Remothered: Broken Porcelain

Remothered: Broken Porcelain is a third person horror game. It’s both a prequel and sequel to the first game Remothered: Tormented Fathers. Most of the game is based on playing as Jennifer (Jenn), a young girl who’s living at a hotel as a servant of some sort after running away from home. When you play as Jenn you’re played in the past, prior to the events of the first game. You sometimes flip to a girl named Linn also based in the past, a maid for the same hotel and friend of Jennifer. Lastly you also sometimes play as the older woman from the first game, and during these events, you’re playing after the events of the prior game. So it’s a good mix of a confusing timeline.

In the game Jenn is trapped in the hotel, and the other residents of the hotel turn into monstrous versions of themselves, out for her blood. She’s just a young teen, they don’t react to pain as readily, which makes them very dangerous. So she has to run and hide and sneak around as best as she can to avoid combat with them because even if she does hurt them enough and they collapse, they get back up after a minute or two.

The game is based on Jennifer trying to figure out what’s going on with everyone, why it isn’t affecting her, how to stop it, and how to get herself and her friend Linn out of this place. It takes place over seven levels of various lengths and sizes. In most of the levels there’s at least one character that’s acting as an enemy moving around at near random, in many of the levels though there’s more than just one. You have Ashmann the owner of the hotel and a total douche-bag and significantly worse, Elisa the hotel’s cook and cleaner who’s fairly nice, Andrea a super strict kinda bitchy woman who uhhh… I don’t know what the fuck her job is other than being a stuck-up bitch, Porcelain a giant, lanky, hulking person who’s sole job is to hunt down Jenn with a giant cane sword thing that looks like it’s made of a human spine, and lastly the Red Nun a crazy Nun in red with a weird hat and a flame thrower cause yeah a like fifteen or sixteen year old girl is totally someone you need to use a FLAME THROWER on… totally.

That’s all I can really give you when it comes to story. Now onto gameplay, you find different weapons like knives and screwdrivers and the like that you can pick up to defend yourself with. When a character catches you, you can use the weapon to stab them in the neck with a small minigame to make them let you go. If you don’t have a weapon though, they’ll just outright kill you which is somewhat annoying however there’s a bunch of weapons to find so it’s not too bad usually. You can also use weapons to stealth attack characters when their backs are turned, which does significantly more damage meaning they’ll drop sooner and with less weapons being wasted as every time you use a weapon, in general, you lose it. You also pick up different items you can use, radios and music boxes which can be placed down and start playing music to draw enemies to it. Various bottles, cups, and glasses that can be used to distract enemies by throwing them off to the side or used to do small amounts of damage and the like by throwing them directly at the enemies. Lastly there are ropes and cables which are used to lock doors for a while so that enemies are trapped or to slow them down so you can get away. There are a few other items you can turn on, namely a couple TVs, a stationary radio, and a jukebox that all act like radios and music boxes but they can be used as often as you want providing they’re in that level. You also have places you can hide, from chests, closets, lockers and showers, if you’re seen jumping into one of these hiding spots you’ll be yanked right out of them, however otherwise enemies thankfully never open them. When enemies get close to these hiding spots you have to do another mini-game to keep you from freaking out and them hearing you. Succeed and you stay hidden, fail and they yank you out of it. Otherwise the game is about finding keys and the like to get your way through the levels, getting from point A to point B. Thankfully you always have objectives listed on the screen so it makes it easier to figure out what to do.

The game has a good horror atmosphere because everything is set at night and you can’t kill any of the enemies. You have limited stamina, limited items to defend yourself with, etc. On top of all that, if an enemy sees you, you have to run, and they’re no slouches, so it becomes very panic inducing to try and get away and get to a point where you can hide without being seen. It can get super stressful which isn’t bad cause it’s small periods of high stress then it gets better soon after as they mix high stress with just being able to get around albeit usually requiring the player to be stealthy and walk crouched so you don’t make any nose.

There were some seriously annoying issues that seem to have been ironed out. But there are still some issues with it, some items are hard to interact with or outright impossible to interact with because you have to be at certain places to interact with them, if you can at all. Like there were a few items that I wanted to pick up but couldn’t because no matter where I stood I couldn’t pick it up but I could see that it was meant to cause a white dot appears over items you can interact with, and it turns, at least for the Xbox, into an A when you can actually interact with it. Other than that there’s also some screw ups with the character models during cutscenes on occasion where black squares show up on character’s faces and the like. Those are really the only issues I had, most of the game is really well made, and they fixed the serious issues that existed in prior versions of the game. I feel like these issues will be ironed out eventually as well. Outside this though, stealth fans should be aware the stealth in this is fairly basic, which some people don’t like but I find it just fine.

Overall, I really like the game, there are some issues but they’re minor. Jenn is adorable and her relationship with Linn is ‘awwwwww’-worthy on a regular basis even if they sometimes say things in a very weird way, which is common for many of the characters in the game, but these two especially so. I’m also a big, big, like giant, huge fucking fan of stealth games. I’m photophobic and patient so sitting it shadows is kinda my thing, both in real life and in games. I really liked the first game and the timeline order of this one really confused me until I realized that parts of it are based in the past and some are based in the games current-ish time. It also made me cry a bit at the end, and when you play it you’ll understand, cause goddammit it’s sad as fuckballs. My only complaint is that there are some graphical bugs and you can’t always interact with items you SHOULD be able to interact with, but that’s manageable honestly so it doesn’t matter.

Remothered: Broken Porcelain was developed by Stormind Games.

Point of Sale: X1, PS4, Switch, Steam, and GOG.

$30

A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher, Modus Games.

darkmikasonfire awards Remothered: Broken Porcelain the Indie Gamer Team Seal of Approval, thanks to the update that fixed most of the issues she had with the game.