HELLNIGHT: Atlus' Forgotten Survival Horror Classic
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- Опубліковано 1 лип 2024
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MONSTERS OF THE WEEK: Hellnight/Dark Messiah
#Hellnight #HellnightReview #SurvivalHorror #MonstersOfTheWeek
When Survival Horror was on the rise after Resident Evil’s meteoric rise, a ton of (especially Japanese) game companies came up with their own take on the emerging horror sub-genre, with many trying to impart their own twist and flavor on the formula.
Atlus (yes, the SMT/Persona guys) also tried their hand at it with the wonderfully experimental subterranean horror-adventure Hellnight (known as Dark Messiah in Japan).
It came out in 1998 in Japan for the PS1 and was only released in a few European countries in a translated version in December 1999, with few copies and fewer game journalists grasping what this game attempted to do - resulting in abysmal review scores and Atlus ultimately dropping Survival Horror for good. Which is a damn shame, because Hellnight was highly inventive, pioneering many mechanics that have become tried and true staples in survival horror gaming.
A prime example for a game that was far ahead of its time... or rather pearls before swine.
*Support the Channel*
/ ragnarroxshow
Chapters
00:00 Intro
03:18 Part 1: Pearls Before Swine
07:06 Sponsor
08:58 Part 2: Welcome to The Mesh
16:33 Part 3: TOP 5 REASONS HELLNIGHT WAS TOTALLY AHEAD OF ITS TIME
23:06 Epilogue: Atlus was onto something here
28:43 Thank you & Credits
__
Thanks for additional Footage Recording:
Mira Cox
@Snaping Snapper - Ігри
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.
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.
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)
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
I like the idea that the stalker monster has literally nothing to do with the cult but has its own origin that is separate.
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
It must be hard being a games journalist fr. Like i can imagine how having to play games and write about them, probably not entirely what you want but what your boss says will sell which would probably start pushing your tastes more conventional mainstream so that you're more aware of the games that are already selling etc idk
Great video!! Thank you for sharing 🖤🖤
Not to mention having to play & review around a work schedule deadline.
The review needs to be out for launch. You probly barely have time to finish a playthrough unless you grind, so there's no time to digest, explore, meander, take breaks, experiment, etc... It's work. You've gotta push through it cuz you got another game to review due next week! It's just a bad mindset to properly experience a game thru.
And you have to be writing that whole time too!! Which is less time to play, but also means no time away from it for your brain to digest & refresh..
I think worst of all is just that it makes you form your thoughts & opinions out as they come to you.. Like, you're putting them down to paper before they're fully formed.. Yknow?
Idk, it's like being asked how you're liking a movie so far at the end of every scene. It messes with having a genuine, full experience of the thing.
-Hell, even once I fully finish something, I usually don't know how I feel until *at least* the next day. I hate being asked before then, bc it feels like I'm just making up an opinion, and then that one will get in the way of figuring out my actual one.
Anyway, lotta words to say that the whole format of reviews makes them hard to be full/genuine. I don't think it's the journalists fault even, it all sucks. But, RIP I guess
Yes, people are rarely held accountable for the thoughtfulness/quality of their takes nowadays beyond the immediate moment.
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
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.
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.
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.
The uniqueness of this era of gaming is just, breathtaking.
Respect for being open and honest about emulation, and for putting in the work to make it easier for people to access this game.
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.
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.
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...
Now that you covered HELLNIGHT, feel free to check out the Hellnight successor horror RPG game deSpiria :]
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.
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.
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.
Its crazy this game doesnt get talked about enough, ive loved it for years
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.
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.
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.
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 ❤️
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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💥
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.
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
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.
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.
Finally someone feeding my boy Ragnar.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Man I agree with you about revisiting older game reviews. I discoversd a PSX game called broken helix. It caj be played first or third person, the entire game takes place in real time, you can fail major objectives and the game branches off and continues into several different paths, you can talk to npcs with different moods. The game is super wild and one of those weird Konami experiments.
I looked up an old review of it where it was apparent that the reviewer never went passed like the third room as he made a point of complaining a lot about these tiny enemies that you see in maybe the first 2 minutes of the game and never again as if it was something that came up endlessly.
I on the other hand was blown away when I failed to save someone and instead of the game ending I now just had to get the hell out of there and escape. Later when the special forces team happened to catch up with me I was able to hide and listen to them walk by ans go through a door I didnt have access to at which point I continued on a different route. Incredible stuff for a PS1 game nevermind some obscure one you never hear about.
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
Man the music from these old horror games are so fire too..
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.
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.
(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.
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 loved watching an LP of this back in the early '10s. Glad to see I'm not the only one that remembers this.
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.
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 😁
The whole game takes place in a first person dark cave where you walk forward and turn left and right, occasionally encountering monsters. It’s just an early SMT dungeon! That makes almost too much sense, lol.
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.)
Another argument for why Atlus not going into survival horror, alongside how well they nailed Hellnight, is that some of the stuff they did instead still shows how good they could have been with it. Nocturne feels like what happens if you take a survival horror setting but instead intend your protagonist to become king of the monsters, strongest of them all.
For Nocturne, that specific angle is something I love about it, but again, you can’t tell me the people who made the Vortex World wouldn’t do amazing at survival horror.
another wonderful video! i remember seeing this in a gamefan magazine (i believe) long ago, and desperately wanted to play it, but could never find it. thanks for jogging the memory so i can play it finally
Played this back in the winter of 2020 on my MacBook. Had an absolute blast playing this. Very unique and atmospheric.
Let me tell you about how I received this game in Argentina. Back in the day, we had NO a single legit release, but PS1 (big grey bricks) were so easy to cheat that we had thousands of chinese CD copies (impact copies made professionally, not your average "PC burning copy"). So I tried to play "Dark Messiah" on japanese, and didn't got that far, the chasing monster would make my life impossible and I didn't knew what to do about it (and I figured out how to solve the M.O. Discs from the japanese vercion of Dino Crisis 1, so as the Silent Hill piano, no guides or internet at the time and not even knowing English that well). Then I waited ... and waited ... AND WAITED.
Finally "Hell Night" came out here, an English translation of the "Dark Messiah", and I couldn't be more thrilled, although without a guide or anything, balancing that with High School, etc. It just became very difficult for me to get a overall notion of the story, or whatever was going on. It was a hard to beat game, and I like some character development (if I understood them correctly at all), for them to flip over at the end... So yeah. I remember this game as much as many other PS1 horror that didn't got out to anywhere after that, although they were quite good. Ahead of their time at very least...
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.
It’s funny how this game doesn’t cheat with teleporting enemies, but even Resident Evil games keep doing this to the day!
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.
You either go over some game or movie that I know and love, or introduce me to one I am immensely interested in experiencing for myself.
Thank you!
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!!!)
There is one game that predate all of them. Survival 3D First Person Game, no combat, free roaming monster + items & 'logical' puzzles management : Relief Action (1987) Amstrad CPC. The name is weird, but it's recreate the first Alien movie. Vector 3D (there was 3d glasses too, but never tested I got a monochrome screen back in the days. The monster itself is invisible but you can get a detector that tell you when it get closer. There is a big adventure/survival part, because you need to navigate in the spaceship and figure out how to escape. You need to open locks, operate computers, supply the escape ship while evading the monster... The game is really short but it was a great experience and I find it's mechanics are still better than lot of modern games.
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...
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.
“Game journalists don’t like games” Ah yes this floor is made of floor.
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.
8:20 my man pulled the Boris Maneuver
I remember watching Purmello stream this and thinking "wow this looks like something Ragnar would make a video about."
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.
Forgotten age of 30 years ago :'D
Man I really love classics, the feeling of experimentation that comes with technical limitations is lovely, I've never heard of this game before so I look forward to learning about it
The companion mechanic is super neat and I'd love to see horror games mess around with it more. Feels less like Fallout where they just kinda do whatever and more like an actual part of a group trying to stay alive by pooling whatever resources they have. Or like Last of Us 2 where they're pretty much just hanging out for plot reasons lol
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).
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.
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 ]
Dude this is literally the closest thing I could describe to an actual Nightmare. SMT Dungeon designed mixed with Silent Hill Ambience/Style and finally glazed with Outlast gameplay sounds absolutely horrifying. I don't know why but being actively pursued always scared the Hell out of me. I could never beat Alien Isolation because of the Pursuit so I doubt I'd last 15 minutes with this literal Nightmare game. That alone is enough to make this a horror classic.
Well the game was developed by Dennou Eizou Seisakusho and published in Japan by Atlus and Europe by Konami
The intro alone got me to subscribe, love the style of your content, plus weird unknown PSX games yay!
So the reason for the date of the release is probably on purpose for tax reasons. In a lot of countries, including I think Germany where Konami Europe was headquartered at the time, a company only pays business tax if it turns a profit. If a company isn't having a great fiscal year, it's better to be slightly in the red than it is to be slightly in the black, because if it does turn a profit, no matter how small, it will be taxed 20% on its earnings, which can mean that it will make less money by making more money, so it's better to take a small loss than a larger one.
I'm not saying this is what happened and I havn't looked at Konami Europe's old financial records, but I have looked at other companies and other games that were released at the tail end of the year and definitely did bring the company ever so slightly in the red.
It's also a great scapegoat that the company can pile additional losses unto, and make their other products that the company has more faith in, seem more profitable, especially to their investors just looking at the numbers.
I wouldn't be surprised if the localization budget for this game is much much more expensive than it should be because Konami Europe took the localization costs from other projects and piled it unto this one.... It probably also used way more printer paper and other office supplies than any other project.
18:57 Michigan Report from Hell uses a similar mechanic, but that came out in 2004