nemesis (bad comparison but you know... THIS game had a Monster which followed you as well one year BEFORE that) BUT as well SILENT HILL ... so graphically this game was WAY to late with it's simple images as NPCs, the wonky controls as well as the bad FMVs compared to other games which were already avilable.
You’re one of the only channels I don’t skid sponsers/ads for
I watched this while working out and lifting and was a great video. This game is definantly now on my list of "retro/old games I must play" especially since I plan on delving into Horror experiences from different genres and time frames.
I've been rekindling my love for games this year by setting a goal of beating 50 games ive had on my backlog, unfinished or not started before 2023. I was born late into the console generations, I'm barely around the corner to being 18 within a bit of a year, so I've missed quite a lot. Interesting and niche games like this keep my interest in gaming waning in the current landscape (mainly triple A, indies be bussin). I'm a nerd for games as an artform and the history of said games, so this kind of game is up to my alley. Thanks for talking about this game, you've given me a game I'll probably fall in love with very soon.
(a comment on why some gems remained unknown) :
Back then you had to purchase any original title on dvd which was relatively expensive; so you had to be carefull. Also, gaming was somehow unpopular overall for our parents' generation so we were not allowed to have as much time with games as we would like... which was approximately 1 to 5 hours tops per day and then the killing began.
Most games are unnacessible without emulation, the biggest part of an entire art form cannot be accessed by the average person legally or without emulation.
I know this is kinda obvious, but I just realized this for real after watching this video.
Almost every time I see a gaming oddity, or a misunderstood classic too ahead of it's time for it's own good, or a high quality genre pushing classic whose devs weren't afraid to take risks, they're almost always unavailable in the market currently.
Most games I played I had to emulate because I've no way to play them otherwise, the notion that I have to track down hardware that's older than I am just to play something I can find with a simple google search is absolutely ridiculous to me.
Thank you for talking about this game, I fell in love with it after this video, I'm at a place where I can't afford hardware powerfull enough to play modern games , but what I have is incredibly good to play old ones, and channels like yours are always very helpful.
Nice! you did it, I have it on ps1 to play backwards compatible on ps2 and for some reason the screen the screen is shifted so I can only see the top half. The atmosphere in HELLNIGHT is 2nd to none though. Great game even if I haven’t completed it. Just feels so interesting to play
I want to thank you deeply, besides all that you do, for the mention and picture of the Tokyo sewer/flood prevention system. It's a beautiful space, and something like that will fit perfectly into my horror game. You have just directly enriched its design, since until now I thought all 3 (building) levels the game is set in will have the same visual style, which I already have defined, but thanks to that picture, I realized that the middle (containment) level NEEDS to look like that.
Thank you.
This was the first video I saw in your channel and I'm really interested on seeing more. Playing horror games is not my forte (I'm a coward) but I like seeing other people playing them, and even more, going deep into the game and taking the time to explain it.
I like your channel and I want to see more.
Great video analysis! At 00:10, is this HELLNIGHT, or another game? What is this from? It looks terrifying despite its low-res PS1 FMV quality...
Super interesting! I'll never play this one, but as a bit of an Atlus fanboy seeing this obscure gem is fascinating. I feel like some of the ideas here definitely influenced their future titles, if not in terms of mechanics then by way of atmosphere and presentation. Like, Nocturne seems like quite a natural evolution from a lot today the world design philosophy at play here.
I remember going over to a friend's house when I was about 10 years old and the excited look on his and his older brother's face when they told me they had a new game to try out. I remember a schoolgirl, I remember a dark tunnel and--- the silence. So much silence. Just walking around a gray tunnel and nothing else but then... the joystick would start to vibrate and the school girl would say something. Out of the darkness a grey creature jumped at me and I had never been more scared in my life up until that point. This was like 20 years ago btw. But all those images stuck with me, never knew the name of the game tho so when I finally got into gaming a few years after that I would think about that game but still couldn't find it until, only last year I think or the year before, right in the midst of the pandemic, I came across a list of old forgotten PS1 survival horror games and I screamed with excitement to see screenshots that had lived only in my head for so long. Got myself a copy AT WALMART and settled a debt due 20 years. I finally beat the game and saw it through. With as much hindsight, Hellnight was so far ahead of the competition. An utter shame it has been left in the dark. Thank you for shining a light on it.
Does Walmart still sales ps1 games?
@@oneguyonedryer8730 sorry, I didn't bought the game at walmart. It's a Grimbeard thing. I emulated it through... Other means.
@@andoniroque5934 ok, got it!
I don't know if it's my TV's post processing but the darkness at the end of the tunnel looks absolutely amazing for PS1, it really looks like the end of the tunnel disappears in darkness, unlike some games on PS1 and N64 where the draw distance limit of the hardware turns into ugly fog.
I was going to comment questioning calling this a Survival Horror game, but as I was writing I thought about it more and am not so sure. It's sort of one, but it'd be the most genre breaking one ever made (to the point that it kind of needs searching and stretching to be called one). I'm not giving up on my initial post so it's at the bottom, but to go into how it fits (I guess):
It's sort of fits the letter of the genre in the form of having a limited defense against the horror through the companions. Rather then having separate ammo and health, they exist as one along with you're health/weapon having story implications. Although you can't remove threats, can delay them at the cost of health.
But I am going to say that it still fails in the spirit of S.Horror, since S.Horror generally gives more of an active role rather then pure avoidance. Merely having a threat you work to avoid doesn't really fit the need of this genre specifier, otherwise it seems that all you have left for any other horror game is jump-scares and threat-less unease. I guess you can boil down the genre of Survival Horror to just being horror games where you have threats, but it kinda just downplays the 'Survival' modifier (and also might start a precedent where any game where threats exist fits into a type of 'Survival-' genre).
[Although this is a nice Hidden Gem Horror, I don't think this really counts as a Survival Horror game. S.H.G.s generally work off a mix of aspects found in Horror, Action, and Survival gameplay. Action in your (often limited) ability to fight off the horror, Survival through the enforcement of heavy resource management, and Horror through the feeling of your power being limited (along with other horror elements). The closest thing that Dark Messiah has to fitting these bare bone features (at least from what I can gather from your video) is the companions, but even then as you admit they more act as extra lives with story effects and sometimes the ability to ]
You hooked me man. A survival horror game about running away from Resident Evil-esque biological abomination, and made by ATLUS in addition, that's literally my favorite things combined
upd: Finished that a while ago, really great, really scary
It’s funny how this game doesn’t cheat with teleporting enemies, but even Resident Evil games keep doing this to the day!
The party member system actually reminds me a little bit of the party members of SMT if... , primarily with the fact that each party member effects the ending and trajectory of the plot.
I wonder what an Akira route for this game would be like...
That “itchy scratchy brow” was one of the smartest penultimate moments in an intro ever. Bravo sir, bravo.
This is such a nostalgic game for me, for many reasons.
I have vivid memories of playing this at my grandparent's house in London, they had a big old victorian house that was old and dark and had just the right atmosphere. Also the millennium was fast approaching and although I never really believed the doomsday prophesy and Y2K scare some of that fear of what would happen did create a general feeling of anxiety.
But it's an awesome game and I enjoyed replaying it age 41 some 25 years after it's release. There's something really spooky about those PS1 graphics that I absolutely love.