BinaryMessiah Dread X Collection 5 Review

xperiences and put it all together in some weird hub. Each game is completely different and offers brand new experiences, but I'm starting to see that the series is running out of ideas. The main hub this time around is a kids birthday center called Outpost 3000. It's space- and alien-themed and full of 90's cheesy goodness. I appreciate the varied areas you can go into, and the games this time are unlocked by finding 12 different presents and bringing them back to your table. You can then choose one of twelve games to unlock with the present represented as candles on your birthday cake. When you unlock a new area in the center, you get a comic book panel. Discovering the center is probably the most fun the game has to offer. There are some puzzles, chase sequences, and light exploration, but nothing too crazy. These areas range from a locker room, kitchen, animatronic stage, movie theater, ball pit, and many other birthday play center areas. There's a monster that chases you through most of it in certain areas, and this doesn't prove to be much of a challenge. The game controls like any other low-budget asset flip Unity/Unreal Engine FPS game and looks the part too. The graphics are very early 2010s or Unreal Engine 3 era feeling. Lots of shiny surfaces, baked lighting that's too bright, bloom, etc. While it gives off a cheesy vibe, I would have liked to see this series move a bit further ahead in the tech department. Of course, I will do mini-reviews for all twelve games. I will give each game a rating out of 5. Ludomalica—This is a board game where you play in the first person. You are in your bedroom, and there seems to be a family member haunting the house. When you roll the dice and you land on a question mark space, the ghost will appear somewhere in the house. You must have all lights off in all rooms and all doors closed. The game has a limited duration and follows a predetermined script. Eventually the house opens up more with different floors and rooms. The entity must not capture you, or it will send you back to your room. Overall, the atmosphere is really intense, and I felt reluctant to go outside of my room and close all the doors. It gives off the memories of turning on all the lights while going to the bathroom at night as a kid. - 3.5/5 Resver - This is a first-person walking simulator that just doesn't make any sense. Everything is presented in black and white, and as you move forward, text appears, seemingly attempting to explain a narrative. It honestly made no sense outside of having the moral idea of not doing drugs and the impact they can have on you. It seems this is some sort of drug ring thing. I honestly have no idea. The game is about 20 minutes long, and outside of the visual trip, there's not much here. - 2/5 We Never Left - This is about a video game developer with psychosis who is inside his own text adventure game. We saw something like this in Stories Untold. The atmosphere and tension here are done really well, except I found the tape hunting to be quite tedious and annoying. The visuals are a bit headache-inducing too. These are PS1-style graphics, but with some sort of filter over them, and they just don't look that great. I found the story to be pretty intense, and the voiced lines were a plus. 3.5/5 Interim -This is a weird one, but in some ways it's good. The game features a real-life actor superimposed in front of it, similar to older FMV games of the mid-90s. You are an intern who seems to be on some sort of reality TV episode. It's really odd, makes no sense, and the visuals are really weird, but not always in a good way. Sometimes it's confusing where to go, and the game soft-locked on me a couple of times for no reason. It's over in about 20 minutes, but what's here is mostly entertaining. However, it doesn't contain any frightening elements. 2.5/5 Beyond the Curtain - This is a weird walking simulator that is very repetitive and has almost no tension. You are an actor in a play and seem to have some sort of phobia of puppets. You walk around an endless backstage tunnel, and I mean seemingly endless. The scenery never changes, and all you need to do is walk around puppets holding knives so they don't stab you. There's a final area with some sort of worm creature, and that's about it. The puppets are always following you, and you need to make sure you constantly look back at them to gain some distance. The game lacks scariness and is excessively drawn out, leaving no clear sense of purpose. This game is likely to rank among the weakest of its kind. 1.5/5 The Book of Blood - This is by far the best game in the package. This is a full-on stalker game set in a fairground. There is a lot of occult discovery, and you accidentally end up in one and need to get out. You have a book that you need to solve puzzles in. You need to go out and gather supplies to complete the ritual, and every so often a strange masked man will try to kill you. Both trailer doors must be locked at all times, and sometimes the power will go out and obscure the book. Next, you must locate the numbered breakers and reset them. Run around too much, and the masked man will find you. You need to sneak around and get everything turned back on. You can also pop out the two windows to see if the man is near your trailer. Once you hear him knock, you need to quickly check the locks on your doors. This game is really intense and actually quite scary at times. The book puzzles require a significant learning curve to master, but once you do, they can be quite enjoyable. 4/5 KARAO - This game is rather strange, and while one of the most surreal, it just doesn't make sense. This is a PS1-style horror title in which you run around a linear path trying to find a way to open doors. You get a shotgun and can shoot things, and this is one of the longer games along with The Book of Blood. The path is super linear here, and you need to talk to people and listen to their abstract dialogue to also get codes to open gates and doors. The visuals are more on the interesting side, but this is another game with PS1 graphics and a weird filter on top that doesn't seem very appealing. 2.5/5 Spirit Guardian - Probably one of my least favorite games. This is a terribly designed first-person haunted school walking simulator. The game is around 15 to 20 minutes long and has a cheesy "Nanny" haunting the school inside. You are following the instructions of a little boy. He tells you to place blocks on a table, play hide and seek, and carefully walk eggs on a spoon. Physics are terrible; the flashlight works well, but if you're caught, your items are taken and may be in a dark locker where you can't find them. I found the game just incredibly tedious, difficult to control, and completely uninteresting. 0.5/5 HUNSVOTTI - This is one of the oddest games in here, but also the ugliest and hardest to control. Rather than a PS1 aesthetic, this game goes for an N64 one, and boy, does this look ugly. The polygonal, poorly animated figures and stiff controls certainly bring back memories of some of the worst games on that system. You are a little boy in a Dutch festival called HUNSVOTTI. Every character is in a canned animation, and you must find flowers without bumping into anyone. The more you do, the faster the animations are, and eventually they will all come after you, and you still have to find flowers. After finding all the flowers and dropping them into the well, you become a large demon that can kill the villagers. It's very odd and not really in a good way. 1/5 Gallerie - This game has one of the coolest concepts, 3D binaural audio, to use ASMR voice lines to add atmosphere for the player, but it just comes across as mostly annoying. While the spoken words are fine, the gibberish later is just the weird clicking and smacking that people do in the ASMR videos, and I can't stand that. You are tasked with destroying the world, and some girl is angry, and you need to interpret what she is saying to you via a legend. There are three levels here, each more annoying than the next. You must keep away from an entity that stalks you, and when you look at it, similar to Beyond the Curtain, it stops moving for a few minutes. You need to find demon paintings and enter the QTE on screen before it attacks you. The second level is more of the same, but the third is the worst with leapfrogging of batteries that need to be charged. In the meantime, you are backtracking and running around a confusing level. The visuals are weird, but disorienting and not pleasant in the slightest. - 2/5 Vestige - This is another PS1-style game, but you are a kid who is discovering his old PS1 games, but they are haunted. Sadly, you end up playing this game, and it is just a terrible dirt racing game similar to Motocross Madness with terrible controls and physics. You walk around your house trying to advance the plot a bit. Overall, the game isn't memorable or captivating in the slightest. The atmosphere is a bit tense, but nothing here is worthwhile. 1.5/5 Rotten Stigma - Another poorly implemented PS1-style game with Unreal Engine asset flip vibes. You play as a generic bald-headed man in a green shirt who wanders around what seems to be a recreational center. You get a pistol and a lead pipe as a weapon and have to fend off weird bipedal creatures. You just read notes from Alex to solve a couple of puzzles that aren't challenging at all. Once you wind your way around the area, collect a few items and keys, and shoot some bad guys, you end up at the end of the story in about 20 minutes. The game is incredibly ugly, clunky, and uninteresting. There's a bit of atmospheric tension due to the dark lighting and sounds. There's one particular scene that I enjoyed, but nothing was expanded upon. It involves a crying body bag and a bathroom. The game is obviously inspired by Silent Hill but doesn't even come close. 1.5/5 Average Score: 2/5 It's clear that the collection here isn't quality but quantity. Most of these games are just ideas for what could be larger games, but those ideas still aren't great. Many of these games are clunky, ugly, have headache-inducing visuals, nauseating cameras, obtuse puzzles, or have atmospheres that are slightly creepy but don't go very far. The Outpost 3000 hub is more entertaining than any of these games. Many games also have asset flip vibes, don't have outstanding resolutions, and show up stretched out on higher resolution screens or have visual bugs. Nothing here is fantastic or stands out much. The Book of the Blood is the most solid of these games, and that's still not saying much. I'm glad most of these games are around 20 minutes long. Any longer, and I will not finish them. Overall, Dread X Collection 5 is the weakest one I have played thus far. This doesn't feel like a collection of quality at all. Nothing here makes me want to seek out these developers and see what they have to offer, unlike past games. I feel like this series needs to go more on the mini-game route rather than full-on games or be stricter in their quality.