Gray Dawn – Another ‘Horror’ Game

Gray Dawn is a religious horror game developed by Interactive Stone. They are a developer based out of Romania.

For better and for worse, Gray Dawn is noticeably Romanian.

The Premise

It is the early 20th century, and you are a priest who is under suspicion of murdering an altar boy. You must search your eerie parochial house, as well as several other ethereal realms, in search of answers to this accusation.

This is as strong a start as you can get for a horror game, in my mind. I love, and will forever be slightly creeped out by, religious iconography. I love the idea of a winding narrative that can really only be understood depending on how well you keep your eyes open for clues. And I LOVE small, cramped, meticulously designed games packed with detail instead of ‘content’.

The main problem with this was that these were my hopes for the game and not what it actually was. I don’t think I will ever get another What Remains of Edith Finch. Reveil may have stung, but this one really hurts.

The game’s narrative is extremely focused which not only means that it’s essentially on rails, but also that, by the end, there’s precious little room for misinterpretation. This can be great if the intent is to tell a focused, concise story which is either engaging on its own or is at least full of engaging characters.

Unfortunately, that’s not how it plays out.

The Level Design

Gray Dawn is seemingly set in some kind of limbo. Your character is either being tortured or tested, as the walls of his parochial house contort and his statues bleed. These small hellish flourishes are what kept me going for the first half hour, but it all quickly collapses in on itself once you reach the first ‘otherworldly’ section.

Instead of allowing the story to take place in this parochial house (where the rooms you have access to are able to branch out and develop alongside the story), the developers love to shove you into an ethereal world which is often meant to represent a more heavenly atmosphere.

The game is divvyed up into about 25 chapters, and it whips you between each of these worlds so often that there’s never any lasting tension. The game is overly reliant on immediate intrigue and variety moments that it can’t afford for you to stay in any one place for too long lest you notice the collapse of their Potemkin horror village.

As the game pushes you towards each section, you will be met with what can only be described as the loosest interpretation of a puzzle. You either find a thing to open a thing, find a thing to twist a thing, or just pick up everything you can and mash it all into some BIG puzzle near the end of the chapter.

There’s also very little horror in this horror game. Despite my predilection for Christian iconography, I was never even intrigued, let alone scared. I think that’s due to one main thing.

The Language Barrier

Yes, the game is from an indie studio. Yes, the game is Romanian, and YES, the unique Romanian flare to the religious aspects of the game can make for some interesting moments, but that language barrier is perhaps too high to scale.

The voice acting is awful. Not to insult the voice actors, because it’s much more of a direction issue, but it is AWFUL. There’s something about the specific phrasing and cadence of English that’s just slightly off for the entire game. I honestly would have preferred for the entire game to be in Romanian; I would have been fine with subtitles.

The game also seems to insist upon the idea that layering bad voice acting with filters is the only way to make someone either sound like a demon or a god. I seriously thought we’d grown out of this. Instead of a typical ‘demon’ voice, wouldn’t it have been so much creepier to just hear the dulcet, apathetic voice of an eternal being who revels in your torment?

I really thought they were trying to go for something like that when I heard an early news on the radio, but apparently not. Apparently a comical echo filter is much more inline with how a deity would sound.

Conclusion

Not to sound too negative right at the end, but this would be a great case study on what Amnesia would like like if it was unengaging.

Gray Dawn is too fractured to be scary. It feels like a first draft or a proof of concept. If you were to hack this story down to the essentials, focus ALL gameplay on exploring that parochial house, and lean more into the vague, non-overtly religious elements of psychological horror, you could have a great game here. Also, if you insist on having English voices in your next game, please hire an English voice director.

The game took about 3 hours for me to get the platinum. there are very few collectibles, and one type of collectible even influences whether you get a good or bad ending. Though outside of a 5 minute section, there’s no difference between the two.